Who Is Jericho Brown?

In Brent Staples’ "Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space," Staples describes the issues, stereotypes, and criticisms he faces being a black man in public surroundings. Staples initiates his perspective by introducing the audience in to thinking he is committing a crime, but eventually reveals how the actions taken towards him are because of the fear linked to his labelled stereotypes of being rapists, gangsters and muggers. Staples continues to unfold the audience from a 20 year old experience and sheds light onto how regardless of proving his survival compared to the other stereotypical blacks with his education levels and work ethics being in the modern era, he is still in the same plight. Although Staples relates such burdens

The Harlem Renaissance was a time for racial uprising and change. However, sexuality is rarely discussed when researching and reflecting on this time. Many of the leaders in the Harlem Renaissance identified somewhere along the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual) spectrum. “Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, Richard Bruce Nugent, Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Langston Hughes, all luminaries of the New Negro literary movement, have been identified as anywhere from openly gay (Nugent) to sexually ambiguous or mysterious (Hughes). In a 1993 essay, “The Black Man’s Burden,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root‘s editor-in-chief, notes that the Renaissance ‘was surely as gay as it was black.’”

The diversity between Americans has always been evident, and not just by the skin tone or religion, but also by their backgrounds, as well as how their lives are like today. Especially in African Americans and those who wanted to change the ways of religion, and the prejudice against them continues to stick, even today.

Racism will always be an issue and will always be considered inevitable due to society. Racism is said to be morally wrong because no one is born racist, they are taught. The ideals of a group are thought to be forms of extrinsic racism which lead to morally problematic intentions. Utilitarianism is ultimately the one way to prevent the consequences and effects of racism, as Kantian ethics follow it up by defining its moral rule.

The article “The Negro Digs Up His Past’’ by Arthur schomburg on 1925, elaborates more on the struggles of slavery as well as how history tend to be in great need of restoration through mindfully exploring on the past. The article, however started with an interesting sentence which caught my attention, especially when the writer says ‘’The American Negro must remark his past in order to make his future’’ (670). This statement according the writer, explains how slavery took away the great deal freedom from people of African descendant, through emancipation and also increase in diversity. The writer (Arthur Schomburg) however, asserts that “the negro has been throughout the centuries of controversy an active collaborator, and often a pioneer, in the struggle for his own freedom and advancement” (670).

It is always around, it is impossible to back away from it, but what it is? Racism is a very strong force, it has captivated the world ever since humans existed. It is hard to back away from racism, to avoid it all together. Whether you are black, white, Jewish, Catholic, Irish, etc. you will be discriminated against by a group of people. No one can hide from the hatred, it is just there. The Color of Water shows that no matter where you are or who you are, that you can face racism. Rachel faced it when she was a Jew in an all white, Protestant school. James and his siblings faced racism when they were in an all-Jewish school. In the memoir, The Color of Water, by James McBride, racism is a powerful presence that can severely affect those who are victims of it.

During the Civil Rights Era, many black power movements strived to prevent the New Jim Crow from happening. The black man was being oppressed during segregation and treated like animals. The white supremacy, only visualize African Americans as slaves, people who should not be a part of the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X drove men and women to fight for his or her rights. However, that was not enough to stop the white supremacy from oppressing African Americans. The Civil Rights movement did put an end to public segregation. It did not put not put an end to the laws being made by the government, which is dominated by the white race. In the book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander discussed how the Civil Rights and black power movements helped African Americans gain their equal rights, but did not help to gain political power. Mass Incarceration is where the African Americans’ lives end because of the social structure created by the government. Blacks are mostly in the lower class because after the Great Depression, Roosevelt only created laws for whites. This allowed the white community to build and move out the cities into better neighborhoods. Leaving the black community behind. The government placed businesses and built big buildings to keep all the blacks in one place. Base on how the black community was viewed as a race and social status, gives this race a higher chance of being behind bars.

