A Black Man Talks Of Reaping By Countee Cullen

Cullen is hopeful to get to a place where people of different races will be able to look at others without prejudice and discrimination. However, the poem “Incident” is of a less positive tone. She expresses her experience in a shocked manner, saying, a boy stuck his “tongue out and, called, [her] ‘Nigger’,” (Cullen 8). She was so shocked that “From May until December; .../… of all the things that happened... /… that’s all [she could remember” in Baltimore (Cullen 10-12). At the young age that she was at, it is surprising and upsetting to her to be discriminated against for no reason.

American history is fraught with racism. Its evolution is depicted in literature through the ages, from journal entries of colonial slavery to novels about modern-day race relations. Countee Cullen was a black poet alive during the Harlem Renaissance whose poems “Tableau” and “Incident” portray racism as it was in the early 20th century. Through the use of figurative language and tone, Cullen develops in each poem themes about the effects of small actions.

He wants his readers to imagine the pain and humiliation of the ill treatment that African Americans endure on a daily basis. King writes of vicious mobs lynching people’s mothers and fathers, policemen killing people’s brothers and sisters, a man and his wife not receiving the proper respect they deserve because of their skin color, and the notion that African Americans feel insignificant within their communities; this is why these peaceful demonstrators of whom the clergymen attack “find it difficult to wait” (King, 20). However, King believes that soon, injustice will be exposed, like “a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up” (King, 30). This vivid description helps arouse an emotional response, driving shame into the hearts of his white readers.

Racism is an issue that blacks face, and have faced throughout history directly and indirectly. Ralph Ellison has done a great job in demonstrating the effects of racism on individual identity through a black narrator. Throughout the story, Ellison provides several examples of what the narrator faced in trying to make his-self visible and acceptable in the white culture. Ellison engages the reader so deeply in the occurrences through the narrator’s agony, confusion, and ambiguity. In order to understand the narrators plight, and to see things through his eyes, it is important to understand that main characters of the story which contributes to his plight as well as the era in which the story takes place.

The lyric poem “We wear the mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar is a poem about the African American race, and how they had to conceal their unhappiness and anger from whites. This poem was written in 1895, which is around the era when slavery was abolished. Dunbar, living in this time period, was able to experience the gruesome effects of racism, hatred and prejudice against blacks at its worst. Using literary techniques such as: alliteration, metaphor, persona, cacophony, apostrophe and paradox, Paul Dunbar’s poem suggests blacks of his time wore masks of smiling faces to hide their true feelings.

Imagine a person being labeled as inferior because of a complexion they cannot control. African Americans have been treated unfairly solely because of the color of their skin throughout history. The idea behind this is what is defined as colorism, which is the prejudice or discrimination against individual with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic group (Oxford Dictionary). Colorism has been prominent throughout history, allowing discrimination and hatred towards people with darker skin, more specifically African Americans. In a world filled with racism, prejudice, discrimination, colorism is another factor that has similar effects when it comes to the treatment of African Americans. Martin Luther Kings Jr.’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man both connect to the role that colorism plays in the lives of African Americans. Martin Luther King’s letter explicitly explains how society influences colorism and how it creates injustices. Ellison’s novel gives further insight on the more psychological and personal affect colorism has on Black people by using lots of symbolism in the novel throughout the novel to portray it. Constantly being put down because of how dark someone is will eventually lower an individual’s confidence, knowing that they will miss out on opportunities simply because they have darker skin. Colorism negatively affects how people treat African Americans and also how African Americans feel about themselves.

Throughout the poem Incident by Countee Cullen, the author uses the change of tone to reflect the ideas and purpose of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout the poem, the tone changes from the young child being thrilled about arriving to a heartbreaking memory. In the poem, cullen writes “Once riding in old Baltimore? Heart-filled, head filled with glee/ I saw a Baltimorean/ Keep looking straight at me/ Now I was eight and very small,/ And he was no whit bigger,” (lines 1-6). In this part of the poem, the child had just recently arrived in Baltimore and is more than excited to be in a different place other than in the plantations. He’s very optimistic about meeting someone whom he thought would be his friend. The tone explains how during the Harlem

