Joe Louis, who was representing-as she describes-all the Negroes around the world, was losing. Angelou writes that if Louis lost it would mean the fall of her people. Although it is not a literal statement, she implies that a loss would mean to lose their pride and dignity. Louis had to prove they were strong and equally capable of succeeding. Angelou also states, “If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help.
African Americans were segregated from the whites and also Women had no rights because Men were seen as the alpha male. The obstacles of the two would probably fit into the race and gender of how America was back in the twentieth century. African Americans were always hard to be put in society in the 1900’s because of slavery. Even though slavery had ended in the 1950’s, they were still not accepted into society. The northern parts of the United States accepted African Americans, and many try to escape to the north to try to get employed and leave the racial segregation in the south.
Zip Coon is portrayed as a buffoon that is in constant violence and one that cannot handle his freedom. Although Blacks looked nothing like the images that were being portrayed through minstrelsy, over a vast period of time, these images appealed to the slave inhabited South, the North and throughout the Mid-West. These images were widely accepted as the Black image by people in the North and Mid-West who had never seen Blacks. As a product of minstrelsy and characters such as Mammy and Uncle Tom many people had the false assumption that Blacks were happy in slavery and in bondage. When examining the images and legacy of minstrelsy in modern
There are certain cultural practices that came to America with the enslaved Africans that have long been forgotten as the years went by. A good example of these differences is the conflict between American born Blacks and the immigrated Africans in Bronx. According to the Oscar Johnson research Both African immigrants differ from their black predecessors, not only culturally, but in experience and perspective. Those differences are rarely discussed but widely understood to be at the root of a great divide. While some African Americans are "very nice," he said, "The difference is the way we have been raised.
A slave master named Willie Lynch created several rules about how to keep slaves from resisting and uprising.The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of a Slave states, “KEEP THE BODY, TAKE THE MIND!...In other words, break the will to resist...if you break the FEMALE mother, she willBREAK the offspring in its early years...Train the female horse whereby she will eat out your hand, and she will in turn train her infants to eat out of your hand, also. When it comes to breaking an uncivilized nigger, use the same process, but vary the degree and step up the pressure, so as to do a complete reversal of the mind(Lynch)” Willie Lynch debases the slaves by comparing them to horses by comparing the breaking of a horse to the breaking of an enslaved person. Lynch repeats the words break and mind constantly in this quote to make his main message clear: to break an enslaved person, the slave masters have to break the psyche of an enslaved person. This is significant because the strain and bend of the enslaved Africans’ minds left a form and constraint structure for future generations to follow. Therefore, some of the ways of division used on enslaved Africans are still in place today, 300 years after the Willie Lynch
She discusses the story in a unique way because she changes its point of view; helping the audience gain a new perspective of the issue. “I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress” (Jacobs 84). Jacobs’ story speaks out to me because she addresses an audience of people that slavery should have been stopped. She tells a story about how traumatizing the life of an enslaved black female can be. She tries to gain sympathy for what she has been through.
According to Du Bois the prejudices of white people elicit “self-questioning, self-criticism, and lowering of ideals” among black people. The internalization of anti-black sentiment from the outside world thus begins to shape the black American experience. Through the concept double consciousness DuBois becomes better able to explore the social problems he studied in his earlier work “The Philadelphia Negro”. Double consciousness also creates an element of conflict within the black American, as they struggle (often unsuccessfully) to reconcile their identity as a black person and as an American citizen. Dubois cites the example of the black artisan in “The Souls of Black Folk”.
Although each of them had their own perspectives, their main objective was the same. Reparations in this society can be defined by stating that the U.S. government needs to make a formal apology to blacks for the damage caused by the transatlantic slave trade due to social and economic consequences in the United States. Advocates also feel the U.S. government owes the black people. Blacks remain behind due to many things, the most important being slavery. The Constitution, until recently, did not apply to blacks; blacks feel they deserve payments from 310 years of slavery, destruction to their minds and culture.
That in turn scares people because of the fact that someone might reveal that Caucasians believed that they were the superior race and the belief in "White Supremacy, African inferiority." In history Africans have been mistreated all through history, so I still think that white are dominating now but the minorities are taking over slowly but surely. This novel attacks reality from different points of view and in the process shows that Africans put up with the treatment because they think they lost the battle. It could have been used as a form of prevent discrimination
Segregation has been shown in many way and in different forms of housing, industries and often in our school board . The factor segregation we face today started when slaves gained their freedom in the southern cities back in the 19oo‘s . The black community “were look as an inferior race” in the eye’s of the White American community (Woodward). Even after they won their freedom everyone still saw them unequivalent, and discrimination continued. The southern states started to segregate without sanction; “a segregated society is one in which members of different races rarely, if ever, come into contact with one another as equals” (Dizard).These free-men and freewoman were often denied their civil rights and were discriminated by railroads hotels, and inns.