Courage to grow
Power or Weakness
Racism and segregation have been and always will be alive in some forms in the United Sates and around the world. Racism and segregation are terrible by themselves, but seeing how people deal with them can make matters worse. Some of the best examples of the ways people dealt with these issues were shown in the poems “I, Too” and “White Lies”. In the poem “I, Too” by Langston Hughes, Hughes describes an African American’s willingness and courage to fight, when experiencing racism and segregation. But in the poem “White Lies” by Natasha Trethewey, Trethewey represents the lengths to which an African American would go in order to avoid standing up for herself or her race. In “I, Too”, the narrator describes the situation of a black servant being sent into the kitchen as white visitors come to the household. The reader must decide whether the servant is sent to the kitchen because he is black or because he is a servant, when they read the lines, “They send me to eat in the kitchen/When company comes”(Lines 3-4). It was still a common practice back in the 40’s and 50’s to have African Americans in wealthy white households act as servants, even though the nation was 75 years removed from the abolition of slavery. How the servant deals with this type of separation from whites is what Hughes portrays as the overall message of the poem. The narrator says “Tomorrow/ I'll be at the table/When company comes”(8-10), which shows the hope for equality held by the servant. But not everyone has the same approach to the matter as the servant does. The narrator in “White Lies” explains the story of a girl who was born as a mixed race child. In the poem Trethewey explains the lengths the girl will go to in order to fit in with the other whites and not have to go through the scrutiny of being labeled as an African American. Trethewey says, “I could easily tell the white folks/ that we lived uptown”(7-8). This was easy for others to believe because of
Racism and segregation have been and always will be alive in some forms in the United Sates and around the world. Racism and segregation are terrible by themselves, but seeing how people deal with them can make matters worse. Some of the best examples of the ways people dealt with these issues were shown in the poems “I, Too” and “White Lies”. In the poem “I, Too” by Langston Hughes, Hughes describes an African American’s willingness and courage to fight, when experiencing racism and segregation. But in the poem “White Lies” by Natasha Trethewey, Trethewey represents the lengths to which an African American would go in order to avoid standing up for herself or her race. In “I, Too”, the narrator describes the situation of a black servant being sent into the kitchen as white visitors come to the household. The reader must decide whether the servant is sent to the kitchen because he is black or because he is a servant, when they read the lines, “They send me to eat in the kitchen/When company comes”(Lines 3-4). It was still a common practice back in the 40’s and 50’s to have African Americans in wealthy white households act as servants, even though the nation was 75 years removed from the abolition of slavery. How the servant deals with this type of separation from whites is what Hughes portrays as the overall message of the poem. The narrator says “Tomorrow/ I'll be at the table/When company comes”(8-10), which shows the hope for equality held by the servant. But not everyone has the same approach to the matter as the servant does. The narrator in “White Lies” explains the story of a girl who was born as a mixed race child. In the poem Trethewey explains the lengths the girl will go to in order to fit in with the other whites and not have to go through the scrutiny of being labeled as an African American. Trethewey says, “I could easily tell the white folks/ that we lived uptown”(7-8). This was easy for others to believe because of