Comparing Meanings Of A Word 'And' What's In A Name?

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.

“What is racism? Racism is a projection of our own fears onto another person. What is sexism? It’s our own vulnerability of our potency and masculinity projected as our need to subjugate from another person…” Gary Ross’s breakdown of the age-defying constructions of race and sexism exemplify how fabricated standards can take a toll on the well-being of individuals. American novelist Toni Morrison is renowned for her publications illustrating how racial stigma can dent a character physically, mentally and emotionally. “Sweetness”, an excerpt from God Help the Child, one of Morrison’s more recent works, follows the narrative of a guilt-stricken mother who allowed society’s predetermined notions of race interfere with her parenting, as her daughter was undeniably black while she and her husband have negro roots but are lighter skinned or ‘high-yellow’. As the story develops, it is obvious that the narrator, Lula Ann’s mother feels some sort of resentment for mistreating her child and holding her back from experiencing a blissful childhood like other youngsters, but is too shameful to admit it. With time, tables turn and Lula Ann, Lula Mae’s daughter is able to regain her self-esteem, moves away, builds a career, and is preparing to settle down with a family of her own and change her miserable fate given to her by her parents. Morrison successfully translates the destructive effects of prioritizing racial constructs through varied elements including: characterization, point of

The film reminds us that “slavery and its aftermath involved the emasculation-physical as well as psychological - of black men, the drive for black power was usually taken to mean a call for black male power, despite the needs of (and often with the complicity of) black women. That continues to result in the devaluing of black female contributions to the liberation struggle and in the subordination of black women in general.”4

Reading the content in this book made me get a picture of what it was like to be a colored person in this time. My eyes were opened to the meaning of the word “nigga”. Nigga is such a derogatory term, yet now-a-days it is used by people so much. Kids in this generation use it as a term of endearment when they see their friends, or they say it when they are shocked by something. Frankly, I don’t believe they know how serious it really is. The fact that white people could look at a person and see less than a human being when they did nothing wrong distresses me. They (white people) treated them as if they were property and below them. Even though we don’t have racism to this extent

“You are a nothing little nigger” is one of the demeaning phrases African American human beings have heard over the years in an effort to keep them in a state of persecution. This paper will discuss the persecution of the African American. The following documents the struggles, gut wrenching pain, and heart ache of African American people have endured and are still suffering with today.

Negroes do not like it in any book or play whatsoever, be the book or play ever so sympathetic in its treatment of the basic problems of the race. Even [if] the book or play is written by a Negro, they still [would] not like it” (Henry). In addition, John Wallace believes that the word “nigger” is so offensive that he rewrote the novel without the word “nigger.”

To engage a large audience, Staples appeals to readers with his use to two different points of views throughout the essay: societal views and black views. Staples tries to connect with the readers by giving examples of unconscious thoughts that run through the minds of most people when in the same situation as the “white women.” In his opening sentence, Staples calls the women a “victim.” In her own eyes, she herself was “victim” due to the influence of generalized stereotypes presented in our culture. She becomes quick to judge based on Staples appearance: his skin tone. Because of his color, his every action becomes nothing but threats and anxiety on the women. “She casted a back worried glance. To her, the youngish black- broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Director of the Hutchins Center for African American Research at Harvard University, and an esteemed Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. According to his Harvard University profile he is an “Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, institution builder…and the recipient of fifty-five honorary degrees and numerous prizes.” Professor Gates was also the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. In 1973 he earned his Bachelors in English Language and Literature from Yale University, and in 1974-1979 he got his Master’s. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge (Department of African and African American Studies). Throughout many of his texts Gates provides examples of the ambiguity of language and identity, and the oppressive role ideology plays in the black community; allowing readers to apply the idea of deconstruction to our own daily experiences

