Multicultural Literature Essay- Eleithia
| Elethia | Final Paper | | | 8/6/2012 |
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Author, Alice Walker’s, Elethia, is a story of young Elethia who struggles to overcome a legacy of passivity, marginalization, inferiority, and misrepresentation of the Negro. To define her own identity she must break free and simultaneously hold on to the central figure that causes her to doubt her identity. Uncle Albert is a symbol of racism and the blindness that oftentimes presents itself within the Negro culture.
There is a quote given by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “there are many Negros who will never fight for freedom, but will gladly accept it when it comes!” Dr. King’s remarks are favored by me in the fight against racism and I understand it to mean this. That while segregation, impartiality, brutality and blatant disrespect are present, there will always be a certain percentage of people, belonging to an oppressed culture, who will idly sit by and accept the countless improprieties set before them while others continuously fight to break down the walls of bigotry. In the town in which Elethia made her home, Uncle Albert had been a fixture in the window of the Old Uncle Albert’s restaurant for good length of time. So long that some of the old-timers, who had known Uncle Albert before his murder, were victims of fading memories, “perhaps both memory and eyesight were wrong (Brown p.307).” As a humanist, I am annoyed that the story is absent, perhaps accidentally or possibly on purpose, that not one member of the African American community protested or took any actions to give Uncle Albert’s likeness a release. I understand fear. The fear of retribution and death at the hands of white supremacists, however years, an entire generation in fact, had passed and Uncle Albert’s remains still stood smiling in the white-only eatery. Since slavery religious instruction was aimed "to inculcate meekness and docility (Aptheker 122)." What about after the doors of the church were
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Author, Alice Walker’s, Elethia, is a story of young Elethia who struggles to overcome a legacy of passivity, marginalization, inferiority, and misrepresentation of the Negro. To define her own identity she must break free and simultaneously hold on to the central figure that causes her to doubt her identity. Uncle Albert is a symbol of racism and the blindness that oftentimes presents itself within the Negro culture.
There is a quote given by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “there are many Negros who will never fight for freedom, but will gladly accept it when it comes!” Dr. King’s remarks are favored by me in the fight against racism and I understand it to mean this. That while segregation, impartiality, brutality and blatant disrespect are present, there will always be a certain percentage of people, belonging to an oppressed culture, who will idly sit by and accept the countless improprieties set before them while others continuously fight to break down the walls of bigotry. In the town in which Elethia made her home, Uncle Albert had been a fixture in the window of the Old Uncle Albert’s restaurant for good length of time. So long that some of the old-timers, who had known Uncle Albert before his murder, were victims of fading memories, “perhaps both memory and eyesight were wrong (Brown p.307).” As a humanist, I am annoyed that the story is absent, perhaps accidentally or possibly on purpose, that not one member of the African American community protested or took any actions to give Uncle Albert’s likeness a release. I understand fear. The fear of retribution and death at the hands of white supremacists, however years, an entire generation in fact, had passed and Uncle Albert’s remains still stood smiling in the white-only eatery. Since slavery religious instruction was aimed "to inculcate meekness and docility (Aptheker 122)." What about after the doors of the church were