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In The Belly Of A Clothes Rack Analysis

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The most important message in the story called “In the Belly of a Clothes Rack,” is that there is racism and it affects people. Crissy is from a mixed family of dark and white skin colored people, Crissy’s mother is white but her father is dark skin colored. Crissy has been discriminated against because the saleswoman thought that Crissy’s mom would be black like Crissy. The saleswoman never even considered that she might be a mix of both. The passage reads, “Even as I could hear Momma's Cris?Crissy?! I understood what being lost meant. Being lost is to look in the face of a spectacled white woman and wonder what the gnarled ball making it’s way from your stomach to your throat is called” (lines 80-84). Crissy feels discriminated against because
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Internalized Racism is the The Taye Diggs interview, Nella Larsen’s “Passing”, Sojourner Truth, and the racial scenarios video all display at least one of the five themes that are listed and all tie into each other in some aspect. Each New York during the 1920’s and the 1930’s better known as The Harlem Renaissance passing served as a In gateway for African American writers. Although these writers wrote about different issues their concepts were the same on certain topics such as: assimilation, colorism, passing, racism, and segregation. interview, scenario, novel, and biography. of these will be discussed and this paper will show the similarities of the themes in each main theme in the Taye Diggs interview; the topic of self-hate and colorism are being discussed.

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The author establishes her ethical appeal, by providing the reader with a vivid image of how her childhood was growing up colored. She let the readers see through her eyes by providing common grounds, with people of color. Growing up in an exclusively colored town, and only seen whites occasionally, gives the author no reason to see herself as colored,

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Richard has always felt the unjust of race, and has felt how segregation made it hard for him to have a future. But when he gets a chance to get revenge on the whites, he refuses when he thinks ”Who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to walk and act like a man.(200)” Stealing went against his morals of the right way to succeed and would not help the community appearance to the whites. The community as a whole is very religous but Richard does not share these beliefs, even with the persistence of his friends and family he says ”Mama, I don't feel a thing.(155)” This caused his friends to beg him, but in face of rejection they leave him alone.

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The problem is more than race, it is about how humans treat other humans and how little respect we give to those we deem lower than us. The author used the characters to show that the desire to be superior among others goes further than race. She also used a real tragedy, the murder of the NAACP Field Secretary, which allows readers to connect the novel to real life and making the novel more compelling. These key issues make the readers think deeper, allows the novel to surpass others like it, and connect to many human interactions even in today’s

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The skin color is no longer the target of discrimination. In Eatonville, the adequate supplies of food and space and Hurston’s father rank place Hurston in an upper class, where Hurston’s awareness to her black self has not yet awaken. Under the culture constrains, in her self-representation, Hurston has transcended the boundaries and somewhat inevitably become a white. The following paragraph shows Hurston’s father’s alerting of her being black. Hurston has depicted herself as a girl who likes to discover everything and enjoys being different from others: “I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon’s nest.

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Janie’s grandma made efforts to warn Janie of the systematic hardship she’ll endure as woman of color. (p.14) Nanny essentially told her that in terms of societal value, black women were the most taken for granted, for they’re the “mules uh de world” as far as she knew. Nanny was constantly urging Janie to find a man because of this. She believed that a man could better her granddaughter, whether there was requited love or not, by providing security and financial stability. Janie tried to refute this idea that only a man could complete her life.

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It is obvious that Mr. Raymond disagrees with society’s racial and social prejudices when he tells Jem to “Cry about the simple hell people give other people - without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people too” (Lee 269). However, it was weak of him to hide his true sentiment on the subject and blind himself with society’s

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The discrimination against the white race begins with a gradual distinct treatment of the African Americans who appear to have a trace of the white race. Helene proves to have a more formal dialect as she asks for “the bathroom” (23) and the black woman cannot understand until Helene finally refers to it as “the toilet” (23). The difference in word choice distinct Helene from the African Americans in the Bottom. The fact that Helene also has fairer skin than the African Americans gives the black woman a reason to believe Helene has a trace of white. Therefore, when Helene approaches the black woman on the train, “[the woman fastens her eyes]…on the thick velvet, the fair skin, [and] the high tone voice” (23), as if surprised and shocked to see an African American women appear in such a manner.

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The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).

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At another level, it is a clear narration of how internalized concepts of beauty works in the minds of blacks and they themselves become their oppressors. All through the novel we can find numerous instances where “whiteness” is the measure for beauty. This is evident in all the characters in the novel who degrade themselves for not being fair and lovely like the whites. The novel is narrated through the eyes of a ten-year old girl Claudia McTeer who witnesses white hegemony around her as well as this superiority being unquestioningly accepted by the blacks. Sexism is one

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