Group 1 Final Review

Throughout the novels we have read this semester, many of the characters struggled to form an identity within a continuously oppressive environment. Racism has a way of limiting one’s identity due to it’s powerful constraints. For centuries the shackles placed both literally and figuratively on african americans continuously pounded them to the ground. As the constant scapegoats in our society, african americans have had to create an identity despite being surrounded by hostility. Because of the continuous animosity forced on them by whites, African Americans not only found a way to beat this antagonism but also created an identity through the shared suffering they endeavoured. These works of literature were crafted by extremely intelligent individuals who see this mass hardship in it’s totality. These novels both represent the beautiful shift in mentality we as a nation have gone through while also demonstrating the realities of the work we have ahead of us as a nation. Through these texts the raw actuality of racism is depicted through the restraints society has placed on the growth of  African American identity.

In A Raisin in the Sun readers are given a glimpse into African American family life demonstrating in depth the constraints placed on African Americans during the 1950s through the struggle each character faces in finding an identity. The characters Mama, Walter, and Beneatha grapple with the paradoxical world they are immersed in. On one hand as african americans in the 1950s they have much more autonomy than ever before. However, as african americans they still are very much limited by the invisible shackles of white supremacy.

As the wisest character in the play, Mama is the core of the family and represents the older generation. Mama’s wisdom and knowledge is all based on the past, therefore the world her children are immersed in is astounding to her.Mama demonstrates her insightful thoughts when she says to Beneatha, “There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing” (Hansberry, 145). Mama not only is addressing Beneatha but is also addressing the predominantly white crowd at the time. Mama is a product of the extremely oppressive past she struggled through. Through this pain and suffering Mama learned to value love and family above all else, forming a concrete identity through the morals she learned to hang on to.

Incredibly different from Mama, her daughter Beneatha is driven young college student who strives to become a doctor. Beneatha decides to not conform to societal ideals and to connect back to her African roots. Beneatha both strongly embraces her freedom by becoming a doctor while also cherishing the culture she whole heartedly identifies with. Beneatha’s possible love interest, George, attacks her new found love for her African heritage when saying, “Let’s face it, baby, your heritage is nothing but a bunch of raggedy-assed spirituals and some grass huts” (Hansberry 81). Beneatha is able to come to terms with her identity by rejecting George’s ideas and finding herself through her determinedness to become “something” while also embracing the rich culture she is a part of.

Lastly, Walter is considered in light terms the “man” of the house. In the beginning of the play Walter strives to find dignity and respect through an accumulation of wealth. However, after Mama buys him a house in a white neighborhood and the “Welcome Committee” wants to buy the house back from them because they do not want black people in their neighborhood, Walter comes to terms with the true meaning of being a “man.”  Walter turns down their offer saying, “We have decided to move into our house because my father… he earned it for us brick by brick...we don’t want your money” (Hansberry 148). Walter comes to understand that wealth is not a means of finding dignity or identity but rather a distraction from the true meaning of freedom. Walter comes to terms with his identity through the new found dignity he demands for his family, as the “man” of the household.

In Beloved by Toni Morrison, although in an unrealistic fashion, Morrison is able to explore some of the more brutal realities of slavery and life after. It seems throughout the novel as if the characters are finding themselves through each other. Paul D begins to find his manhood as he becomes the patriarchal figure in the household. Sethe grows attached to Beloved because she feels as if Beloved has somehow taken the place of the daughter that she had to kill to protect. Denver finds her identity through the other characters because she is able to pick up the slack when Sethe becomes less functional due to Beloved’s presence.

These characters are able to find their identities through each other because they spent so much time at Sweet Home together as a family-like unit. Paul D is able to become the man that he envisioned Halle as being by coming back to be by Sethe’s side at the end. Early on in the novel Paul D doesn’t feel as if he has much self worth, and also has a predisposition to remain unattached to those who care about him. He finds his identity by learning to be the man of the family and take care of Sethe and Denver. Sethe, in some ways, loses her identity at the hands of Beloved. As Beloved grows, Sethe begins to grow frail and weak. I think that this is a metaphor for how Sethe feels about killing her child in the first place because it shows that the more guilt and resentment that builds up inside, the more she loses herself.  Denver shows the most growth out of all the characters because she is able to get a job and rally the community in order to expel Beloved from their household. The characters of Beloved  were trapped in an institution that strips them of their identities. This novel depicts how even in unnatural circumstances, freed slaves were able to find their identities in each other and get on with their lives.