This book tackled many situations that people of color face on an everyday basis. For example, in one situation Coates and his son were faced with mistreatment. A white lady pushed Coates son, rushing him to hurry up, in an act of showing who was boss, the author tells how he became upset with the situation. What ended up happening was that because of the way Coates defended his child people began to scream at him and threaten to call the police for his behaviors. He states that he faced a state of shock, he was unaware, how cruel people could be and how much power white people attained. (94) This example shows how people misjudge a person of color it doesn’t matter if they did something right, they are being called out just by the pigment of their skin. It goes to show that the statement Coates said was true “not being violent enough could me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body.” (28) Either way one may look at a situation, for a person of color, it can go bad and seeing through the eyes of this author we become aware that social racism still exists in today’s

Throughout the novel it is apparent that everyday instances of racism occur, causing people of color to feel outcasted. There are two very obvious occasions where this happened. In the first instance two African American woman are in a workspace of primarily all white co-workers. When a woman they worked with got these two names mixed up, it was stated that she had a “fifty-fifty chance of getting it right” insinuating that these two women are the only black ones working here. Later, the woman who had the mix-up with the names wrote an apology note; however, in the note she stated it was “our mistake” and seemingly put part of the blame on the to women. This is a primary example of how African Americans can be thrown against a white background making them seem different than everyone else.

Throughout all of the history of the United States of America, race has been a prevailing issue. Although the ways in which racism presented itself has changed, the prevalence of the problem has not. Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man does an excellent job of allowing some insight into the way racism has and still does impact the life and self identity of affected individuals. In this book, the narrator is faced with the challenges that come with being an African American in mid 1900s. The struggle first becomes something the narrator is aware of when his grandfather utters some troubling advice on his deathbed. He said in order to succeed in a white man’s world, you have to

A person being obviously different from the majority has never been a positive thing throughout most of history. Many cultures crave consistency and conformity, from post-revolutionary America, to ISIS in the Middle East. Racism and other issues of difference have shown throughout all of history and Incident by Countee Cullen is no different. In his poem, Cullen shows how deep racism can run and how bewildering and damaging it can be to the minorities that hear it.

In present day American society, African-Americans’ skin color makes them into targets -- of violence, prejudice, stereotyping, and potentially of victimization. Police are trained to racially profile in their work, and the byproduct of this has been devastating; in 2015 alone the police killed about 102 unarmed black people. These happenings have sparked national outcry over institutionalized racism in America. The racial profiling of blacks increases their visibility, but because it is based on a narrow stereotyped portrayal, it marginalizes them. Racial profiling denies African-Americans the formation of an identity separate from that of a victim and likely criminal. This is essentially just a continuation of the black and white that vengeful post-Reconstruction Southern whites created in order to establish home rule. Te-Nehisi Coates illuminates how this black and white world is integral to white supremacy in Between the World and Me: “the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white” (Between the World and Me 42). This colorless world encourages African Americans to reject visuality in order to arrive at a brand of disembodied individuality. In the novels The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the authors write about two protagonists’ quest for their own identities in a similar

In Incident, the overarching theme of the poem is how racism can ruin someone's day, week, month, year, or even life. This poem shows an innocent Black little kid walking down a street in Baltimore, when he sees another kid about his age, but white. The black kid smiles at the white kid, and the white kid, “poked out His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’” This insult by the white kid completely kills the black kids

This idea of being a part of a society, that has deemed its African American citizens as “Separate but equal.” Dunbar does his best to explain this role to his readers referring to himself not only as a part as the African American community, but also as a scholar in the African American community. As someone that has become privileged enough to write, read, and publish individual works. Which have allowed him to gain respect from a number of other authors. Dunbar tries to explain what is necessary to hold this position in his society. How one must wear a “mask,” this of hidden pain that must never be shown in order to maintain the “dream” that the world has created. He gives his audience an idea of the sacrifice many people were required to make, in order to maintain the appearance they created and continue to be respected in

In conclusion, as one can see, racism is still a big problem, and bringing awareness to it is the only way it can be solved. A very telling statistics stated that, “ ...43% of blacks said they felt that the country would not make the necessary changes needed to give blacks racial equity in all areas of American life. That's compared to 11% of whites who felt that way. (Vega)” People need to realize how many people, even teens, struggle with social inequality and persecution. Literature and the impacts it makes is the first step to change society’s views of tolerance and acceptance of not just racism, but of all injustices in the world. This goes to show that maybe it isn’t about the color of one’s skin is, but but how they deal with that color