Before using her Facebook as a means to connect young minds about civil rights movements and issues that still plagues the nation today, Sandra Bland used her social media like every other citizen. That is until just after Christmas of 2014 when she made the decision to speak up about “the economic crisis burdening young African Americans,” trying to, in her words, inform her readers about black history, or American history as she liked to describe it (Nathan). Sandra Bland, a 28 year old African American, had just received a job interview from her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University. Her life seemed to be going smoothly, just received a job offering, rekindled her relationship with her mother, and seemed optimistic about the future to

Brent Staples is an author and editorial writer for the New York Times. His writing is mostly on political issues, cultural issues and controversies including races. In one of his essay written in 1986 which was published in Ms. Magazine “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space,” Brent Staples explains about his personal experience being black in an American society. Author wants his reader to understand that we are living in a culture with is constantly becoming violent and dangerous. Staples in his essay is gathering sympathy from his audience. He explains his thesis throughout the essay describing different incidents which took place in his life. Staples wants his audience to know how racial stereotypes has affected him as well as many other peoples like him and forced him to change so that he is not misunderstood by people and can prove himself fearless for others.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander tries to advance intellectual dialogue regarding mass incarceration in the United States. Alexander does this by carrying out a historical analysis of the process in which the correctional system controls African Americans through intentionally selected, and systematically sanctioned legal limits. In fact, the United States incarceration rate is not at peak by coincidence. Moreover, it is not coincidental that Black men and women make up the majority of this number. According to Alexander, this problem is a consequence of the “New Jim Crow” rules, which use racial stratification to eliminate black individuals in the legal sense. Black people and a small number of the Hispanic community face racial stratified laws when they face the justice system. This paper will support the claims that race is a major factor in the incarceration of black men in the United States, which includes the Jim Crow system, the slave system and the drag war. This process will also involve analyzing of some of the arguments presented within the book.

There is an extricable relationship between race, capitalism, and property and how it perpetuates the notion of whiteness through the exploitation of “others”. Property is a relationship of a person and an object; slaves were considered as objects. Race is constructed from white workers’ ideology of whiteness and labor wage. Racism has been long constructed through the production of race and its relations to property, and we can see it through the notion of capitalism and the idea of whiteness.

Today, racist sororities and fraternities on college campuses have grown to be a public crisis. Recently at the University of Oklahoma, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity released a video including racial slurs and lynching of African Americans (Glionna et al.). This activity shows that there is racism among Americans even in the twenty-first century. There are many other publicized cases involving racism in American society which proves that racism is not just an issue of the past. The past contains elements of racial misconduct that can be explained by James Baldwin and Brent Staples. Baldwin, a preacher and published writer, writes “Notes of a Native Son” to emphasize his experiences and actions towards racism of a different time (50-71). Staples, a reporter and columnist who wrote “Just Walk on By: Black Men in Public Spaces”, describes difficulties and stereotypes from the nation and how he suffered through, yet, another difficult time in American history (394-97). Both have a way with words in describing past racial issues. But in comparison of Baldwin and Staples, one can see that the type of racism they experience, their age and maturity, and their response to racism differ entirely by noting the different time eras of racism that each encounters.

In Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts describes the history of African-American women and the dehumanizing attempts to control their reproductive lives. Beginning with slavery, to the early beginning of birth control policy, to the sterilization abuse of Black women during the 1960s and 1970s, continuing with the current campaign to inject Norplant and Depo-Provera along with welfare mothers, Roberts argues that the systematic, institutionalized denial of reproductive freedom has uniquely marked Black women’s history in America.

bell hooks, renowned black feminist and cultural critic criticizes the lack of racial awareness in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination (1992). ‘bell hooks’ is written in lower case to convey that the substance of her work reigns more important than the writer. From a marginalized perspective, hooks argues that sites of dominance, not otherness is problematic and critiques the lack of attention that white scholars pay to the representation of whiteness in the black imagination. Critical feminist scholars Peggy McIntosh and Ruth Frankenberg identify their own whiteness as a dominant discourse, but share a critical departure from hooks with the notion of whiteness as terror. hooks aim is not to reverse racism, but discuss her position to authentically inform readers about how she experiences racism. Furthermore, systems of oppression are manufactured by human thought and thus the site of the Other is always produced as a site of difference. Gender, race, sex, class, disability, and geography are situated differently in social structure, but dominant groups assume they share the same reality though they cannot experience it. In consequence, the Other cannot hold a singularized identity of their own and the binary structure succeeds in containing racialized bodies in place. What happens to those bodies when they cross boundaries of the binary? hooks recounts being routinely disciplined back into place when crossing the border; however, dominant white

The book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is about the mass incarceration of African Americans in the criminal justice system. It depicts individuals who were arrested on drug crimes. Because these individuals are labeled as criminals, it becomes difficult for them to find work, housing, and public assistance. (Alexander, 2010) The themes in this book include denial and ignorance, racism and violence, and drugs.