Analysis Of The Book ' Two Women Of Little Rock ' By David Margolick

In her book, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, Crystal N. Feimster discusses how race, gender and politics shaped the post-civil war south from reconstruction into the 20th century through the use of historical statistics, narratives and recorded court cases. Through the juxtaposition of Rebecca Latimer Felton and Ida B. Wells, born a generation apart as a plantation mistress and the other into racism, Feimster explores the differences in the treatment of and the reactions to a white woman and an African American woman fighting against rape and for women’s rights. The author, discusses how institutionalized racism, patriarchy and mob violence helped and hurt these women on their quest for equal rights.

. . but specifics [to him] didn’t matter because the victims were now symbols of injustice: a NAACP cause” (78). Especially given the long-past, over-60-years-old nature of the lynching, Wexler’s goal, and therefore also her writing, must more profound, and compelling, than this, and therefore she, unlike White, is interested in the specifics: “Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray [the lynching victims] . . . I have tried to bring them to life” (266). Wexler succeeds in that, rather than merely mentioning these victims in the context of the lynching, she includes detailed biographies of each, as well as of their relations, and describes their actions long before and immediately leading up to the lynching, in an attempt to give the reader a better understanding of and greater empathy for them.

Claudia Rankine analyze racism to its core, bringing to surface that miniscule event are just as problematic as televised one. Her words are beautifully brutal, striking up emotions for anyone that reads it. As readers we are taken through a journey from past to present events of racial incidents experienced by different genders and ages. Above all, Claudia provides a strong indication that racism is far from over.

Hannah Guthrie was a second year English major student when this article was posted in 2010. Hannah being a student questions her creditably because she isn’t an expert and nor does she have a reputation for being advocate on stopping racism. She was a writer for the UCI’s “New University”, which is a school news paper often stretching to seek attention from the media and other forms of

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.

Have you faced racial persecution due to the color of your skin? The time was 1900’s and this was the nightmare that Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote of in Mob Rule in New Orleans. This is the true account of Robert Charles as he fights for his life to escape the hands of a lynching mob. This impassion story collaborates with the witness of this terrifying event that Wells describes. Wells uses her literary skills to shed light on racial discrimination, media bias, and her personal crusade for justice to portray this heart wrenching reality of the violent lynching during the 19th century.

Wise’s examination of the inconspicuous character of racism 2.0 dovetails fittingly with our course’s recurring theme of institutionalized racism. In class lectures we have defined institutionalized racism as the discriminatory practices that have become regularized and routinized by state agencies, organizations, industries, or anywhere else in society. Although such practices might not be intentionally racist, they end up being racist nevertheless as consequence of the systematized and unspoken biases that have become increasingly convoluted and entrenched within society over time. It also doesn’t help white people to recognize these discriminatory practices considering they have been unconsciously tailored to be consistent with white perspective and mentality. In her article, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh examines not only how white folks often consider themselves to be a normative figure within society, but also how they are carefully taught not to recognize the advantages they gain from the disadvantages that impair people of color. In the article, McIntosh acknowledges the reality of her own white privilege and expresses, “In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth” (McIntosh 4). In fact, even if white folks do not believe themselves to

Another event displaying racism was when Roberta was spotted at a high school. Her and other mothers were outside “picketing” about their children attending a racial integrating school. Twyla was driving by, and

It is often said that kids don’t usually understand race or racism, and that is true until Janie is met with kids who have faced oppression all their lives. Janie is a young girl who is raised by her grandmother in the deep South during the 1930’s. Janie lives among many white kids and doesn’t realize that she is not white until she sees a photo of the children and cannot identify herself in the picture. “Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, ‘where is me?’ Ah don’t see me’”(9). Janie didn’t know that she was a black girl because she had always been treated the same as the white kids, and they never treated her any differently than anyone else. The only kids that ever abused her with their words were the other black kids at school, they always teased her for living in

The themes of fear, racist social structures and scapegoating are indeed applicable to the wider society of the real world, with another infamous example of social structures promoting racial discrimination and apartheid being the Jim Crow Laws, which were enforced from 1877 to the 1950s. Unfortunately, many people are too conservative and stubborn to look beyond their beliefs, take on a different point of view and put their differences aside to understand one another, which ultimately leads to discrimination against one another. The effect of this is emphasized when people are too afraid to speak out in fear of being punished, as it only allows those who are advocating and participating in racist behaviours are allowed to do so without suffering consequences and fully realizing the implications of their

Racism is a learned behavior; humans do not choose to be it but have it forced upon them from the second they come into this world. Written by David Margolick, “Elizabeth and Hazel” is a book which explores how racism has affected the life of two women captured in a historical photograph, one white, one black and in the end, friends.

¨The crowd shouted at them and kept them from entering the high school.¨ When the group of nine high school kids arrived to the Little Rock High School, they were met by a giant crowd of angry white people. The large group was intimidating to the young group of African American high schoolers. They yelled racist comments at them, and spit at them. They refused to let them into the high school. ¨And when I looked up, I saw they were throwing flaming balls of paper into the stall.¨ The Little Rock nine were discriminated and bullied the entire year by almost everyone at the school. Melba, who was one of the Little Rock Nine, was in the women's bathroom, when people started throwing flaming balls of fire, into the stall she was in. She had to persevere through the bullying and keep moving forward to help everyone else follow in her footsteps and be able to

ZZ Parker’s short story, Brownies, is set in the suburban area of Atlanta at an all-girls camp (Camp Crescendo). Parker chose to narrate the story through one of the girls from the all black brownies troop, Laurel, who seems to be a lot more mature than her friends. The story is not like our usual discussion of racism, instead it is reverse racism in which a group of black girls racial hate and prejudice towards a group of white girls (Brownies troop 909). Throughout the story, one of the major theme recurring is irony-contradiction between what is meant and what is said. ZZ Parker uses irony to illustrate to the reader the hypocrisy of human nature always wanting from others what

Although the text, Women: Images and Realities a Multicultural Anthology, has done a wonderful job of showcasing the diversity of women’s experiences, I find Beverly Daniel Tatum’s work “Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?”” to be the most striking. In the essay, Tatum describes how she (and many other feminists) define racism and who can and cannot be racist. Tatum argues that there are important distinctions between prejudice and racism, wherein racism is defined as a ‘system of advantage based on race” or more precisely “prejudice plus power” (388). Through multiple examples Tatum illustrates that if one accepts and uses her definition of racism then only White people (the group of people who ‘dominate’ society) are racist because “people of

In 1955, Emmett Till who was a 14-year-old Black victim of Jim Crow, received national and international attention. Born and raised in Chicago, he planned to visit relatives in Mississippi. Before he went on his trip, it is likely that his family told him about the South’s Jim Crow laws. During his visit, he was accused of offending a White woman in her family’s grocery store by “flirting” and “whistling” at her. What actually happened in the store has been disputed. Till’s reported behavior violated the Jim Crow laws at that time. Whatever the circumstance, the teen probably understood about restrictions for Blacks in public facilities like the little boy in the poem knew about the front and back sections of buses and that Blacks and Whites did not sit side by side. However, the teen may not have realized how arbitrary the laws were and their full ramifications. He may have merely made eye contact with the White woman or smiled during his transaction, and she became offended. She probably expected him to keep his eyes bowed and not make human contact with her. On the other hand, if a White teen had offended the White in the same way that Till had, the White counterpart likely would