(Unfortunately) visible man

White Boy Shuffle  is probably my favorite of the books that we've read this year so far (not that I didn't like the others but this is the book that we've read so far where I've been tempted to read ahead. Maybe that's also because the readings are slightly shorter). I think one of the reasons that this book is so striking to all of us is how different it feels compared to the other books that we have read so far this year. It talks about similar topics as the others but (so far) it's not a sad book, at least not on the surface. The beginning of White Boy Shuffle is really, really funny in a way that even the other books we've read this year that contain satire never achieved. But this humor doesn't seem to have come at any kind of price with the messages the book sends. Beatty still somehow manages to work stereotypes and other racial issues into the novel and he does it so seamlessly that it would be easy to miss some of them. The way the humor is u

When I first started writing this post I wanted to write about how confusing Beloved is as a character for the other characters in the book but also the readers. (As she just randomly appears and just assimilated with the family.) However, after today's reading, I'm even more confused than ever. I thought she was just going to be a kind of weird person in the family but she not only has a weird obsession with Sethe, but she also has some habits that I just don't know how to react to. First of all, just as a person, she just (to me at least) seems really manipulative. She has Denver completely under her thumb and it seems like Sethe listens to her pretty much all the time no matter what she says or does. But also she just seems to use people without thinking about them at all. She uses Denver to learn about Sethe even though it hurts Denver and she uses her as a kind of substitute when Sethe isn't around. She also uses Paul D for her affair thing (which also seems to rea

In the poem "Thoughts in a Zoo" by Countee Cullen, Cullen talks about how much animals suffer in their enclosures in zoos. However, I felt that, despite the title and most of the content of the poem, Cullen is talking about experiences of people and particularly African-Americans. The imagery of the zoo seems to fit very well with the racial dynamic in America (especially at the time the poem was written, but still today). It is pretty obvious that the humans visiting the zoo represent white people. They are not only in an objectively better situation but they are the ones benefitting from the situation and also allowing it to continue. However, I'd say these are probably the more passively racist people as they don't really cause the problem and don't directly cause the animals' pain. White people are also represented by the people working at the zoo and I think that the people working at the zoo represent the aggressively racist white people. They control

In my poetry reading I talked about the poem "The Wrong Street" by Cornelius Eady. In the fifth line, Eady says "the young white men at your back" while he talks about someone getting chased for being black and in the wrong neighborhood. This pretty obviously is a reference to violence committed against black people by white people (and in this case not the police). At first I connected this to Ralph Ellison's  Native Son. This was because of the scene where Bigger first goes to the neighborhood where Mr. Dalton lives. Bigger is very careful of how he looks trying to go to Mr. Dalton's house and even is careful about how he goes in the house because he is worried that other white people in the neighborhood will be suspicious and call the cops or try to do something themselves. Bigger expresses these fears once again when he is trying to deliver the ransom note to Mr. Dalton's house and he doesn't know how to approach the house. Once I finished  Inv

In "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the narrator spends a great deal of his time with 'The Brotherhood' dealing with problems of race. However, after an extremely unfair interaction with the committee and Brother Wrestrum, he is moved downtown to deal with something that the Brotherhood calls "the woman question." This appears to be a feminist branch of the brotherhood in downtown Manhattan. However almost as soon as he enters this branch, a couple of things become abundantly clear to the reader. First of all the reader probably notices that the narrator is extraordinarily unqualified to work with feminists as he seems to have minimal interactions with women, let alone actual conversations or other things that would let him understand what feminism is. The reader will probably also notice how fake of a movement this feminist branch seems to be. Very little actually happens in terms of actual organization and the most important thing that happens (at least f

As much as I usually dislike poetry, I've been finding the poems that people are choosing to read in class very powerful in a way that most poetry I've been forced to read in the past just wasn't. I felt like the poems have been more effective than the novels at expressing their protests. The poem I wanted to write about is "Walk Like Freedom" by Carolyn Rodgers. In the class discussion, people (I don't remember who sorry) brought up how carefree the white woman is in the poem and how entitled both white people are. The woman's carefreeness is shown by how she comments on the weather. As if the only thing she has to worry about is the weather. This shows her privilege as it shows that she is worrying about such small things. It also shows her privilege in that she feels entitled to better weather than there is currently. The man shows his entitlement when he says that "the train must not be late" as if the world should change for him and he is