On March 1 2017, I attended an event for the anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. This event included readings, musical performances, and a choreographed performance. The entire event completely captivated me, but I was most impacted by Andrea Jenkins reading from her part of the anthology titled “The Price We Pay: How Race and Gender Identity Converge”. In her piece, she talked a lot about gender identity, race, and how they intersect.
She talks about how people stereotype because of one's skin color. "The truth is we liked watermelon in our family. But the only times we ate it well, those were secret moments, private moments, guilty, even shameful moments, never unburdened by the thought of what might happen if our white neighbors saw us enjoying the primeval fruit. We were always on display when it came to things stereotypical. ”(Williams)
In a smaller image stands her and a small white baby that looks disturbed by a black fist (symbol of black power). This picture was created to describe the ethnic issues that had been surfacing. The portrait shows diverse media. The representation of Aunt
As a child, she recognized that her imitation of ‘White” afforded opportunities of mobility, education, acceptance and privilege. Her mother’s appearance as “Black” afforded opportunities of poverty, inferiority, and inequality. So, she fails to mention her mother’s identity and occupation to classroom peers and teacher. Sarah Jane wants cultural assimilation and white privilege.
Walker’s essay shows the dehumanization and abuse that black women have endured for years. She talks about how their creativity was stifled due to slavery. She also tells how black women were treated more like objects than human beings. They entered loveless marriages and became prostitutes because of the injustice upon them. Walker uses her mother’s garden to express freedom, not only for her but for all the black women who had been wronged.
Black women are treated less than because of their ascribed traits, their gender and race, and are often dehumanized and belittled throughout the movie. They are treated like slaves and are seen as easily disposable. There are several moments throughout the film that show the racial, gender, and class inequalities. These moments also show exploitation and opportunity hoarding. The Help also explains historical context of the inequality that occurred during that time period.
A relevant example of this point is the derogatory icons of Black Women - Jezebel, Mammy, Aunt Jemima, Matriarch, and Welfare Queens (Roberts, 8). Each of these icons is rooted in the deep mythology that applies racial politics to black women by corrupting the reproduction process at
Jorgensen’s embodiment of white womanhood made her more accessible to the public, and made it clear why it was her, specifically, that became the icon that she is. An article entitled “Constructing the ‘Good Transsexual’: Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and Heteronormativity in the Mid-Twentieth-Century Press”, by Emily Skidmore, examines how Jorgensen’s image was built up, and how it contrasts with the images given to trans people of color of the same time period, looking at Jorgensen’s experience from an intersectional perspective. The very language involved in the New York Daily News article that first exposed the country to Jorgensen already set up how she would be treated as a woman from then on. Skidmore talks about how characterizing Jorgensen as a "’blond beauty’" simultaneously aligned Jorgensen's body with an idealized femininity and asserted her desirability as a woman to an assumed male viewer” (273). Another article said Jorgensen is “not only female; she's a darn good looking female” (275), again placing her degree of passing at the top of the list.
" Journal of Black Studies 39.1 (2007): 5-21. Web. 2 Mar. 2015. The studies of this article examine the images of men and women that advertisements perpetuate. Mass media is a widely accessible resource that presents positive and negative portrayals.
Dee approaches culture by decontextualising it, while Maggie and Mama relate to it with a kind of ‘organic criticality’. The former stance is mere rhetoric and the later one is womanist. In one of her interviews, Alice Walker identifies three cycles of Black Woman she would explore in her woman’s writing: 1.
The Power Behind “Just Walk on By” In Brent Staples article “Just Walk on By”, Staples shares his thoughts on the way marginalized groups interact. He uses his own experiences as a young African American man to shed light on how people can have implied biases that affect the way they treat other people. Staples does this to demonstrate how society develops preconceived notions in the minds of individuals about marginalized groups, primarily African American men, which are often a flawed representation of the people within these groups. The rhetoric he uses is key to developing an understanding persona and an emotional appeal that exposes the implied biases of people without alienating or offending the audience, to whom-- among others-- he attributes these biases.
Grace Nichols is a Guyanese-British poet who migrated to the UK in 1977, when she was 27. Her poetry has been central in helping us understand the cultural Caribbean-British connection for over thirty years. One of these poems is The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping, which was published in 1984. During the 80s in London, there were riots over racial issues such as the ones at Brixton and Tottenham, which in part motivated Nichols to write this poem about
Redefining realness by Janet Mock is a memoir in which Janet discusses essential aspects about her life and her path to womanhood. “I felt I had endured enough. From some cavernous place, I reached inside myself and grabbed the courage to take a long trip back to a place I never thought I’d revisit” (Mock 11). A young Hawaiian girl by the name Marilyn who Mock
To be specific, she situates the imminent feminist struggle by highlighting the legacy of slavery among black people, and black women in particular. “Black women bore the terrible burden of equality in oppression” (Davis). Due to her race, her writing focuses on what she understood and ideas that are relevant to black females. Conversely, since white men used black women in domestic labor and forcefully rape these individuals. These men used this powerful weapon to remind black women of their female and vulnerability.
At another level, it is a clear narration of how internalized concepts of beauty works in the minds of blacks and they themselves become their oppressors. All through the novel we can find numerous instances where “whiteness” is the measure for beauty. This is evident in all the characters in the novel who degrade themselves for not being fair and lovely like the whites. The novel is narrated through the eyes of a ten-year old girl Claudia McTeer who witnesses white hegemony around her as well as this superiority being unquestioningly accepted by the blacks. Sexism is one