Summary Of The Accord On Racism By James Baldwin

Establishing and maintaining a certain identity mostly depends on the setting. The setting allows us to analyze someone at a deeper level. Considering the time, place and the circumstances around under which they respond allows us to explore them and determine their identity. In the short story “Sonny’s Blues”, James Baldwin conveys the message of how one goes about establishing and maintaining their identity on different levels by using elements of setting. The author uses elements of setting several times to convey the message but some of the prominent uses are the military service, life in Harlem and especially the use of

“Sonny Blues” is a narrative of a young man’s development to adulthood at a place, the Harlem ghetto, where it is less demanding to remain a cunning youngster. James Baldwin copes with a man's needs to discover his character in an unfriendly society, and his capacity to comprehend himself through creative measures. In “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin utilized biblical stories and figurative language as an establishment for his fiction story.

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.

Many tragic events happen in this short story that allows the reader to create an assumption for an underlying theme of racism. John Baldwin has a way of telling the story of Sonny’s drug problem as a tragic reality of the African American experience. The reader has to depict textual evidence to prove how the lifestyle and Harlem has affected almost everything. The narrator describes Harlem as “... some place I didn’t want to go. I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt. It filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality” (Baldwin 60). Another key part in this story is when the narrator and Sonny’s mother is telling the story of a deceased uncle. The mother explains how dad’s brother was drunk crossing the road and got hit by a car full of drunk white men. Baldwin specifically puts emphasis on the word “white” to describe the men for a comparison to the culture of dad and his brother.

James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” was a great tale of the struggles shared between two brothers in Harlem in 1957. This story is about two African American brothers who, unfortunately, grew apart as the aged. The plot shows the struggles the two brothers faced as they grew up in Harlem, and in return, the two drastically different paths they perused. James Baldwin was an African American who grew up in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s. Baldwin was the oldest of nine children, and grew up in a very poor family, having a very bad relationship with his stepfather. Baldwin followed in his stepfather’s footsteps in becoming a preacher, but as he was studying to do so, he realized that his true calling was to become a writer. Baldwin

Gather at the Table: A Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of Slave Trade, is a story about the expedition that two interracial adults take across the country and overseas. Thomas Norman Dewolf, a white man from Oregon, is a descendent of a large slave-trading family. He was once a public official, who is now retired, and he speaks widely about the social prejudices across society. On the other side of the spectrum, Sharon Leslie Morgan, an African American women from Chicago, is a descendent from slaves on both sides of her family. She is the founder of Our Black Ancestry, a nationally recognized innovator in multicultural marketing, and a founder of the National Black Public Relations Society. Together, these two cross paths and go on an adventure across twenty-seven states and Trinidad and Tobago, over one hundred thousand miles, between 2008 and 2011. Their journey leads them to ancestral towns, courthouses, plantations, cemeteries, antebellum mansions, and historic sites. Throughout the story, the author use the past-present-future tensions to discuss cultural conflicts in the story including ancestry, trauma, and adaptation.

Baldwin, however, describes his father as being a very black-like “African tribal chieftain” (64) who was proud of his heritage despite the chains it locked upon him. He is shown to be one with good intentions, but one who never achieved the positive outcome intended. His ultimate downfall was his paranoia such that “the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him” (66). Baldwin relates the story of a white teacher with good intentions and his father’s objection to her involvement in their lives because of his lack of trust for any white woman. His father’s paranoia even extended to Baldwin’s white high school friends. These friends, although they could be kind, “would do anything to keep a Negro down” (68), and they believed that the “best thing to do was to have as little to do with them as possible” (68). Thus, Baldwin leaves the reader with the image of his father as an unreasonable man who struggled to blockade white America from his life and the lives of his children to the greatest extent of his power. Baldwin then turns his story to focus on his own experience in the world his father loathed and on his realization that he was very much like his father.

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.

Race has always been a touchy topic within the United States because of its societal implications. Race has never failed to stir up arguments which have turned into riots and violent protests. Race has always been at the center of politics, entertainment, and schooling with a majority of the US population taking polarized stances. Much of this debate on race stems from the large history that race has had within the United States. It has provoked thought as well as violence ever since the first Americans stepped onto the New World.

Stereotypes play a tremendous role in society. These popular, fixed, and oversimplified ideas concerning different demographics can affect the way particular groups are viewed and how they might act. This is because stereotypes often lead to circumstances that a person must face due to their social identity. In James Baldwin's short-story "Sonny's Blues," the character Sonny reflects Claude M. Steele’s concept of " identity contingencies" found in a chapter from "Whistling Vivaldi" through his academic, economic, and social statuses. Regardless of Sonny's difficulties, he strives to refute the stereotype a black man living in the United States of America during the 1950's typically has and the contingencies that accompany it.

In The Racial Contract, it is argued that contemporary structures of white domination in the United States operate by means of an epistemology of ignorance for white people. White people inadvertently suffer from cognitive dysfunctions such that they cannot understand the racially (and racistly) structured world in which they live and, indeed, helped create. For Mills, while no person of any race is self-transparent, becoming a white person entails a particularly extreme form of self-opacity regarding issues of race that corresponds with a conspicuously bad or offensive misunderstanding of the world. Recently with the invasion of Iraq, the president has proven that white people believe that they are correct when that in any given conflict

"The legacy of past racism directed at blacks in the United States is more like a bacillus that we have failed to destroy, a live germ that not only continues to make some of us ill but retains the capacity to generate new strains of a disease for which we have no certain cure." - Stanford Historian George Frederickson.

James Baldwin, an African American author born in Harlem, was raised by his violent step-father, David. His father was a lay preacher who hated whites and felt that all whites would be judged as they deserve by a vengeful God. Usually, the father's anger was directed toward his son through violence. Baldwin's history, in part, aids him in his insight of racism within the family. He understands that racists are not born, but rather racist attitudes and behaviors are learned in the early stages of childhood. Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man is a perfect example of his capability to analyze the growth of a innocent child to a racist.

Through articles, books, and the media, history, and memory about the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima are shown to viewers. One of many portrayals of the event that tragically happened to Japan is through the work of Black Rain. In the movie, there were many aspects that showcased history and memory. As defined in Hiroshima in History and Memory, “History is ‘an intellectual and secular production’ that subjects the past to critical scrutiny, whereas memory […] ‘installs remembrance with the sacred.’” In simpler definition, history is objective, whereas memory is subjective, selective, and present-minded through people. In some way, history is related to memory because people remember to share what they lived through

Throughout history, black culture has heightened the authenticity of struggles. Sometimes good and sometimes bad and every story is different based upon the people involved and the setting. A person becomes who they are when they recognize passion, work ethic and growing forth from anything past tense but in most black history, black people are shaped around this stereotype that they all grew up in the projects, father isn’t in their lives, have many children by different women or with men, take a lot of drugs/sell them, in jail for numerous years, the list honestly goes on and on, and more ideas on who a black person is and what they're about are made up everyday. But are these perceptions of black people reality or are they perceived to be reality based off of one person and that's what we want to believe? Because we don't want a black person in more power of a white person under their own control so we have to toy with their character and make them be considered lesser than, just in a less obvious way. The stories that show a great sense of struggle are “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin and “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain. The most potent factors inhibiting an individual from controlling his fate is society, other people, education, fears and the simple fact that destiny is out of one's controI. In the story “Sonny’s Blues” we see that the struggles Sonny faces enables him to dive deeper into an escape for himself, whether it's a good or bad escape-his intentions are to