Age, Race, Class, And Sex By Audre Lorde

In this book, Jeffrey Ogbar talks about the beginning of rap, where it started, some of the artists of this genre and some of the controversial topics the artists rap about. He also talks about the usage of the N word as well as men calling women the B word. In the first chapter of the book, Ogbar contextualizes the debate by talking about the history of the minstrel figure in American popular culture, relying mainly on the work of W. T. Lhamon and Patricia Hill Collins. He talks about how the earliest manifestations of hip-hop music in the 1970s came from the Black Power movement and often included direct rejections of minstrel tropes for example in the artist KRS-One’s song “My Philosophy”. Before going on a chronological study of the internal debates that many rappers have over their relationships with the minstrel trope, Ogbar finds the source of the debate in early twentieth-century black writers’, mainly W.E.B Du Bois, interest in elevating many portrayals of African Americans in the arts, versus Harlem Renaissance writers’ rejection of the emphasis on

The Harlem Renaissance was a period that started in the early 1920’s in which the concept of “the Negro” was intended to be changed (History.com). This period witnessed the thrive of African American art. White stereotypes had influenced not only the way African Americans were perceived in society but also their relationship between themselves and others. Participants like Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and W.E.B. Du Bois were some of many authors of creative pieces that reflected their points of views. Like George Hutchinson writes in his article, The Harlem Renaissance brought many African Americans from South to North which helped the rise of literacy and the creation of organizations dedicated to promoting African American civil rights that resulted in the uplift of the race and the availability of socioeconomic opportunities (1). The distinctive expression through things like poetry and music during the Harlem Renaissance reflected the reality and experiences black people were going through. This essay is going to focus on the relationship between poetry, politics and representation while relying on the poem “We Wear the Mark” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. At the same time, this paper will be supported with works from Langston Hughes, Alain Locke and W.E.B. Dubois.

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that throughout the book, she lives in houses, but never has a home. Lorde, being a double and sometimes even triple minority continues to experience hardship throughout the book. On page 255, Lorde again looks to her friends and lovers as a

In The essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is a descriptive essay in which Zora Neale Hurston discovers her real identity. At the beginning of the essay, the setting takes place in Eatonville, Florida describing moments when Zora greets her neighbors by singing and dancing without anybody judging her. Back then, she was free from feeling different among other races. However, a tragedy happened when she was thirteen, her mom passed away and she left home to attend school in Jacksonville where she experiences discrimination due to her color of skin. She was introduced to a different lifestyle where the color of her skin was an unfortunate thing. However, she felt this change effected the way she viewed her appearance, as well as inside her. Here she also experienced isolation that comes from being different compared to other races. Hurst realizes that it’s more than just being “colored”, but how race can separate people. Back in history, Jacksonville’s habitants were a mixture of blacks and whites. In Jacksonville, Hurst was just another “colored girl.” However, this essay motivated me to analyze, evaluate and synthesize these works and explore the concepts and themes that run through each of the readings. Most importantly, find out what made this essay so important in American literature. According to the description in the essay, I have notice that the author Hurston uses literary devices like metaphor and tone that I found interesting and deserving for the reader to enjoy this journey.

The famous leader Martin Luther King once said, “Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.” This quote pretty much summed up the way in which African Americans felt during the 1960’s. They had basically no meaning to life. They were irrelevant. Whites wanted no part in them. This was especially the case in the state of Mississippi. Anne Moody, writer of the autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi explains the importance of the civil rights movement in the state of Mississippi and the influence it had on her life and her viewpoint.

In her essay “The Fourth of July”, Audre Lorde described the enlighteningly awful experience of the reality of racism she had during her first trip to Washington D.C. as a child. While Lorde’s older sister had been rejected by her high school from traveling with the rest of the graduating class because she was black, Lorde’s parents decided to take a family trip to the nation’s capital on their own to compensate for such an injustice. Nevertheless, the reality of racism and discrimination the family felt while on their trip foiled their attempt to ignore and overcome such oppression, and led Lorde to view the trip as a frustrating experience. By employing this personal anecdote of her family’s replacement graduation trip for her older sister, Lorde successfully conveyed the impossibility of pretending to live in ignorance of racism and discrimination, and powerfully presented her anger at her family, the black community, and all of American society at trying to do so instead of addressing these problems.

