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White Majority Vs Dutchman Essay

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Black Minority verses White Majority Back in the 1960’s, the Civil Rights Movement was at its highest with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and his famous speech “I have a Dream”. Following King’s death, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, banning the discrimination of race, color, religion, sex, etc. The minority, people of color, were upset with the way they were treated and just wanted to be considered the same as the majority, white people. Many people of color at the time did what they could to blend in with white normality and live in society as peacefully and undisturbed as they could have. Amiri Baraka, who was known as LeRoi James back in 1964, is a controversial poet/activist and is the author of the play “Dutchman”. The play brings forth the issues African men had to deal with in 1964, mainly centering on stereotypes and racism. …show more content…

The play starts off with young African American adult, Clay, about twenty three years old, minding his own business with a magazine in his hand casually looking out the Subway car window in New York City. While blankly looking out the window, he makes eye contact with a red-haired lady, later to be known as Lula, thirty years old. Lula, possibly a metaphor for the “Flying Dutchman”, purposely walks into the Subway car while eating the symbolic apple, spotting out the young African American man she saw. Once seated next to him, even though Lula started off flirtatious and cheery, with her “casual banter”, she in the end came out as manipulative, psychotic, and racist. Clay and Lula are a prime example of what it was to be like in the majority verses minority society back in

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Nevertheless, such a union between Clay and Lula can never exist in what Larry Neal calls "the twisted psyche of white America" (34). Neal's point is relevant because in Jones' world a normal relation between whites and blacks is impossible. Ironically, the symbolic, sexual union between Clay and Lula leads to the victimization and murder of Clay. A great deal of the criticism on Dutchman reveals that some critics approach the play from a Euro-American perspective while ignoring the black revolutionary issues which operate in the play. This kind of criticism is irrelevant because it dissociates the play from its black literary tradition and attempts to link it either with Christianity, the white man's religion, or with white literature and mythology (the myth of the Flying Dutchman).

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