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Brownies By Zz Packer Analysis

Decent Essays

In “Brownies,” Z.Z. Packer illustrates the narrator, Laurel, struggling for individuality in an ethnically differentiated culture. To begin with, the author deliberately models her characters as unrighteous using wry contrast and divergence, to show her prejudicial attitude toward ethnicity. In the present aspect of the story, not one character feels righteous enough to stand against prejudice. Packer does this to emphasize the central character’s ambiguity in which the events of the story is happening.
Perhaps, this is why the author sets the background of the story by placing the black troops in the same camp with the intellectually impaired campers, who in fact are considered as righteous. The story “Brownies” projects two class difference; the rich and the conceded and the poor and unfortunate. Here the author uses her main character, Laurel to project the poor and unfortunate by means to form hatred and covetousness. Hatred gives Laurel inside looks and a lack of connection she feels toward the white race they are alienated from each other’s world. “When you lived in the south suburbs of Atlanta, it was easy to forget about whites.” (Packer, 4) Laurel holds the jealousy against the white girls as she sees the white as reach and conceded. …show more content…

“– invaders, Arnetta would later call them–were instantly real and memorable, with their long, shampoo-commercial hair, straight as spaghetti from the box. This alone was reason for envy and hatred.” (Packer, 5) The affirmation validates the racial differences the girls are confronting. Moreover, it is pretty evident that the girls use their emotional aversion through verbal language to cope with their frustration of cultural variances they believe people to have of them by dismaying someone as being Caucasian large-eyed breed

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