Social Issues In A Raisin In The Sun

The play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry debuted on Broadway in 1959, and the movie was made in 2008. “A Raisin in the Sun” is about the Younger family, the fifth generation of lower-class African-Americans living in Chicago’s Southside. They are faced with problems such as racial discrimination, poverty, and conflicting dreams. As the family decides on how to spend the insurance check of $10,000 from Walter’s father’s death, these problems cause many conflicts to rise. Reading the 1959 play and the 2008 movie, I have realized certain similarities and differences in how the story plays out.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry was published in the year 1959, a time of discrimination, racism, and segregation for Blacks. Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun to portray the difficulty of being an African American in the 1950’s. Lorraine Hansberry particularly chosed to write a private play to bring the audience into an intimate experience with the family and their drama so that we can understand how it was to be black and that the play was a form of activim/.

In the text “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry, the author uses the writing strategy of conflict to develop the central idea of how oneself can become selfish when trying to achieve the American dream. The text shows that the central idea is selfishness because circumstances are presented where various characters fail to take into consideration others while seeking their dreams. For example, Walters says, “ Who the hell told you you had to be a doctor? If you so crazy ’bout messing round with sick people, then go be a nurse like other women-or just get married and be quiet…. ’’. This example of greed shows that the ambition to obtain a dream brings out the selfishness is true in the instance of Walter. It shows this because Walter diminishes his sisters Beneatha’s dream of becoming a doctor by making a misogynist comment in which insinuates on her settling on being a nurse due to a doctor clearly being an often male dominant profession. Furthermore, Walter is deluded by greed on opening a liquor store which causes him to have no regard for the feelings or desires of others. Clearly, the central idea of the text is that in trying to achieve a dream it can bring out a person selfish tendency because people tend to disparage others dreams in order to attain theirs.

The play, “ A Raisin in the Sun” authored by Lourraine Hasenberry holds a very unique title that refers to Langston Hughes’s poem “A Dream Deferred.” Langston’s poem is about dreams and what happens to those dreams are not fulfilled. Hassenberry wrote her play about a poor African American family by the name of the Yongers. Mrs. Younger, Walter Lee, and Beneatha all have there own individual dreams. , But are consistently being differed.

The world stereotypes rich people as rude, stuck up and selfish. Ever wonder why? Studies from Yale, The New York Times, TED and more have concluded, money changes everything. Whether it’s attitude, morals or values, money can affect and change all aspects of someone’s life. The play, A Raisin in the Sun, has a theme showing this claim clearly. The author, Lorraine Hansberry, puts in different characters to help display these themes and the correlation between money and how it affects people.

In Allan Johnson’s Privilege, Power, and Difference, Patricia Hill Collins describes the Matrix of Domination as an intersectionality between all the isms, especially racism and sexism. Collins describes this cycle of domination saying “that each form of privilege is part of a much larger system of privilege” (Johnson, 52). Work for change needs to focus on the idea of privilege in all forms and the way in which it enables people to think in relation to inequality and power. The only way to understand the matrix, is by understanding its dimensions. The different dimensions include one form of privilege reinforcing another, one form of privilege affecting the access to others and subordinate groups that are pitted against one another to draw attention away from the system

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is a play which contains many different obstacles that the characters face. One character, Beneatha, faces an obstacle that is out of her control. This obstacle is gender inequality. Throughout A Raisin in the Sun, gender inequality is experienced by Beneatha and reflects the struggles women faced in the 1950s.

Through the use of the historical lens, looking specifically at the economic struggles, the struggle of unequal opportunity, and the housing covenant that African-American’s faced in the 1950’s, Hansberry’s message of A Raisin in the Sun is revealed: the perseverance of an ethnic minority in a time of racial discrimination. A Raisin in the Sun is set in a time of great racial discrimination, the 1950’s in the united States. This featured racism towards those of color or non-caucasians, and the struggles commonly faced by the African-American family is shown through the eyes of the Younger family through the writing and experiences of Lorraine Hansberry.

In A Raisin in the Sun, a play written by Lorraine Hansberry, the audience was able to obtain a sense of the struggle for the American dream. We are introduced to the Youngerś a black family living in the Southside of Chicago around the 1950’s. Each member of this family has their own meaning to what is the American dream. A Raisin in the Sun teaches us that even though life might be full of conflicts, it is important to not give up on our dreams.

Identity is who someone is as a person. People have different views of what identity is and what can be done to find it. Identity can be your actions and thoughts. It’s what makes someone unique and different from anyone else. The Bible has its own view of identity as well. Also, identity is one of the main themes in “A Raisin in the Sun.” Personal identity is what tells one human being apart from another.

A Raisin in the Sun was an innovative play for its era. Lorraine Hansberry produces in the Younger household one of the first authentic portrayals of a black household on an American stage, in an era where primarily black spectators just didn’t exist. African-American characters, typically minor and comedic, mostly hired racial stereotypes before this play. Lorraine Hansberry, nevertheless, displays a whole black household in an authentic view, one that is unbecoming and anything but comedic. She makes use of black dialect all through the play and raises significant concerns and struggles, for instance poverty, bigotry and racism.

Throughout the 1950s, people of color have struggled with achieving their dreams due to the lack of equality that is portrayed in that specific time era. It has been a constant battle for equality for all races and genders over the course of time. In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin In the Sun the character Beneatha struggles with her racial inequality, education, and gender stereotyping. These specific struggles are the blocks she deals with trying to achieve her dream.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun presents the rise of feminism in America in the 1960s. Beneatha Younger, Lena Younger (Mama) and Ruth Younger are the three primary characters displaying evidences of feminism in the play. Moreover, Hansberry creates male characters who demonstrate oppressive attitudes towards women yet enhance the feministic ideology in the play. A Raisin in the Sun is feminist because, with the feminist notions displayed in the play, women can fulfil their individual dreams that are not in sync with traditional conventions of that time.

In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, the characters of Mama, Walter ,and Beneatha are faced with hardships associated with their dreams being destroyed by discriminatory housing,racial inequality and lack of support from her family towards her education. In the play all the characters have some kind of dream. Mama wants to get a house for the family, Walter wants to have money to provide for his family and plans to do that with a liquor store, and Beneatha wants to become a doctor. Beneatha is going to school and at the same time she’s trying to discover herself,but her family is not supportive of this. Mama did unfortunately lose her husband, and the family is receiving a life insurance check for $10,000.

In the play Raisin in the Sun written by Lorraine Hansberry takes place on the southside of Chicago where Walter and his family are racially profiled and show us how the survive throughout their struggles. The central struggles for the younger family in their search for the American dream is mostly poverty and being racially profiled against for their actions.