In an article in the New York Times, Racism on Campus: Stories from New York Times Readers, Maya Bird-Murphy told her story. Bird-Murphy was one of two black students in a class of more than 20 people at Ball State University. The class was studying William Grant Still, one of the first black composers, when the Caucasian professor asked Bird-Murphy to read one of his poems written in the ‘20s. Bird-Murphy read the poem aloud in her usual voice and the professor said, “No. Do it again. You know how it’s supposed to sound. I can’t read it because that’s not my…
It is not uncommon to sometimes hear or see what here in America is considered to be a strange or different name and decide to make fun of it or the holder of that name. This is a major obstacle that an Iranian immigrant named Firoozeh Dumas, author of “The ‘F-Word’” had to face. She illustrates a picture using words about the hardships that her name has brought upon her during her entire life. Throughout the story, she uses humor to describe what would have been a rather negative situation, and in the end she decides to embrace the name she has and not let any remarks about it bother her.…
"Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?" Martin Luther King Jr.'s son asked his father this because as a young boy he realized that people were treated differently. Using his son as an example for his speech to people will really get the public's' hearts to break and feel horrible for what this young boy realized at the age of five. “The answer lies…
Staples used another example where it strengthened an impacted his writing. While he was working as a journalist in Chicago a huge mistake was made. He was “…rushing late into the office of a magazine…with a dead line story in hand, [he] was mistaken for a burglar. The office manager called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued [him] through the labyrinthine halls, nearly to [his] editor’s door” (Staples 106). He had no form of identification and continued to walk with the security guards without putting up a fight to truly claim his post there as a journalist. This case made a point where the audience can sympathize with this sort of discrimination.…
[ 16 ]. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West, The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (New York: Free Press, 2000), page 12.…
Terminology, language, and how we categorize people socially decides who has humanity, who has a story, and who doesn’t. Butler and Kelley in their interactions with Mallory, even the simple act of learning his name begin to gain empathy and even interest in his story. In today’s society with categories and identity constantly shifting how individuals identify themselves versus how society identifies individuals becomes just as important as the difference between Slave and…
Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born in 1960 in a small town in West Virginia. He was a professor of humanities and chair of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard University. Through observation and experience from Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lawrence Otis Graham, U.S. Supreme Court handed down decisions declaring racial segregation unconstitutional in public schools. Gates and Graham both felt discrimination against African Americans were the norm in many communities, including those outside the South. Henry Louis like Graham, when younger, both felt discrimination was only alive through certain blacks or hate of the opposites due to…
This can be seen in the essay, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” which is an autobiography about the writer’s childhood (Ahzaldúa). The author identifies as Chicano, which is a mixture of all the “Spanishes” from regular Spanish to Southern Texas Spanish. The way that the author speaks in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” determines her identity similarly to how the Goldberg family’s crude and unique way of communicating with one another determines their identity. From the fighting, to the use of swear words in everyday communication, communicating, to Murray calling his children “morons” the Goldbergs are showing their…
When Martin Luther King was around 6 years old he had a good friend who was white. He was told by his parents to not play with him anymore, this was one of Martin Luther King’s first encounters of racism. Another encounter of racism for Martin Luther King was when he was coming home on a bus from Dublin, Georgia, with his teacher, after he had won an oratory contest. Then he was disrespectful asked by the driver to move seats so a white person could sit there. He had to stand all the way back to Atlanta. He said, ‘That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my…
| “Sometimes, I fell discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”…
Even though Meher Ahmad and Thomas Chatterton Williams both address the discrimination issue, William provides a more convincing argument due to his own experience and feeling to the woman’s remark, the situation that made them to be noticed by the older white woman standing nearby and, his conclusion about mixed-raced.…
Discuss the subjects in which you excel or have excelled. To what factors do you attribute your success…
Lipstiz, George. (1998) The Possessive Investment in Whitness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.…
As the famous Michael Scott, who tries to solve problems, but eventually ends up making them ten times worse as they were to begin with, undergoes a Chris rock routine and has an African American male coincidently named Mr. Black come and try to teach about diversity. This doesn’t work out of course, because Michael thinks he knows more about it thaen Mr. Black, so Michael decides to take it upon himself. To try and show everyone about diversity, he does this activity where he gets a bunch of blank index cards and writes different races and ethnicities on each one. These include; Asian, Bblack, Italian, Jamaican, Jewish, and of course for himself, Martin Luther King, juniorJr. Although this exercise was to “better” everyone getting along and to teach them about diversity, it turns out to make it much worse as tempers begin to burst. As you watch this episode, you can see the point in which Michael Scott is trying to get across, racism. By doing this exercise, where each of the employees picks a name tag and sticks it to their tag, it created a lot of controversy. For instance, when Dwight was trying to figure out which race he could possibly be, he went up to Pam and had her start telling him facts, in which she didn’t believe. She started off by saying with facts based on totally untrue things; you might possibly be a bad driver. Now Dwight immediate came to the conclusion and yelled out, “I’m a woman!” Now, this portrays those facts he probably has heard about led him into the conclusion that should make him a woman. However, his tag was not a woman;, it was Asian. Yet again, this is a point the finger type of an analogy.…
I watched a video named “The Power of Privilege at YouTube”, the speaker is Tiffany Jana. She said she is a black woman but her appearance doesn’t look like it because her family history. She mentioned she doesn’t notice Martin Luther King Jr. in the center of her family picture but only her grandfather.…