Ask yourself, “Who influences you?” Is there more than one? Are there a lot? It’s okay if there’s a lot because we learn in in the book trilogy March written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell that there are multiple people/groups that influenced John Lewis to become a great leader and activist in the civil rights era.
Paper Topic 1 After reading Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) in the course packet, and watching the film Birth of a Nation (2016) I was able to notice some key takeaways and differences between the two. The film Birth of a Nation was directed by Nate Parker, he also played the main role in the film acting as Nat Turner.
“Masks” by Shel Silverstein is a deceptively simple poem. The poem has a rhyme scheme of ABCBDDED, and has a regular rhythm. The lines alternate rhythms, the first line is hard/soft/hard/soft, and the second is soft/hard/soft/hard. This alternating pattern continues throughout the poem. Though the reader might expect “Masks” to have a regular rhyme in addition to the rhythm, the rhyme scheme is not as consistent.
Unbeknownst to many Americans, the Bataan Death March was one of the most horrific wartime experiences for American and Filipino soldiers. The Japanese forcibly marched an astounding estimated 75,000 Prisoners of War (POWs) in what became known as the Bataan Death March. (Tokudome) Many prisoners perished along the way or in POW camps because of the horrible conditions. Not to mention, the cold brutality with which the Japanese soldiers killed the POWs. The Bataan Death March is a callous example of the abuse and death that American and Filipino POWs faced at the hands of the Japanese.
“I Am Not Your Negro,” is not a documentary on Baldwin, and yet it is. The bright, infuriating and countless educated African American writer who belongs on any waiting list of the most significant American intellectuals of the 20th century. It is also a lot of other things, incorporating a visual-poetic paper outlining the surprising threads of similarity between America today and America in the mid-1960s , also an aim to intertwine the stories of 3 important Black leaders killed in that era, whom James knew well: Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X , and Medgar Evers. In the late ’70s, James set out to compose a book about those 3 men that he never completed. His incomplete notes for that assignment, which he intend to call “Remember This House,” are the beginning point for Peck’s movie.
He used this motif of wearing a mask a great deal in his novel, and it leads us to believe that, everyone wears a mask, even society. The idea shown in this poem is also shown through the narrator’s introduction into the novel. For example, in the prologue, Ellison wrote, “I am an invisible man…I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (3). This shows how the narrator represents the norms of society in that people are forced into wearing masks in order to even be seen in other people’s eyes. The narrator begins, in literal terms, as one of those people who haven’t realized that being themselves is just not enough.
Such personification mirrors Dunbar’s use of figurative language, which relates the poems in more ways than one. Dunbar touches on human features such as cheeks and eyes in his poem but also uses a spiritual element to advance his point of view. Furthermore, “We Wear the Mask” was written in 1896; a period in American history that was post-slavery but still had widespread discrimination. The spiritual connotation within Dunbar’s poem can allude to African American churches and/or the hymns slaves sung on plantations. Nevertheless, the struggle of African Americans is a symbol of both presented
Division During the Fight For Equality Throughout history, we have always experienced white supremacy. Whether is was through the disgusting acts of slavery or the saying, separate but equal. No one had ever truly challenged this way of thinking in America until 1955. The Civil Rights Movement was extremely successful, although it did have some of its own sources of conflict.
In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” the speaker wears a mask to hide his internal suffering because he does not want the rest of the world to think he is weak. This poem relates the prejudice black people face against white people. The speaker starts the poem with the lines, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” (1). Here he describes the kind of “masks” that he wears.
For this piece of writing entitled, “The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts”, journalist and commentator Alfred Lubrano focuses in on the areas of working-class and middle-class families. Lubrano uses real-life examples and noticeable characteristics to further explain the differences between the two social groups. Lubrano attempts to engage U.S. high school graduates and newly enrolled college students as the audience of readers. After gathering information from the text, Alfred Lubrano is depicted as a well-educated individual. Alfred Lubrano has shifted between two worlds: living in a working-class environment and attending an elite school.
He utilizes the mask when he says that “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford…” (Fitzgerald ##). He wants everyone including Nick Carraway, the narrator, to know that he is a valuable and worthy person. However, it backfires when Nick Carraway says “I knew why
“Jazz is a complete lifestyle, something that you feel, something that you live.” (Ray Brown). In his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin tells the story of a young jazz musician, and tries to capture the lifestyle described by jazz bassist Ray Brown in his character Sonny. Baldwin constantly limits the potential of Sonny as a character by placing him in situations that defy his personality, but make him a believable character because they are similar to experience of actual jazz musicians.
“We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar is an example of an archetype. In this poem Dunbar continuously presses the idea of wearing a mask; this is not a physical mask people carry on their faces but a metaphor for hiding one’s true self from the public. The first stanza second line there is the quote, “It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,” which really means the mask, as the it, is reforming ourselves into something we may be hiding and reshaping for an outsider's perspective on us. The connection between this idea that Dunbar is expressing and the archetype method is that they both convey an inner message that is within human nature. Everyone feels the need to be something they are not to be accepted.
Beside his word choice, Dunbar connects the reader thanks to literary devices. We can notice an alliteration in -m in line 5, with the words “mouth” and “myriad” (Dunbar, l. 5). This alliteration emphasizes these words, and, as a consequence, the word “subtleties”, which follows “myriad” (Dunbar, l. 5). We can also notice the allusion to the Christian religion, with the reference to the “Christ” (Dunbar, l. 10). It reflects the theme perfectly, because the Christ suffered a lot, especially when he carried his cross, but he never failed to show his pain, hiding his suffering.
The main theme of the poem is centered on the masks that we wear in society, but the poem digs deeper than the simple statement, ‘we all wear masks’. Teasdale presents the insight that when we are walking on the sidewalk, surrounded by the chaos of the streets, we delve into our own thoughts and the mask lifts. Because we are among strangers rather than coworkers, family, or peers, we do