In How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon describes the distinct struggle of growing up black in America. From the beginning, he describes that he “would be disciplined more harshly than white boys for even slightly leaning toward the wrong side” (15), emphasizing life’s difficulties for those who are born the wrong color skin into a society of institutionalized racism and culturally ingrained prejudices. As opposed to the other novels which took place in different time periods, Laymon displays through a variety of stories that blackness is not seen as valid even in our current world. When Laymon is called a racial slur by drunk fraternity brothers, he writes in a heartbreaking fashion that “I think and feel a lot but mostly I feel that I can’t do anything to make the boys feel like they’ve made us feel right there” (39). His mother reminds him time and time again that he was “born on parole” (43) and that any misstep could be deadly. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America reminds us that no matter how far we have come in race relations, we still have an incredibly difficult uphill battle toward equality in our society.

The various novels all display the distinct ways in which blackness is constrained and degraded in American culture, from the post-slavery time period of Beloved to the painful, present-day struggles of Kiese Laymon. Black Americans are forced to fight twice as hard to earn the rights that are meant to be guaranteed to all Americans. The limits of identity for Black folk cause issues that affect their everyday lives, and the institutionalized racism they experience as a result of hundreds of years of systemic oppression, creates the confines of their world.

In Plum Bun by Toni Morrison the main character Angela, a light skinned women from philadelphia, is able to live two separate lives because of her skin tone. While with her mother, she’s able to live as if she was white and witnesses how blacks are viewed in white society. As a result, when she is home and at church she begins to view African Americans as lesser than white people. Angela also begins to struggle with the disappointment of missing out on opportunities in her career path after revealing that she is colored. This leads to her to abandoning her family and essentially her colored identity in order to further her success.

After years of passing as white Angela finds herself unsatisfied with the life she chose. Although passing as white gave her an advantage over her black counterparts, she still faced challenges because she was a women. After realizing that she couldn’t relate to the white community she attempted to join, Angela starts to miss her family and her black culture that she abandoned.  Although Angela has proved her worth to society when she passed as a white woman, she must choose whether to return to her black culture or further career, because of the racial restraints placed on African Americans.

Final Group Review Group 2

Katherine Hancock, Christal Scott, Kayla Chavis, Jonathan Clarke, Malik Thompson

Final Group Review

May 2, 2016

History 105.05

            From slavery to reconstruction, to the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights period, and from then until today, the identity of the African descendant has changed drastically over time. This change has been produced by the ill treatment of the community as a whole, and living in a society where the Negro is considered a second-class citizen. Through oppression, however, black identity will find ways to break through, because it always has.

The black identity in America begins with the history of slavery. The slave was identified as property by the slaveholders; therefore, slaves were stripped of an identity completely. Legislation and court had molded a false identity for black slaves. Cases like the State of Missouri v. Celia and George v. State established that there would be no protection of black female slaves against rape. This had caused the black woman to be identified with lasciviousness.

Black people would also be falsely identified with being criminals thanks to the Fugitive Slaves Laws. These had pronounced the slave as living property; therefore, if a slave ran away they were a criminal for life. The dehumanization and diversity of the slave would also influence the identity of early black lives in America. With the Three-Fifths Compromise, the government had degraded the black slave to three-fifths of a human, stealing their humanity from them. The experience in slavery had impacted each slave and former slave’s identity differently. “Owners dictated where and how the slaves lived, how they worked and played, and with whom they associated. Slaves learned this fact early in their lives, and their owners never let them forget it.”[1] Each character from Toni Morrison’s Beloved experienced something different during slavery that had stunted the formation of their identity. Their identities had been tainted with the false perception that slavery had labeled them. Slaveholders had used their authority as justification for the torment and suffering that has unfortunately defined early black life in America.

            The next major time period for African Americans was the Reconstruction period, which was after the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, spanning from about 1866 to 1877. African Americans were no longer legal property; however, white society continued to treat them as second class humans because of the Black Codes, which were laws that limited black peoples’ agencies and opportunities (such as economic and job-wise). Though black people were able to gain a new identity other than that of property, it was still hard to feel like completely free individuals because the class of Southern white elites reconstructed society to place African Americans underneath them.

Community identity shifted as early as Emancipation Day, when ex-slaves gathered to celebrate the formal end of their legalized bondage. However, the irony of such celebrations and memorials shows how the community still felt the oppression of a constrictive white society. As said in Envisioning Emapncipation, “Images of Emancipation Day celebrations and ‘slave reunions’ stand out, both for the ways in which they directly engage the history of slavery and freedom and for the ways they veil or obscure elements of that history.”[2] The freedom that black people celebrated was paradoxical because they were still very constrained by white society. Additionally, white society was made out to be the benevolent figure in the freedom of slaves, not the force that failed to recognize the basic human right of all people. That is shown by a picture in Envisioning Emancipation where a black child is photographed before and after emancipation. Before and after Proclamation pictures of an African American boy show him “obligingly performing the appropriate responses for the intended Southern audience.”[3] These sources show that the identity of black people was still manipulated by the oppression of whites, although they were no longer property. However, this freedom was the first step for black people to find an identity outside of white control.

