John Howard Griffin: Black Like Me Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, states the chilling truth of being a black man in the late 1950’s to the early 1960’s. John Howard Griffin is a white journalist who wants to know the real experience of being treated as a black person. Griffin transitions from a white man to a black man by darkening the pigment of his skin through medication. He walked, hitchhiked, and rode buses through Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. As Griffin makes his way through the South, he experiences things that no human ever should.
In the novel The Cay by Theodore Taylor, Phillip is prejudice towards Timothy. They are stuck on a raft in the middle of what they believe to be the Carribean Sea, when they finally find a small cay to live on. The young boy, Phillip, changed over the course of the novel, primed with a hatred for people of the black race, overall, he realizes that the only difference is the color of their skin.. At the start of the novel, Phillip is prejudice, in the middle, he is tolerant and by the end he has deep respect for Timothy. Phillip is prejudice towards Timothy in the beginning of the story, his mother always told him they lived differently.
Was it worth trying to show the one race what went on behind the mask of the others?” (Griffin,126), and realizes that not all whites treat blacks with hatred it’s the blacks that treat the other blacks the same and some whites. After Martin Luther Kings speech in the late 50’s the world did change a lot but not completely but it just needed to take time. The way John Howard Griffin writes his book where he puts himself in the book as the main character and lets the reader know how life was like back in the late 50s and 60s, and how much are world has changed in the past few decades and how cruel white and black people were.
When famed baseball player Jackie robinson broke the color barrier, many young black atheltes all across America were eager to follow in his footsteps, One of them being a skinny 7 year old kid from Richmond, Virginia named Arthur Ashe. “I grew up aware,” Ashe wrote in 1981, “that I was a Negro, colored, black, a coon, a pickaninny, a nigger, an ace, a spade, and other less flattering terms”, and this held true for any other African American growing up in the segregated south. For a young Ashe, racial discrimination was a part of everyday life. “I never thought much about it,” he explained. “Life was that way.
There have been many stories about discrimination. It has affected people of color. Those stories explained how uneasy it can be for outsiders. Stories like that have had an impact on society. Two stories that are an example of that are “Black Men and Public Space” by Brent Staples and “The F Word” by Firoozeh Dumas.
The short poem “Discrimination” by Kenneth Rexroth, features a narrator whose monologue about his disdain of the human race mocks the thought of discrimination against other races. Rexroth uses tone to mock the statements usually made by those who feel superior to other races or groups to illustrate how pompous it sounds. Rexroth uses the line “I don’t mind the human race,” to show that the narrator feels superior to humanity, giving off an overconfident feeling, and making the narrator feel distant from the narrator, and not sympathize with what he says. He also has the narrator claim that he wouldn’t mind if people sat next to him on street cars or ate in the same restaurants, which brings memories of the era of segregation. In addition,
Racism affects individuals and their relationship to the rest of their world. It makes people affected by racial injustice to not trust others’ intentions even if it is the right one. For example, when Baldwin was nine years old a white teacher took interest in him and offered to take him to see plays at the theater. The author states, “It was clear, during the brief interview in our living room, that my father was agreeing very much against his will and that he would have refused permission if he had dared.” Due to continuation of racism, Baldwin father grew to not trust people regardless of their good intention.
In this experiment performed by Jane Elliot she shows a group of students the effect of racism by separating them by the color of their eyes. This exercise shows blue eyed, white students what African Americans go through on a daily basis. In this experiment Elliot places the blue eye students in a holding room and explains to the other students how to treat them. She states that they are going to act like the blue eyed students are incapable of learning and to refer to them as boy, chick, babe and to degrade them. Elliot did not make the idea to exclude people by the color of their eyes, she borrowed it from Adolf Hitler.
Writer’s Statement: For the intertextual study task, I choose to do a short story on the theme racism called Beginning of the End. The purpose of my thought-provoking short story was to entertain the readers with a serious topic focusing on the current problems occurring in our society today regarding race. In particular, the relationship between the police force and coloured people. This short story was influenced by the novel Jasper Jones as it focuses on the themes of racism, social inequality and fear.
• Note; The writer of this book makes it crystal clear, there was evil before Caucasians, however, not as destruct-fully personified as the evil, rampage & blind stupidity, arrogance of nature & the environment & ignorance as Caucasians, as they are reprehensive of pure unadulterated (EVIL), just like (Locusts) to this planet or any other planet in future tense. Yes, the real truth; black people created all other races especially, Albino/Caucasians, in-fact it is that original racist elements that personified the origins of racism, as the origins of Albinos were severely rejected, outcast & shunned from the norm mentality, by blacks.
From history of hundreds of decades, we have witnessed the great progress made by human, in technology and in society. But injustice always exists everywhere in this world. Injustice and unfair treatment could not be erased from the world easily. Just like the situation described by John Steinbeck, the immigrants faced injustice. But there are too many injustices that even worse in the world.
Racism was and still is a major ongoing issue. Throughout centuries, people are found to be racist for all sorts of reasons. Some are raised or surrounded by people who treat people with hatred due to the difference of skin color. This causes them to observe and eventually start to treat them the exact same way. Some people are insecure and look down on others just to make themselves feel better and others have the fear of just being different even though we are all the same.
I’m a boy born in Los Angeles, California but grew up in a place with a population of 148,483 and is about 128.4 million square miles. I technically say I’m from Kansas City, the dot, the one and only true royal’s fans city. I spent more than half my life living in this city, and its been amazing, yet wild, and quite sad at moments. I live a suburban community and I’ve witnessed so many innocent lives be headed to the wrong directions due to drugs, money, alcohol, theft, and even suicide. I have been offered to sell, and even try drugs at one point in life, and it is a serious issue, I isolate myself from the people that burdens to my goals.
Comparative Essay: Racism and Discrimination Born on 1966, Sherman Joseph Alexie, a Native American writer, wrote a short story entitled, “Indian Education,” in which he describes his most racist memorable events that he experienced while in school, from 1st to 12th grade. Alexie’s story is greatly similar with Sumaya Al-Ghazawi’s “Mixed Races, Mixed Feelings” in which a biracial girl tells a story about her racist experiences at school. In both Alexie and Al-Ghazawi’s stories, it can be seen that both withhold the same point of view and theme of racism, however they have different settings, races, and people that discriminate the main characters, Sherman Alexie and Audrey Kibs. Both stories are told in the first point of view, from Alexie and Kibs’s point of views. Alexie
Racial discrimination is prevalent in many areas of the workplace. Psychologists believe that the majority of the thought process of prejudice starts to provoke in early years of childhood. The young child does not have a fully developed perception of various aspects of the society all at once. His perception of them is gradually learned/taught by adults, family, peers ,mass media or his own personal experience.
