He starts by showing the society how honest and pure hearted a black man can be in order to let the white community understand, accept and tolerate the black people. The central person in the whole theme of racism is Othello and the community thinks it is the worst disgrace for Desmodena to marry a black man. The novel turns out to be a tragedy because despite Shakespeare efforts to portray black people as being kind, Othello gets overwhelmed by his jealous and exposes his evil side. Racism has proven to be like a resistant infection that keeps recurring in all generation: efforts have been put to end racism in the modern society but to no avail because it has deep roots back in
On the other hand, Wole Soyinka uses alliteration to show how the lady reacted when she found out the man was black/African “Clinical, Crushing.” These two words were used to portray the coldness in the lady’s tone when she found out the man was African. One of the other ways Maya Angelou makes her poem stand out is when she makes parts of her poem like questions “Does my sassiness upset you? Do you want to see me broken? Does my haughtiness offend you? Does my sexiness offend you?” By questioning the readers (you), it catches the reader’s attention and the reason why this is so affective is because it makes the readers realize how some people made the person (I) feel or how many people might be feeling.
Angelou also expresses this powerful and courageous tone in the very first stanza. The author illustrates, “you may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies, you may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I 'll rise” (Angelou). This quote shows how bitter and prejudice whites treated blacks in this time period, but Angelou was unhindered and determined to go down swinging. Angelou rhymes “lies” and “rise” in this stanza which is effective in explaining her experience living through segregation and abuse, because it shows there was no sincerity between the two races and through that she still brought herself up to be better. The placement of this stanza was strategically brilliant.
This enabled him to realize following the ideologies of the white contained major limitation. For instance, his grandfather suffered humiliation as well as slavery, which proved vulnerable to racial prejudice. The dramatic speech which conveyed by the narrator was perceived by the white as a joke since they were not prepared to accept the ideas of the upstanding black citizens. In reality, the embarrassment the narrator received motivated him to emphasize on industrial education which is the key to overcome racism as well as discrimination towards the black community. The men’s reaction towards Ralph Ellison’s slip of the tongue by saying “social equality” for “social responsibility underlines clearly the point he was conveying.
In “On The Subway,” Sharon Olds depicts an affluent white narrator’s initial description of the blatant differences between her and a poor black boy seated on the opposite side of the subway car. The narrator’s external observation then shifts into an introspection of the subtle similarities shared between the two individuals despite their socioeconomic differences. Through juxtapositioning the physical differences between the narrator and the boy, allusions and comparisons of the boy to slavery, Olds asserts that white individuals achieve false superiority through their racist act of discrimination and oppression of the not-so-different African Americans. Old’s repeated allusions to slavery and racism demonstrates that even in modern day,
Ellison uses Invisible man to highlight the racism and Prejudice within society; despite the narrator’s lack of reliability, these themes are still conveyed effectively. Not only does our narrator detail the differences between black and white people, but also northern and southern people so that even the southern white man could read this book and relate to the feeling. All of his delusions, and outbursts add to the societal situation that Ellison wanted depicted in his work. The subtle racism that threatens to be brushed aside is deafening as I.M. rages on about Tobbit defending himself by being “...married to a fine, intelligent Negro girl” (468).
The society will not accept that she seduced a black man, her feeling of guilt motivated her to remove him out of her way "I got something to say and then I ain 't gonna say no more. That nigger yonder took advantage of me and if you fine fancy gentlemen don 't want do nothing about it then you 're all yellow stinking cowards, stinking cowards, and the lot of you. Your fancy airs don 't come to nothing and Miss Mayellering don 't come to nothing, Mr. Finch”. ( Lee 167). This is another kind of racism between man and woman, she does not have the right to dream, to love, to learn, there is always someone that thinks for her and tells her what she should and should not do.
She criticizes both racist opinions of colored people and colored people’s beliefs that they are predestined to be looked down upon. She defies the stereotypical image of black people, not in Germany but, everywhere by calling for the betterment of the self, a call first made by Washington and later adopted by Hughes in his poetry and prose. Unlike many black poets who wanted to pass from Black into White such as Countee Cullen, she like Hughes, is proud of her blackness and defends it using the language of the racist. However, in “afro-german II” she criticized German history: “German history isn’t something one/ Can really be proud of, is it. / And you’not that black anyway, you know” (Ayim, Blues in Black and White 16-17).
This shows how the grandmother looks down upon the black race which ultimately makes her arrogant of her own race. In doing so, the grandmother ends up getting killed because of her attitude towards those who she feels are inferior to her. Emily and the grandmother both show qualities of racism that both authors criticize them for encouraging, even though it is the norm at the time and place that these short stories take
While the plot evolves, enmity is demonstrated between Mama and Lois, and it is overcome at the end. Firstly, the enmity is fuelled and justified by Mama. Mama often expresses her contempt for Lois to Pa Ben, Len and Lois herself. She rips a wedding photo of Len and Lois in half tossing the half with Lois on the floor, she tells Len that marrying Lois was a grave mistake and she addresses Lois with derogatory terms such as ‘Tar Baby’ and ‘Black Sambo’. Mama’s hatred of Lois stems from her belief that nothing black can be good, as well as a degree of self loathing as she herself is black and feels inferior.She believes that Lois,who is a dark-skinned woman, will impede her son’s success and is firmly rooted in the belief that Lois seduced Len using ‘obeah’ or black magic.