Unfortunately, a question that many African Americans have to ask in childhood is "Mommy, what does nigger mean?," and the answer to this question depicts the racism that still thrives in America (345). Both Gloria Naylor’s "'Mommy, What Does "Nigger" Mean?'" and Countee Cullen's "Incident" demonstrate how a word like "nigger" destroys a child’s innocence and initiates the child into a world of racism.  Though the situations provoking the racial slur differ, the word "nigger" has the same effect on the young Naylor and the child in Cullen’s poem. A racist society devours the white children’s innocence, and, consequently, the white children embody

According to Frederick Douglass, “it was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it (p.4).” Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison literatures examine the stigma of slavery, and the perceptions of its dangers. They illustrate what life was like and the mental as well social impact it had on enslaved African-Americans and their life after gaining freedom. Richard Wright convinces his audience in Black Boy that he was tired of the limitations and outcries in the South “I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that some day I might understand it, might come to know what its rigors had done to me, its children (284).” Alice Walker obtains her readers attention by transforming young women into their own characters with a voice using spiritual guidance. In Native Son, Bigger has achieved is lost after being apprehended and brought into captivity, as he transitions back into silence and passivity and begins to recover only in his final confrontation, whereas Douglass in the same prevailing convention, only heals after the regaining of his freedom. Through these literatures, and many others, African-Americans find multiple ways to alleviate and recover from the intensity of undesired bondage and bigotry.

This book is about a Black man's reading of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time while in graduate school. The story captures his poignant occurrence with Twain's use of the racial label "nigger" more than 211 times throughout the book. The gut reaction to hearing the word verbalized by whites with Twain's consent, despite the consequences of sarcasm or spoof, is a essential premise of this personal history/memoir. The location is a colloquium in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, where the Civil War is still being fought on many levels. The story is the problem of race as a topic of public debate and the responsibility the word nigger plays in postmodern civilization particularly among Blacks

In the essay “African American Whiteness in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, Tim Engles is under the assumption that Gloria Naylor uses whiteness in Linden Hills as a recurring theme in order to depict the process of normalization in the characters of the novel. Engles also focuses on how Naylor criticizes and assesses “whiteness” in African Americans as something that is “a generally repressive mode of thought and behavior that paradoxically bleaches away both communal ties and individual distinctiveness” (662). Engles’s essay also addresses the manner in which Naylor parallels this “whiteness” and accomplishment in terms class rather that race, while also displaying how Naylor shows through Linden Hills what a Healthy African American identity should resemble.

This makes younger Gates, question why certain people call other people who aren’t white other names. And claiming it as ‘one of those things’ (4). Now as an older adult, gates still faces racist people down the road of his life, yet still treats everyone with the same respect as everyone ought to be given. But when he was little he stated, ‘i never looked Mr. Wilson in the eye again’ (4), he learned that those who are being racist shouldn’t

Naylor was called a "nigger" not because she was being particularly obnoxious or because of something she had chosen to do--she was degraded because of the color of the skin with which she was born and the legacy it left her to bear, issues she'd never before contemplated. Similarly, in an essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "'What's in a Name?' Some Meanings of Blackness," Gates tells of the first time he was aware of the "other world that we could not affect but that affected us" (426). While walking with his father, "the" prominent African American man in town, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. witnessed another important, but white, man calling his dad "George" (425). Although not an explicitly racist epithet, "George" is still a degrading name in this context, when forced as a unifier upon otherwise dissimilar, African American men. In the simple act of considering all black men as the same, indistinguishable and unworthy of the effort it would take to decipher individual faces, this man unleashed a slur as powerful and pointed as any expressly racist comment. The insult was more subtle than in Gloria Naylor's situation, but equally abject and carrying the same message--in our society, African Americans are seen as different and separate from "Americans."

In Wedding Night, Macnolia remarks , “our language frames us as we resemble our words”(30). Here, Macnolia reasons that racism is bolstered by our harsh words. Therefore, racism is spread throughout society by way of mouth. For example, if a young white boy overhears his father speaking in a prejudice manner, the child is more apt to develop a racist mentality. Van Jordan’s furthers his message about societal racism and oppression through three key poems.