During the 1920’s a new movement began to arise. This movement known as the Harlem Renaissance expressed the new African American culture. The new African American culture was expressed through the writing of books, poetry, essays, the playing of music, and through sculptures and paintings. Three poems and their poets express the new African American culture with ease. (Jordan 848-891) The poems also express the position of themselves and other African Americans during this time. “You and Your Whole Race”, “Yet Do I Marvel”, and “The Lynching” are the three poems whose themes are the same. The poets of these poems are, as in order, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude Mckay.

The poem, “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde is a both a confessional and identity poem. She is not only addressing her internal battle and self-suffering, but also discussing the societal inequities African American women were suffering in the United States. The poem’s diction, on the surface, produces a tranquil tone to the poem. This facet of tranquility in the poem is used to express how her battle against inequity will not be fought with violence or hatred, and how she is not blaming any specific party or institution for her personal suffering. She instead plans to use the power and beauty of words to communicate the flaws of the image of women, fight against injustice and racism, and alleviate her internal despair. “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde is an anthem for African American women and uses vivid imagery, ancestral references, and a call to action to connect to the reader and enact a fight against the underrepresentation of African American women.

Audre Lorde is an unbelievable human being and her responses to other feminists regarding such issues were well argued and came from such an intelligent and intuitive human being who simply wanted to be heard and respected. I think that her openness about her hostility with other black women is such a strong admission, and her inner poetess is strongest at that time. She overlooked the world of men very well, except to mention them only in relation to women's suffering, and in relation to themselves. She talked of Malcolm X but only very briefly. Her statement that "The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am.

Hughes story, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, veers away from the conventions of Du Bois’s essay as rather than focusing on the value of black art as a key in social movements, it involves black artists who would rather neglect their blackness and rather took on the culture of whites. The speaker claims he enjoys being white more than being an African American, and Hughes describes this as “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America-this urge within the race towards whiteness…”. Much like Du Bois, Hughes writes about the “beauty” of Negro art, and aims to uplift the appeal of negro language and culture as he examines African American artists who stayed true to their roots and culture whose works are amongst those that are still heavily praised even decades later.

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that

Audre Lorde, a well-known poet, utilized her poetry to call attention over the political issues of class, feminism, sexism and racism for decades. These political issues are the symbols that transformed her into someone who is not just a woman, but a person whom clarifies these issues using poetry as a voice to define herself as a Black lesbian woman and an individual. The poem “Coal” is a poem that represents her ideals and her feelings towards being a voice among other feminists. It also shows her struggle as an individual that is caught between the issues of feminism coinciding with race, class, and sexism, which is also known as Intersectionality. Because of the attention being called from Lorde’s poetry, people should continue to recognize this political issue and utilize it to spread awareness of the prejudice and marginalization of today’s society.

Because Lorde grew up in the 1930s, she faced both gender and racial discrimination. One of the main and highly valuable influences in Lorde's life was her mother, who was always happy and pleasant in the face of any issue that came her way. That was especially true with the discrimination issues that she faced, because the

​​Audre Lorde is Caribbean-American who lived a rough life. Her poetry explains what she is dealing with, and how she feels with the things she is facing. The two text that will be covered throughout this paper are “Zami: A new spelling of my name” and “Cancer journal.” During the time period of her life she have writing her syntax and structure in her writing, by what was happening in the time era of her life. I will show the time period of her two novels, and her three poems on how Lorde wrote them similar and different from one another. Also will look at, how she changed in her writing. During the close reading of both the text I will bring up the queer theory: gay and lesbian criticism, and a historical survey of literary criticism.

Since the beginning of its art form rap music has been subject to scrutiny throughout its existence. In a Theresa Martinez reading from the semester, the author describes rap music as a resistance. She builds on a theory of oppositional culture that was composed by Bonnie Mitchell and Joe Feagin (1995). In this article, “POPULAR CULTURE AS OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE: Rap as Resistance”, Martinez explains how African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans draw on their own cultural resources to resist oppression. She states that this very resistance to the dominate culture in