Waiting to Exhale

I feel like her aim was for every single person in the audience and she wanted them to know what African-American women go through on daily basis. She wanted everyone to feel the pain and why the violence against African-American women go unnoticed in the media politics and many more. This documentary is the advocacy of

Perception is the process of seeing the world through your own eyes by utilizing your own personal experiences to guide your judgement of what other people are. (Steven A. Beebe, 2011, 2008,2005) In this movie, these concepts are incorporated, whether it be between mother and daughter, employer and employee, or a completely opposite set of best friends. These six women provide acceptance and support to one another throughout their experiences and tragedies. Despite their differences in age, values and beliefs, they form a close family with unbreakable bonds. Regardless of the circumstances, life goes on, as long as we have a family and friends, and a strong communication system, we can push through anything.

Whether a story is written short or long, in a novel, or in a movie, it always has a main theme that attracts the reader. The theme helps connect all the plots together to come to a final resolution. Being lonely, isolated and unwanted are the feelings that most affect people. Loneliness is about feeling disconnected from the rest of the world. Being isolated have a negative impact on society, but it will also have a negative impact on the person being isolated. The two short stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “Ms. Brill” by Katherine Mansfield focuses on the way two women experience loneliness, isolation, and social expectation in their society. Social expectations may hold back women from achieving their fullest potential because they are obligated to stand by a series of rules that may be counter-productive to them. Throughout these two stories, the readers are able to see a lot of similarities between the stories just that they are presented in different ways.

Part II: Core Themes in Black Feminist Thought tackles five themes: 1) a legacy of struggle, 2) treatment of the interlocking nature of race, class, and gender, 3)

Gates highlights that For colored girls is a film that makes a strong message of empowerment to the humanity of women. No matter how bad things could get in life and no matter how many times you’ve been brought down, always know you are strong enough to get back up and not let darkness conquer your life. This essay will explore how a person can overcome any kind of tragedy, hardship or struggle whether or not they are affected emotionally,

In the story, these women came from a life-threatening experience. Most of them lost people. Some children lost their parents, some women lost their husbands. Lee expresses these women’s feelings after having probably the worst experience of their lives (“The women went down on their knees on the deck and prayed,

One interesting fact that I have noticed deals with the movie When a Man Loves a Woman, the meetings the heroine of the movie is saddened by the fact that she is no longer the same person, she was while she was drinking. She is no longer as much fun, or no longed as interesting as she once was. Many of the people at the "real meeting" expressed the same concern, that the fun life is no longer fun, and they are not the same people as they once were.

When the ladies talk about their own life’s they never once assume that they are all thinking or going through the same problems, their ingroup. But when thinking about this “big, black boy” they think he must be a threat to the teenage daughter. Even though through further getting to know him we find out that he would never let anything happen to his new family let alone do anything, the only 98% he got in school was protectiveness on the aptitude test.

Morgan states that her community has came to a point in their history where black on black love is in serious danger. Even when it has survived physical dangers such as slavery, lynching, segregation, poverty and racism. It is now in danger because black men are made to believe that the enemy is their own people. White power structure made them believe that their sisters are not worthy of love and respect they should be getting. She claims that black women are hurt when they hear their brothers calling them “bitches and hoes”. However, the real crime isn’t the name calling but its the failure for their brothers to love them and t to commit to being their brothers in the way that they commit themselves to being their sisters. She says that one thing they have to realize is that if a man doesn’t truly love himself then they are incapable of loving them in the healthy way that they need to be loved. She concludes that if black men who only see what they should be referring to as sister as bitches and hoes then it tells them that they refer to themselves as

But Monique was not even aware of that when she was invited to the U.S to visit she thought that she had to ride on the plane and hold on the entire time, she was not aware that you could actually sit inside and have a comfortable ride. But let’s not forget to mention that Monique’s salary was not even fully hers until the end. Her hard-earned money was partially kept by the Clerk and then the rest was kept by her Fathers-in-Law. She was left with little to nothing to take care of her and her family. It is also shown that the men have the upper hand in the story because the men dictate everything the women do they tell them where they are and are not allowed to go. They even get to eat first and have the best food that was made. Then men even got to kept the children just in case the mother and father got divorced. The list can go on and on with how unequal the genders are to each other. But to the women here it is everyday life and they thought that is how women are treated everywhere else.

“How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” also exposes the way the main character thinks of girls. He is only worried about how he can make himself come off to the girl in a false pretense that will impress her. The way he hides his real identity when he hides his cheap cheese and pictures shows he is not looking for the girl to like him of accept him, just looking for a physical reward in impressing the girl. If he was looking for the girl to like him, or a relationship beyond the physical level, he would want her to like him and accept him for who he is and how he lives. He also shows that he is not secure in himself when he says “Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa” he feels like being white would make him better and the girl would like him more.

What I also found to be quite interesting and perhaps a weakness of the film, was the sense of performative racism that four of the main white characters utilize and how the makers of the film appeal to such a phenomenon through symbolisms as well. In the movie, there seems to be two main kinds of racism the characters exhibit, one of them being blatant racism and another being subtle racism through microaggressions. For example, Katherine experiences blatantly racist and misogynistic behavior from her coworkers, especially from Paul Stafford, the lead engineer (making groupthink much easier) and Ruth, the only other woman working in the office. On the other hand, Al Harrison and John Glenn appeal to the subtler sides of racism and performative white pity, Glenn going out of his way to shake the hands of the computers as the film attempted to paint a positive, “not-all-whites” picture of inclusion, acceptance and tolerance, a kind of racism that almost all of the white people in the film come to, by its end. Examples of this can be seen in scenes like the one in which Al Harrison smashes down the “coloreds” and “whites” restroom signs as if implying that doing so will abolish all racial inequalities with a couple of blows of blunt force. One could infer it seems, that paired with the groundbreaking stories of these three women, white people being decent human

The purpose of this critique is to analyze the various aspects of a modern family through the film, “This is Where I Leave You”. Different components of marriage, families, and relationships will be explored to better understand the central theme of the movie.

in many regards a query. The question in Four Women is who are black women beyond these archetypes? Who am I? Each woman in “Four Women” asks after describing themselves physically. What do they call me? Nina Simone seeks to examine black women’s participation in embracing these definitions as truths. Do black women only exist within these four spheres and if so where does

As the drawing nears its end, a new desperation seems to enter the scene (Jackson, 251). The women of the community begin crying out “Who is it? Who has it? Is it the Dunbars? Is it