Black Like Me Analysis

When he becomes black, John travels down south to places such as New Orleans, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama. John believes these are all places where discrimination in the black community is the worst and that’s why he chooses to go there. What happens is that John changes the color of his skin and tries to experience his life as a black person. He explores the black communities and learns how they live. John goes through hardships and receives a lot of insults from white people.

Du Bois lives in a world in which a color line divides all life into two parts. One part is enjoying a lot of special treatment, money, and other advantages in life and white, and it uses for selfish reasons other part that is held back and black. Du Bois explains that although Mr. Washington was very famous and important and successful man, his personality was not always very pleasant. Mr. Washington was responsible for developing an industrial education, giving in to demands to calm everyone down of the South, Du Bois respectfully speak of Mr. Washington's problems and mistakes of his career and how although he supported the people of color, he also at one time went against them. While DuBoise agrees that Washington was a leader in the African American community, he points out that Washington had both good and bad qualities about him.

’’ In this part Tom Robinsons admits his sorrow for a white woman, which was in that time a theme unspeakable of. Here the purpose of the author was to show Tom as just a human being feeling for another one while being harshly treated for his honesty and goodness. Through the rest of the trial he does his best, however the chance he will be found innocent is so small only because of his skin-color as he

If it weren't for these prejudice thoughts, many people would be together united as one fighting to better one another. As Brent states in “Black Men and Public Space,” “the hatred he feels for blacks makes itself known to him through a variety of avenues - one being his discomfort with that ‘special brand of paranoid touchiness’ to which he says blacks are prone.” (514). Due to this fear of one another, it has brought much tension among many. This discrimination has been going on for many years and is what makes the United States divided.

But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream” (Coates 33). He believes that it is not necessarily all intentional, just whites being stuck in the mindset of how they think America needs to operate, which unfortunately does not always take black rights into consideration. By launching into anecdotes about his own discovery of the brutally honest Malcolm X, the readers are able to better understand where his ideas of human selfishness exacerbate the issue of

Throughout time, people have had to go through hardships, or face adversity. How they handle that adversity is a great measure of their character. Some people give up and lose when faced with a little bit of difficulty. Others, however, use the adversity to motivate them to become a better person who uplifts others under a common cause. In the “Underground Railroad”, by Colson Whitehead, Elijah Lander is a person who stands strong in the face of adversity, motivating others to push through it with him to become stronger.

Wright portrays characters such as Olin and Pease as evil people, but also—and more chillingly—as bit players in a vast drama of hatred, fear, and oppression. An autobiography, Black Boy represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Throughout the work, we see Richard observe the deleterious effects of racism not only as it affects relations between whites and blacks, but also relations among blacks themselves. Wright entitles his work Black Boy primarily for the emphasis on the word “black”: this is a story of childhood, but at every moment we are acutely aware of the color of Wright’s skin. In America, he is not merely growing up; he is growing up black.

He perceives African-Americans as not even human beings. Instead, he views them the same way “other men [view] Newfoundland dogs”, suggesting they possess inferior animal or beastly qualities (73). He is blinded by his own racist beliefs, meaning he cannot conceptualize an African-American as anything other than a passive and inferior servant to others. Therefore, he would never dream that Babo and the other slaves aboard the ship possessed the intelligence and skills to commit the act they did. Throughout the story, Babo never leaves Captain Cereno’s side, and Captain Delano admires their relationship that appears to him more like a loyal companionship.

The patterns of trust and subsequent betrayal found in the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, serve to teach lessons about what it was like for African Americans in post-slavery America, when the book is set. The Invisible Man trusts easily and naively. Yet, despite working hard, he is betrayed by the institutions and people he looks up to as role models as they exploit his expectations for their own agenda. Overall, there are four strong examples of those taking advantage and hurting the Invisible Man. With each incident, he learns a lesson about how blatantly the black population is disregarded, along with being given an object that represents the underlying racism found in a society.

When defending a black man in court, Atticus says, “You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women-black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men” (273). This public defense of minorities is not a seldom action for Atticus. He takes his community members and even his own family mistreating him for defending a black man on nearly a daily basis, but still does it. Due to the fact he is a modern hero, all modern heroes should exhibit this.

Black Like Me is a very interesting book that describes the hatred John Howard Griffin received as he poses as a black man traveling on racial segregated busses. I feel that this book is very shocking because it entails the truth of the way blacks were treated.

He did nothing to evoke the anger of the white population. Although he was later criticized by a white man about his lack of pursuance for more equality for the African American population, he was still looked at as someone that was considered important during the post civil war

These sentiments often lead to violence against blacks, even in the most quaintest of towns throughout the South. Nativist sentiment helped to further this

feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.” The problem he described has countless layers and to attempt to dissect them would be a thesis onto itself. However Dubois, later in the chapter, describes his toil as he headed out beyond the protected hills of the Berkshires. He “sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back”(page 10).

Countless individuals who pursue racial equality “consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior” (Kristof, 1). Those who declare they support racial equality wholeheartedly occasionally do not uphold their beliefs, deeming them hypocrites. In a realistic situation, an ‘enlightened’ person may judge a tall, black man sporting a biker jacket, baggy jeans, a gold chain necklace, and tattoos scaling up his arms, labeling him as a “thug” or “gangster”. Since these ‘enlightened’ people are absent-mindedly being racist, others are doing precisely the same thing, which continues the use of racism.