In 1917, the United States entered what would become known as World War 1. Thousands of African American men volunteered to defend and die for a country that viewed them as second-class citizens. During the war, European immigration virtually ceased and northern industries needed unskilled labor for their factories. The American south after reconstruction was a terrible place for African Americans. Between Jim Crow laws and the rise of the KKK, the south was a violent and dangerous place for blacks.

After Reconstruction, a rebirth in black culture sparked the Harlem Renaissance. When blacks arrived in the city, they were not welcomed with open arms. They were corralled into ghettos, most notably Harlem in New York, and surrounded by white people who though blacks were there to take their jobs. They reacted negatively and sometimes violently. In order to combat the negative stereotypes presented in the media, African Americans came together and created their own institutions, music, art, literature, and theatre. This cultural movement would later be called the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance created a racial pride within the African American community that had never been seen before. Pride in the community fomented thanks to black cultural icons such as Louis Armstrong, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Josephine Baker. African American children had black role models to look up to. This is something they had really not had before. A term often used in conversation about the Harlem Renaissance is the New Negro. The New Negro had left the southern life for the northern, the rural life to urban, and the uneducated life for the educated. The racial pride created in this movement was the catalyst for the civil rights movement.

Identity shifts within the Civil Rights era began to reach an all-time high. Those that were away serving the country came back in the mindset that things would be different for the African American community. Stereotypes continued to be the main ammo for the white community in order to maintain their segregated traditions. From the enslavement era, stereotypes went from being broad assumptions of the black community being inferior to more specific accusations of the New Negro that asserted his or her autonomy such as lazy, uneducated, and unmotivated. To white society, African Americans had quickly gone from hard working, sturdy, and strong pieces of property to a populace that did not work for what they wanted. As we continue through this era, we also begin to see this stereotype shift of the African American community within the realm of housing. The black community began to have new tags on themselves, by being identified as a people that tend to cause trouble and who wanted to threaten what white society had already claimed.

Racial discrimination began to increase within the housing market rapidly. Not only did it place a new way to view African Americans, but it also shifted the identity of white America as well in retrospect of violence. It seemed that the more the African American population gained some form of autonomy, the more violent the white community grew. African American identity shifted even more when it came to education and equality in the social dynamics, because the face for the fight for equality became very youthful. College students began protesting and forming sit ins to speak up for themselves and the rest of their people, giving off an image that they will no longer tolerate this negative identity that they have been given since the beginning of time. The youth were setting a new identity of empowerment and fight within the African American community then and now.

Tracing through African American history and the progression through slavery, segregation and several other forms of institutional nation wide racism gives a comprehensive bird’s eye view. What this view lacks is the Black experience through the trauma, and the genuine psychological and mental impact that this system has on the people. Those aspects are largely overlooked as parts of this systemic oppressive system that we confront on a daily basis. The willful ignorance to the magnitude of this pain is perpetuated by people of all races because understanding our history is a painful and exhausting process. Honest conversations about the past are evidently difficult to manage, yet when writers such as Kiese Laymon and Toni Morrison can create a brutal and honest imagery there leaves choice but to confront the discomfort. Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America was intended to break the stereotypical literary trends in order to draw attention to the aspects of modern day racism from a perspective that is less well understood. “I wanted to explore the benefits and burdens of being born a black boy in America without the predictable literary rigidity.”[4] Throughout his book one of the essential points is that racism is a part of daily life and that has to be accepted as an African American, the next step is how to deal with it. Today we understand that we have made much progress from times that Morrison has written about because we do not walk around with the physical scars of slavery on our backs. However the weight of slavery is still a very real burden today, which proves that there is more uphill battle before equality is achieved.

The African American identity has always been a very difficult term to define because of it’s internal duality and also the many conflicting views and opinions on the matter. We can understand how the term and the people have progressed through the different forms of struggle and oppression placed on the group. Yet the difficulty of accepting the harsh realities of the past is an essential step, of many more to be made, in order to achieve equality for a group of people who have never had any form of firmly established liberty in this country.

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[1] Berlin, Ira, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation (New York: New, 1998), 3.

[2] [2] Willis, Deborah, and Barbara Krauthamer. Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. (Temple University Press, 2012), 130.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Laymon, Kiese. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays. (Chicago, 2013) 11-13