Identity In Bone Black

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When color or dent is added to consistency image, desirability is eroded even further. As an African American girl, the narrator in Bone Black believes she is in some way less desirable than white girls because white girls and their bodies are held up as the desirable norm. Because African Americans often have no "desirable" soulfulnessal identity compared to "white" bodies and physicality in a prejudiced society, the narrator in Bone Black never tells us the name of town or state in which she lives. She also fails to tell us the names of those with whom she interacts, even her comrade and sisters. Such namelessness is a symbol of how the black body is often invisible and without identity in mainstream culture. By describing her kidskinishness…show more content…
I thought that they would remain there forever, orphaned and alone, unless someone began to want them, to give them love and care" (Hooks 1996, p. 24). The narrator depicts the pain and throe of her experiences with prejudice against appearance and deformed physicality. Like the narrator in Bone Black, we see that Lucy initially comes to have a first gear self-esteem and valuation of her self because she bases her entire sense of wellbeing and her entire definition of her identity based on the inhumane and prejudice reactions of others to her. She implys of her body as having "physical oddness," and she also thinks of herself as a "disfigured child" (Grealy 1994, p. 4). These images of identity and self free radical not from inherent feelings of worthlessness in Lucy. Instead, they are the merchandise of the reactions of others whose cruelty makes her believe she is "undesirable" as a person because of the undesirability of her body. Even Lucy's father fails to visit her often in the infirmary because he cannot bear to witness his daughter's physical condition. Lucy initially internalizes these reactions of others, as did the narrator in Bone Black, until she learns to define herself irrespective of outside(a) reaction, attitudes, and

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