A Comparison Of Clybourne Park And The Raisin In The Sun

In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun a number of social issues are both explicitly and subtly exemplified through out the characters experiences and relationships. Living in a cramped Chicago apartment, the Youngers’ display both influential goals and conflicting restraints. Beneatha Youngers is a controversial character; she complicates society’s typical gender roles, introduces the wrestle between assimilation and ancestry of African-Americans, but specifically serves as a paradigm for her generation in the play.

Another theme and issue that arrives from the play A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, is racism. During the 1950’s blacks and whites were segregated. The house the Younger’s purchased was in the Clybourne Park neighborhood, an all white neighborhood. When Lena told the family they were moving to Clybourne Park they stood with amazement. “Mama, there ain’t no colored people in Clybourne Park” (p.734). The family heard of other colored families’ houses being set on fire in this neighborhood, they were concerned that the same thing would happen to them.

Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun,” was a radically new representation of black life, resolutely authentic, fiercely unsentimental, and unflinching in its vision of what happens to people whose dreams are constantly deferred.

Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, centers on an African American family in the late 1950s. Hansberry directs her work towards specifically the struggles faced by African Americans during the late 1950s. Through the dialogue and actions of her characters, she encourages not only a sense of pride in heritage, but a national and self-pride in African Americans as well.

The novel A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, is about an African American family on the southside of Chicago,that struggles through poverty. Soon after buying a new house, a white man, Mr. Lindner comes to their door offering to give them their money back in exchange for them not to move in. Hansberry uses Mr. Lindner to represent society, because he singles out the Younger family because of their race and that they are from a different background than those from Clybourne Park. This is reflective of society, because people mask their misguided beliefs behind the supposed best interests of others.

Through Mr. Lindner’s visit to the Younger’s family, A Raisin in the Sun demonstrates racially segregated nature of Chicago’s neighborhood, and how the Younger family suffered emotional trauma in their everyday life due to their race in the form of stress they had to experience due to the non-violent tactics used by the people to racially segregate them from other people in the community, further leading them to have lesser options to improve their status.

    Lorraine Hansberry faced many obstacles in her life which has made her  write this book A “Raisin in the Sun.” As said in Blooms Literature “She was the youngest of four children whose parents were well-educated, middle-class activists centrally engaged in the fight against racial discrimination. Early figures in the Civil Rights movement.” In the book “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first play written by an African American she made through experiences of  black people who live on Chicago’s South Side, Hansberry used members of her family as inspiration for her characters. Lorraine Hansberry life had comparisons in this book dealing with poverty

the play are ―rich symbol[s]‖ that convey the barriers of a ―racist society‖ (Kenny par. 18). The

It’s as if the words were stolen from my mouth. Maria’s critique of Clybourne Park correctly conveys almost every thought I had while watching the play. She states how unparalleled the story is to A Raisin in the Sun, and the overall bad structure of the play alone. Clybourne Park is so far from the compelling story of A Raisin in the Sun, it’s nearly shameful to compare the two on any level.

A Raisin in the Sun is play written about a family in the 1950’s, and the focus of the play is how racism affects that family. The family in the play tries to buy a house in a white neighborhood, and they have to deal with discriminatory housing practices and the threat of racial violence. A Raisin in the Sun is relevant today because a lot of the insights it makes about racism are still debated over today. One of the issues it tackles is racial violence. In the play, the family deals with the threat of racial violence from people who don’t want them to move into their new house. Today, many feel that racial violence is being done by the police. The story also deals with the family’s struggles to buy a house and the abuse they face for

In Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), she touches on not only the Youngers family, but also the degradation of society within the walls of the 1960’s, as there was apparent societal exclusion by members of the opposite race. This opposition is broadcasted in the play when a character named “Lindner” Linder is part of a council in which they filter through multiple potential buyers in the neighborhood in the hopes of accomplishing an Caucasian only community. He enters in the middle of the play who is initially unrecognized, but offers a large sum of money for the soon to be, property the Youngers will reside within with the advice that, “…people can get awful worked up when they feel that their whole way of life and everything they’ve ever worked for is threatened” (Hansberry 554). The problem that the Caucasian community is facing is that they live without establishing a positive relationship with people who don’t look like themselves; in this situation, it is race. Linder then proceeds to offer the family a large sum of money over the what they paid for the current land and house for the preservation of their precious ideology that whites are only permitted around that location (Hansberry 554). In recognition of this racist

Though there was a heightened sense of tension over civil rights in the late 1950s when A Raisin in the Sun was written, racial inequality is still a problem today. It affects minorities of every age and dynamic, in more ways than one. Though nowadays it may go unnoticed, race in every aspect alters the way African-Americans think, behave, and react as human beings. This is shown in many ways in the play as we watch the characters interact. We see big ideas, failures, and family values through the eyes of a disadvantaged group during an unfortunate time in history. As Martin Luther King said, Blacks are “...harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what

Even after fifty years have passed racism is still evident in Act 2.This portrays the way people treat each other in reality and how race is still a prominent issue in the world today. Bruce Norris may only hint at what rich people do in the neighborhood but raises numerous issues. One in which is that race triumphs class. Norris’s play “Clybourne Park” raised much controversy by bringing up an issue that many people now a day decide to forget and act like it is not there. By bringing the issue of race up

Beginning shortly after Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun concludes, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park presents a two-act play demonstrating the effects of time, and shifting social norms on a single environment. While the potential for change over 50 years is enormous, the set changes between acts is minimal, as it simply requires a makeover generating “an overall shabbiness” (43). On a superficial level, Norris explores the reactions of the white Community Association to the “colored” Younger family purchasing the 406 Clybourne Street home, dismay thinly veiled by a concern for them “fitting into their community” (29) during the first act. Fast-forwarding 50 years, the second act flips the scenario with a role reversal, having a white couple seeking to

In the play A Raisin in the Sun written by Lorraine Hansberry, a story about an African American family living in Chicago. The book illustrates what the daily problems of an average black family had to deal with while living in America in the 1950s and their struggle of overcoming obstacles to reach their “dream”. Hansberry use this novel to address topics such as racism, racial inequality, and racial discrimination. In 1954, many people during that time supported segregation. People perceived whites and blacks completely different and people wanted them to be separate. Everywhere in the south had “whites only” or “colored”, and many wanted to keep it that way. History will always repeat itself and people are not