A People’s History of the United States: Reflection Chapter 3 Persons of Mean and Vile Condition To summarize, Zinn again takes his stand against the upper class by retelling history from the points of view of those put down by society. In this chapter, he covers POVs from slaves, indentured servants, and Indians, and talks about the violence and clashes that went on in the southern colonies. He explains the rebellion and the revolt that occurred as a result of social rest, and talks of the relationship between white settlers and native Indians. Zinn’s take on this chapter can most easily be summed up in this quote: “the poor people wanting to go to America became commodities for profit,” (Zinn 43) and it’s clear the message of the chapter is that there was extreme tension in the working class and in those of even lower status. My reaction to this chapter is one that is mildly surprised.
This journey takes Rutherford into an enterprising passage of horror and self-discovery. The Middle Passage and The Book of Negroes are two novels written by African-American scholars, as they both clearly depict the social and psychological conflicts that result from the invasion of a self-contained African society by the white man and his culture. Thus, in this paper, I argue that post-colonial theory is a useful tool to analyze the dynamics of colonization, both in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage. In particular, I investigate the novels depiction of truth and its betrayal according to the process of colonization from the perspective of the colonizer, the perspective of the colonized and the process of decolonization. The first step to utilize post-colonial criticism is to understand the impact of colonization through the perspectives of the colonizers.
Comparably to The story of Tom Brennan whereby the protagonist fails to adapt to his new paradigm due to immense social and emotional barriers, Norman Jewison’s biographical film The Hurricane demonstrates that coming in terms with inner fear and anxiety allows one to overcome the emotional barriers and enter into a new world that affords a greater self. The protagonist ‘Hurricane Carter’ is an infamous African-American boxer who faces a corrupt world of racial prejudice. He faces an unprecedented calamity of imprisonment due to false allegations of homicide. The close-up shots of his blood-teary eyes conveys an intense thirst for vengeance. Similarly to Tom Brennan, this leads him to face immense psychological barriers such as schizophrenia, fear and antisocialism, which accordingly breeds his hatred and hinders his transition to adapt to his new world.
Orwell’s perspective as a reluctant and disgusted colonizer shapes his essay’s development, detail and main thesis. The essay’s first-person narrative, causal analysis and the detail it employs obviously produce a powerful condemnation of British colonialism. However, while Orwell briefly lists the obvious abuses of colonialism---the torture of prisoners, the appalling conditions in imperial jails, the destruction of the colonized’s spirit---he focuses his essay’s detail and development on colonialism’s effects on himself as colonizer, how this system causes his degradation and corruption as a human being. He presents his younger self as tormented by his role in this system, but also as someone who has absorbed its racist attitudes. He emphasizes his “intolerable sense of guilt” (313), but also his contradictory hatred of the Burmese, those “evil-spirited little beasts” (314), as well as his callous disregard for the native man killed by the elephant (319).
Du bois was an African American man with a strong social position, who did statistics to examine racial discrimination against blacks, and his opposition to the thought that blacks where biologically inferior to whites is the reason why I choose to write about him. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts to Dutch-African and French parents. Du Bois was a graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and he also received a bachelor’s, master, and a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While teaching in the south at Atlanta University he saw how African American where unfair treated and this would move him to publish the book The Souls of black Folk. The book basically stated that the problem in the twentieth century was a problem with the color line.
He would be very influenced by the situation of blacks in his country as well as his personal experience of poverty when he lived in Harlem. Ultimately James Baldwin would become one of the most prominent figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Discrimination, be it racial of sexual would be a
Double Consciousness In Dubois’s work, Souls of Black Folks, he presents that “the problem with the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” (450) He produces the story of his life in relation to “double consciousness, the sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” This dualism and frustration provides the history of the Negro and the hardships that they travel to reach manhood. Double consciousness is the awareness of one’s self and also of the way that other people perceive that person. This awareness could possibly spiral into that person changing themselves into the person that other people perceive them as. The key into not falling subjective to this would be to maintain roots in their past and resist to conformity to the dominant society. Dubois examines the struggle of the difficulties between the differences of identities between being American and being an African American through the
Cameron Ohlin Baldwin’s Harlem In his essay entitled, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” James Baldwin composes a masterful description of the slum that is Harlem, New York. Baldwin takes the reader on a journey through the “colorless, bleak, and revolting” streets that make up Harlem. He portrays the white policeman as a soldier, prepared for war at a moments notice. While Baldwin’s essay is of upmost seriousness, he discovers a way to incorporate irony and even sarcasm into his writing. Baldwin shows his knowledge of the streets history as he describes how Harlem began and gradually became the ghetto that it is today.
Journey toward Self-Identity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's highly acclaimed novel about a black man who is born into America's underclass in the early decades of the twentieth century. The protagonist searches for purpose, acceptance, and self-identity while growing up in a racist society. Ellison describes the book as a "wild mixture of elements" that began as a war novel but evolved into an examination of post-Reconstruction racial and social relationships (Ellison, viii). The literary project is a series of events that are often based on Ellison's own experiences. "It's a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality," Ellison says (Kaiser).
Racial Injustice Raiding Throughout America Similar to many other conversion stories, one must conquer hardships in order to be successful. Martin Luther King Jr., William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X exemplify a few of the many African American human rights activists of the 1900s; however Malcolm X possesses one unique asset which sets him apart from the rest. Being a man from lower depths, he possesses the authority of one who both challenges and conquers those depths. Through his personal testimony titled “ The Autobiography Malcolm X”, told by Alexander Haley, Malcolm shares with the audience his strenuous journey to metamorphosing from a ghetto driven hustler to a religious martyr. His didactic writing