White Supremacy: An Act of Physical Violence Power by Audre Lorde is a five stanza poem depicting her emotions after hearing the news of a black ten year-old boy being shot to death by a white policeman. Lorde uses a prose poem to describe her anger and hatred towards the unjust system. Lorde is advocating awareness to the racial injustice to show society difficulties people face through race. Power uses Lorde’s work through a literal and nonliteral context to demonstrate white supremacy. In her poem, she uses a time frame between the shooting and the trial case. She uses that to her advantage to show her initial anger toward the oppressed. Each stanza details how much power a race can have and how they use it to be superior. In the first stanza, Lorde is making it a mission statement to adults. “The difference between poetry and rhetoric/is being ready to kill/ yourself/ instead of your children” (Lorde). She believes that if adults had the power to do anything, it would be protecting children. This is implied as adults needing to act as protectors to children, especially from violence. Lorde is a mother herself. She is expressing her anger to adults who do not have a desire to save children. The children become a possession of the adult with “your”. Children immediately become the adult’s responsibility and they need to be in their care. However, she speaks out against wrong actions caused by hatred. The hatred comes from racism, especially when it was strong in the
The author of “The Black Beauty Myth” Sirena Riley has encountered multiple experiences concerning body image throughout her life. At a young age, she started to feel the pressure to have a perfect body. The struggle of making herself perfect ultimately lead to eating disorders for instance, bulimia and compulsive exercising. In her journey from a young age to her college years she has learned better ways to deal with negative body image through therapy. In her article, she states “I was in three body image and eating disorder groups with other young women on my campus. I was always the only black woman.” (Riley 2002, 229) This quote supports her belief that black women have body image issues but are not open to seeking help or expressing
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.
Throughout history, African Americans have encountered an overwhelming amount of obstacles for justice and equality. You can see instances of these obstacles especially during the 1800’s where there were various forms of segregation and racism such as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan terrorism, Jim- Crow laws, voting restrictions. These negative forces asserted by societal racism were present both pre and post slavery. Although blacks were often seen as being a core foundation for the creation of society and what it is today, they never were given credit for their work although forced. This was due to the various laws and social morals that were sustained for over 100 years throughout the United States. However, what the world didn’t
In "Oppression" by Marilyn Frye, Frye discussed how a bird cage symbolizes the systematic oppression of women. Frye explains that if you look at a single wire in a bird cage you cannot understand why the bird, is unable to simply fly around the wire and be free. But, when you step back and look at the cage as a whole system of interlocking wires you realize that the bird has no chance of escaping because of all the barriers put in their way (Frye). This is exactly the same case for women. When somebody tries to see the oppression of women. they look only at one problem women face, refusing to step back and see there is no one cause for their oppression. If instead they looked at all the barriers women face at once, they would finally see that women have no way of escaping oppression without continuous efforts of every person involved in the oppression, including the woman being oppressed and the sexist men doing the oppressing.
Power had a huge part on how people were treated back in the times of slavery. In the novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, an African-American woman named Dana traveled between the 1800s and the present to help her great-grandfather throughout his life while also trying to shape him into a better person in the racist society that he was in. One of the things she noticed was how power could dictate how people lived their lives, especially since slavery was prevalent in the area her great grandfather, Rufus Weylin, lived in. Dana, Rufus, and Alice were all characters whose power affected how their lives turned out and the choices that they made.
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.
The famous Japanese proverb and image of the three wise monkeys “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” is interpreted in the Western world as a refusal to acknowledge the evil that occurs around us. In the autobiography, The Fourth of July, by Audre Lorde, she describes an event in her life in which she experienced racism. Lorde’s parents made sure their kids were sheltered from the racism going on in the world and kept them from seeing it. Audre Lorde encounters racism even though her parents tried to hide it from her, which shows how being sheltered from issues in the world can cause greater problems when they are faced.
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
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.
Audre Lorde’s poem shows the reader the prevalence of racism and inequality during the early twentieth century. The poet describes the brutal murder of Emmett Till, an African American boy, for whistling at a white woman. This directly reflects how many white people felt toward African Americans during Audre Lorde’s early life. Audre Lorde mentions the location of her poem is Jackson, Mississippi (Lorde 47). For modern readers, this is another direct way that the poet references racial inequality and the attitudes of people because it is common knowledge
White privilege is the societal privileges that specifically benefit white people. White privilege is why white people can get pulled over by the police and escape a ticket with just a smile and apology. White privilege is also why whites are in charge of a company and they see a black person, they bypass the application. Whites carry a certain privilege not available to people of color. Marilyn Frye describes how whiteness is a form social and political power.
Racism is dislike a person, or it is a fast judgment for the way that person 's looks, and without known anything about the person, indeed, the main reason behind racism is the lack of education. Racism is a true problem, existed hundred years ago in America, in fact, Americans showed hatred against other people especially immigrants. Some citizens of the United States of America believe the racism’s issue is resolved and it is over, also they think we all live in an equal rights era, while others believe the opposite, they believe the racism is still exists but in different forms and ways. In the book “The Heart of Whiteness”, published in 2005, by Robert Jensen, who was raised in a privileged community, he expressed himself as a white person, and the feeling of living in white supremacy. In all honesty, Jensen’s book is the most honest book I had ever read, it brought up the race problem genuinely, and the difference in treatment between the white people and the African-American people, also Jensen included some of his personal stories and experience. In the book “ The Heart of Whiteness”, Jensen aimed at white people, also he cited many points on how it is like to live in white supremacy, and the feeling of mixed emotions about the past, then what is the action white people should make. Me personally thinks the main three points that i experienced with my white friends are: White privilege. Second point is the guilt feeling towards the racism, and finally, the feeling of
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.
In Kindred, Octavia Butler uses characters and events to symbolize parts of larger themes of racism and white privilege in the story. Kevin is a symbol of the complicated relationship that white America has with black Americans.