Summary Of Segregation In Sula

Research that eluded to a multitude of classes within the African-American community is similar to the political discourse of Toni Morrison, in that although segregation was terrible there was a particular measure of power for all communities living under the domination of segregation. While Morrison investigates the ways in which the African-American community blossomed under the oppressive weight of segregation, Adelman shows the reader how desegregation led towards the formation of a greater America. Specifically, the author cites researcher Laudry, who found “that from 1960 to 1970, the proportion of middle-class [African American’s] doubled, based on occupation, increasing from about one black worker to eight white workers to one in four”
The process of gentrification could be observed by some to be remarkably constructive, while as Morrison's depiction in Sula, a cold tyrannical machine that slaughters all culture. Within the closing chapter, Nel is walking the streets of the Bottom and begins to elucidate upon the composition of the community she once was so closely associated with stating, “she hardly recognized anybody in the town anymore” (Morrison,). This scene acknowledges the deterioration of communal bonds after desegregation. Specifically, one can observe the lack of communal sanity as the side effect of constructing the New Road Road which began the arduous process of African-American fight into the Valley. This concept of African American flight is an instrumental aspect of gentrification since this shift in power is brought about by an uneven exchange of culture. Specifically, while a few elite gained all the wealth within segregation, the White people of the Valley seduced the wealthy individuals of the Bottom to abandon their cultural heritage and proliferate White values as “everybody who had money during the war moved as close as they could to the valley and the white people were dying down river, cross river, stretching Medallion like two strings on the banks” (Morrison,). With such a stark conclusion, the reader is left with a reversed structure of the two halves of the land. While the land above the Valley was “given” to the newly freed community as a “joke,” in an attempt to restrict the prosperity of African-American culture, but as the White people perceived the Bottom growing exponentially, the Valley turned their hatred into gentrification and claimed the Bottom in the name of equality. As Morrison depicts within this novel, the White people of the Valley utilizes desegregation not