In Catharine Sedgwick’s novel, Hope Leslie, Magawisca is one of the Main female characters and she runs into many hardships in the book. Magawisca is the daughter of well known Indian chief Mononotto but is separated from her father and her tribe when they are all attacked. After Magawisca and her brother’s mother dies the children get sent to work at the home of the Fletchers an English family. Magawisca gets caught in the middle of two cultures when she is raised by an English family but knows of her original culture, Magawisca responds well and helps the reader understand how big the cultural gap is in the 1600s.…
In the 2004 film Crash, writer and director Paul Haggis presents a complex story that intertwines characters of differentiating races, ethnicities, cultures, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds. It explores the controversial topics of stereotypical racial clashes and cultural diversity in the American society. The plot takes the viewer on a 36 hour, voyeuristic journey into the lives of whites, blacks, Latinos, Koreans, Iranians, cops, and criminals, both upper and lower class. Haggis showcases characters that cross paths revealing the various complexities of the prejudices and racisms that are ingrained in interrelationships.…
It is established that there are conflicting perspectives between past and present, with people of the present having a greater understanding of the implications of apartheid. However, some are still ignorant - shown when a woman tries to give a Springbok Jersey to a young African child. Another lady informs her “If he wears it, he will get beaten up. For them, Springbok still represents apartheid.” Within this scene, the director uses positioning to held audience understand tensions, and close ups to show the confusion on the woman’s face and the shock of the boy. This small scene is representative of how some white Africans are trying to reach out, but still do not understand the existing implications of…
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Claudia Rankine discusses the deadly axis of both fear of and refusal to see black Americans in her book Citizen. When this phenomenon is examined through the lens of "Black Trauma Remixed for you Clicks" by Neila Orr, we see how ancient, systemtic and violent these crosshairs are. Being forced to not only forgive your traumas but laugh at them as they soar in pop culture relevance is a constant and scarring experience. While Orr discusses how the black emotion is controlled, Rankine discusses how black people deal with such…
Lynching in the West aims to educate the reader by emphasizing the importance of recognizing the violent injustices that took California by storm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These ignorant vigilante crimes risk being erased from the modern conscience if they are not documented and discussed in depth with candor.…
With the closing of the “post-racial” America of the Obama years and the inauguration of the Trump presidency the untreated wounds of American society have attained new levels of visibility. The “dog-whistle” racism which forms the base of the New Jim Crow is rapidly crumbling, exposing a virulent white supremacy no longer able to legitimize itself behind the fiction of racial “colorblindness.” In such periods of social unrest the power of racial representation is critical. Beyond providing a snapshot of the prevailing attitudes and morality of the artistic culture, in their most subversive form such representations challenge dominant sectors of society to interrogate the myths they have constructed to oppress despised populations.…
Elizabeth St. Philp created a message upon racism not only within our society, however, focused within the fashion industry through the documentary of Colour of Beauty. Her dedication towards empowering coloured women through media exemplifies what hall means when states how racism can be extended through the media in which forms an inferential type of racism. Hall describes inferential racism to be “naturalised representations of events and situations relating to race, where “factual” or “fictional,” which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions (Hall, 20). Thus, within the Colour of Beauty, inferential racism is being demonstrated because in the fashion industry coloured models are underrepresented in ways that have become largely invisible to society. All in all, we could argue that the media plays an influential role within our society and culture. In the perspective of race within the fashion industry, Marshal McLuhan’s statement of the “medium is the message” comes to…
It is easy to infer that there are inevitable differences in culture between a European woman in her seventies and a fifteen-year-old African girl living in apartheid-ruled South Africa. In the introduction of the book, editor and expert in the field of South African studies Shula Marks articulates that the cultural differences between Lily and Dr. Palmer make for a difficult understanding of correspondence…
Since apartheid and racism were eminent during this time period, it paved the way for many literary works to be written about it. For instance, Marrow of Tradition, a historical novel by Charles Chesnutt was written on the climb of white primacy and the “race riots” that took place in North Carolina. Many poems and…
In Sedaris’s remembering my Childhood on the Continent of Africa, and the Rachel Dolezal wikipedia page, both essays share a common lack of self identity in ones culture, resulting in a need to falsely synthesize an experience they never physicsally could. Sedaris’s essay establishes his arguement by providing anecdotal evidences of his partner, Hugh’s, unorthodox childhood experiences as a diplomat in Congo, to his dull suburban North Carolina upbringing. Through the use of the emotional appeal pathos and the juxtapositon of both childhoods, Sedaris allows the reader to envision the craving of a unconventional lifestyle he never got to encounter. The effectiveness of Sedaris’s comparison is noted by his humourous ironic tone, by providing…
The book is based on interviews, observations at arts events, and photographs of art displayed in homes to challenge common assumptions about elite cultural participation. Banks claim the purpose of the book is to describe how middle-class Blacks constructed Black identities through Black visual art. She addresses the gap in literature about the arts. Banks analyzes how Blacks see themselves depicted in art, “…visual art is a powerful vehicle through which upper-middle-class…
On the last two chapters Dagmawi Woubshet writes about two paintings that break the silence surrounding HIV/AIDS enforcing AIDS awareness. First Woubshet writes about Keith Haring, an American artist and HIV/AIDS activist and his vision of the history of racism. Haring’s painting of Michael Stewart, a young black graffiti artist killed by the police for writing graffiti in the subway in New York represents a protest towards the history of racism lived by black a black American artist. Woubshet mentions “Haring’s painting often incorporate AIDS into a vision of history perennially under siege, replete with catastrophes, a tragic sense of history he shares with African American artists” (85). The painting is a protest blaming Stewart’s tragic death to racism, but he also blames Stewart’s death and AIDS deaths to the…
When reading the novel readers saw how people nowadays have changed, and no longer use people’s race to judge their behaviour. Readers also saw how the criminal justice system has changed and left racism in the past. We also saw, in recent news articles how groups of people are becoming more integrated with one another, and how the government reacts to racist comments towards other ethnic groups. The issue of racism has become much smaller over the past few years, but still an issue where people need to work together to stop it from…
Teja Arboleda, an assistant professor at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Massachusetts teaches race and ethnic courses. He plans to use entertainment to teach about race and cultural diversity. A clear example of this is his case study “Race Is A Four Letter Word”, in which he discusses racial stereotypes that he has experienced in his travels around the world. To prove his point Mr. Arboleda talks about his personal experiences as well as those of his family. In order to persuade his audience he connects with the emotions of the readers through the use of racial slurs that he has experienced personally.…