The Fury Race

For example, Tucker, one of the old men in the story, tells how a white mob beat his brother after he defeated them in a contest between his mules and their tractor. Then tucker asked them “How can flesh and blood and nigger win against white man and machine?”(96) They beat him brutally with stalks of sugar cane. Another example of white supremacy in the novel was when they put Gabel’s mentally ill son in an electric chair all because he was accused of raping. He was not but sixteen years old, half out of his mind, but still they put him in the electric chair on the word of a poor white girl.

She assigns the novel’s protagonist and narrator’s, the Ex-Colored Man, formal education experience with the narrative of knowing. In a school setting, the Ex-Colored Man learns that he is not a white children, but instead is of some African American descent. Hinrichsen argues that when this incident occurs, “plantation-era modes of distinction and classification” are used when the narrator is referred to as “a nigger” (179). According to the article, the narrators urges to “know” led him to pursue formal education and thus to experience that moment within the text (Hinrichsen 176). However, this argument fails to address that the author was only a child when this moment occurred.

In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the narrator, James Weldon Johnson, makes the decision to live life disguised as a white man after seeing and experiencing the troubles that hound the African-Americans after the abolition of slavery. In Lalita Tademy’s Cane River, a slave family struggles to survive through their enslavement and the aftermaths of the Emancipation Proclamation. Throughout both of these stories, white people are disrespectful to the black people despite them deserving respect. Occasionally, this disrespect festers and turns into unjustified hatred. Through the gloom of death in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Cane River, one can see how prejudice is devastating to everything that stands in its path.

In the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin he wants to experience what African America people have to encounter on a daily basis. Griffin explains, “If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make?” (Griffin 1960, 1). Here Griffin explains that if a white man were to become a color person many whites wouldn’t believe in his beliefs of his experiment because he wouldn’t go through the same thing that the colored people go through. With the experiment that Griffin goes through he not only convinces people that the Southern legislators don’t have that “wonderfully harmonious relationship” (Griffin 1960, 1).

He says that his father’s way of handling African Americans was a way of the past and that people didn't do that anymore. This gives the views of the generation, and how they often viewed racism towards African Americans. All these views from white citizens give the reader a second side to see and a way to understand how people felt about the racial tensions of that time and what contributed to

After the narrator tells his mom that the white boys at school started calling him a “nigger”, his mom tells him, “you are as good as anybody; if anyone calls you a nigger, don’t notice them” (Johnson 799). She says this to him because now that he is considered “Black” she doesn’t want him to think any less of himself as a person. It is only

Clemens was historically significant since, his writings were occasionally controversial, but at the same time they convey to the reader a vivid image of what went on during the Gilded Age. There has been a debate over whether his works should be taught in schools because of their racial slurs even though they are an important works of classic American literature. Often people forget, or do not consider because of personal prejudices, how most of the diction Clemens utilizes is simply how people talked in the Gilded Age. Even though in today’s culture people may not use the word nigger anymore, unfortunately people in the Gilded Age used the racial slur in everyday life; considering, during the Gilded Age and before, the word did not have the same connotation as it does to Americans now. Samuel Clemens also hid some social commentary within his works which proved to work in his favor, since he was able to create a vivid depiction of many of the major issues during the Gilded Age, particularly slavery.

The use of the N word has brought many situations upon readers when coming across it, Rawls describes the idea that there was reasoning behind Twain’s writing. Peter Salwen says, “The great black novelist Ralph Ellison noted how Twain

Wright had stepped to the side to allow the people to walk past him when his friend, Griggs, “reached for [his] arm and jerked [him] violently, sending [him] stumbling three of four feet across the pavement.” His friend was trying to teach him how to “properly” get out of white peoples ways because when white people are around Richard “acts…as if [he] didn’t know that they were white.” Wright, being a very rebellious child, seemed to stem his rebellion into a tone that whites took as a sign of utter disrespect. This, though, only seemed to be a part of southern ways, as Wright later explains how, in Chicago, some female workers at a small café would rub up against him as they were walking by. If something like this were to happen in the South, even if it was the white woman’s fault, Wright could have been sentenced to death simply because of the color of his

“’Why were n****** and whites made? What crime did the uncreated first n***** commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him… How hard the n****** fate seems this morning!’” (Twain 51). Analysis of

Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal” is a short story exemplifying how an African American slave descendant fits in a white man’s world post slavery, a continued fight against racism, and their yearning for equality. This story centers on a teenaged African American protagonist, as he faces his deepest uncertainties when he realizes his success in life may be hopeless shortly after hearing his grandfather’s startling final words. Although a year is not mentioned, this story is published in the late 1940s. Ellison takes us on a journey depicting African American’s oppression post slavery era with the main character through the use of figurative language, tone, and symbolism/allegory. A review of these three literary tools will reveal the main character’s

In the autobiography “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, Richard learns that racism is prevalent not only in his Southern community, and he now becomes “unsure of the entire world” when he realizes he “had been unwittingly an agent for pro-Ku Klux Klan literature” by delivering a Klan newspaper. He is now aware of the fact that even though “Negroes were fleeing by the thousands” to Chicago and the rest of the North, life there was no better and African Americans were not treated as equals to whites. This incident is meaningful both in the context of his own life story and in the context of broader African American culture as well. At the most basic level, it reveals Richard’s naïveté in his belief that racism could never flourish in the North. When

In a society clinging to the cushion of political correctness, to be faced with a novel so offensive, so brash, so seemingly racist in the classroom was initially jarring. At first, I was opposed to the concept of having to read the word “nigger” and discuss it as if it was just any antiquated term; it seemed impossible. However, through my reading of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, I began to understand the value of my discomfort. A tenant of Jesuit education, personal growth is necessary for one to grow into an intellectual, whole human being. For one to grow, they must step outside their comfort zone and become uncomfortable.

Amara Crook Harmon—L202 Major Paper 3 Clever Title Countee Cullen’s “Incident” explores the concept of unprovoked and unwarranted racism through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy. In his short yet powerful poem, Cullen uses a single incident in which a young boy “riding through old Baltimore” (1) is singled out and called the N-word by another very small child, despite having done or said nothing to offend the boy. Although this incident is clearly hurtful, why is this incident in particular so important?

The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).