ktmeng/mec huggingface dataset:
Topic: racism

Like many southern plantation owners, he saw the color of his slaves also affect the color of their souls; however, conversation between Désirée and Madame Valmondé indicates that he made time for La Blanche, a slave that we can infer through her name that she possibly mixed and is light skinned enough for Armand. The conversation points out that there is a sexual relationship between Armand and La Blanche when Désirée says the cries of the baby were loud enough that “Armand heard him the other day as far away as La Blanche’s cabin’ (Chopin 432). Désirée seems to be fine with the fact that there is a sexual relationship between Armand and La Blanche. The birth of the baby caused Armand to be in a happy mood, not allowing anything negative to penetrate his happiness. Désirée found that “Marriage, and later the birth of his son had softened Armand Aubigny’s imperious and exacting nature greatly” (Chopin 432). For instance, Désirée tells Madame Valmondé “…he hasn’t punished one of them—not one of them—since baby is born. Even Négrillon, who pretended to have burnt his leg that he might rest from work—he only laughed, and said Négrillon was a great scamp. Oh, mamma, I’m so happy; it frightens me” (Chopin 432). The birth of the baby boy is softening Armand’s personality and his cruelty towards his slaves. This change in personality that fears Désirée could only make readers assume that she believes that Armand could snap and this happiness that everyone is experiencing could be dismissed anytime soon.
Topic: racism

Originally, Armand was in awe with his newborn son, but that soon turned into hatred as the child’s skin turned darker. He refuses to believe Désirée, despite her multiple attempts to show him that she is under pure white heritage. He did not once throughout the story consider if the child’s skin was a result from him and not from Désirée because he was considered white passing. After her many attempts of changing his mind through their child, he tells her “‘It means,’ he answered lightly, ‘that the child is not white; it means that you are not white,’” (Chopin 433). When they separate, she feels as she died emotionally and not physically. After Désirée denies being of African descent, and writes to Madame Valmondé for help where she responds that she and the baby should return home to the Valmondé estate. However, her letter does not reach Désirée in time when Désirée finally understood the significance of her child’s features and being accused of being black by Armand, the guilt in her caused her to walk into the bayou, killing herself and the baby.
Topic: racism

Armand Aubigny is like other southern men where he bases worth of a human being on the mere fact of their skin color and their gender. During the 19th century, many men upheld the belief that women are subordinate to men and if their bloodline is tainted with black blood then they are less than subhuman. Armand is the master of the L’Abri plantation where he plays the roles as a strict owner who treats his slaves harshly, the narrator even comments by saying the “negroes had forgotten how to be gay’ (Chopin 432). When we read the short story we can tell that Armand also clearly rules the home and the environment is portrayed. As a husband, Armand clearly rules the home. The way he acts changes when the baby is born, but the reasons why can be questionable. Désirée observes, “Armand is the proudest father in the parish, I believe, chiefly because it is a boy, to bear his name; though he says not,—that he would have loved a girl as well. But I know it isn’t true’ (Chopin 432). This leads readers to believe that Armand placed the worth of his baby by their gender. To Armand, a male probably meant that the Aubigny name was sure to continue on. However, once Armand discovered that his child had black blood, he became cruel and makes sure that his wife and child is no longer welcomed in the L’Abri. He even goes out of his way to burn all of their items they left behind.
Topic: racism

Armand comes to harbor fear about his marriage with Désirée due to his strong believe that she is mixed, causing her to complete tarnish his family name. Armand thought “Almighty God had dealt cruelly and unjustly with him; and felt, somehow, that he was paying Him back in kind when he stabbed thus into his wife’s soul. Moreover, he no longer loved her, because of the unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name” (Chopin 433). Throughout the story Armand is blinded by his emotions, in the beginning he was blinded by his love for Désirée and later was blinded by his hatred of the black race. His emotions were so intense, it was only in the end that he realised how wrong he was about Désirée’s heritage. On the other hand, Désirée’s mother, Madame Valmondé, tells her in a return letter, ”My own Desiree: Come home to Valmondé; back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child” (Chopin 433). In the return letter we see that Madame Valmondé truly loves her daughter no matter what, even if she is of mix race or not. During the time period that the story takes place in it was not proper for women to leave their husbands. When a woman even a woman of wealth became married, all of her possessions become her husband’s property. However, her mother encourages her to leave Armand so he can obtain true happiness again in the Valmondé estate where her loving mother lives. She is an opposite force in Désirée’s life than Armand is.
Topic: racism

At the beginning of the story, Armand ordered a corbeille which is something that acts as a dowry, but is given by the groom to the bride. The contents of it wasn’t revealed until Armand has them burned. The corbeille included silk gowns, laces, embroideries, bonnets, and gloves. These items offer a stark contrast between Armand’s attitude towards Désirée in the beginning until the end of the story. His hatred is so strong that nothing is able to nudge the barrier, that is, until he reads his mother’s letter that he found while burning the items that belong to Désirée and their child. His mother wrote “But, above all… night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery” (Chopin 434). Through the letter he learns that he is actually in fact part black due to his mother’s origins that was kept secret from him all his life. If he knew the mere fact that he was part black due to his mother, he could have prevented himself to see a person’s race as being more important than their personality. His emotions overpower him, and in what seems to be a desperate attempt to save face, he breaks and destroys any trace or connection he had with Desiree. The readers can tell that his emotions overpower him the burning of the items is a way for him to destroy any connection he had with Désirée previously.
Topic: racism

In the story of “Désirée’s Baby” it covers many of the issues over race, gender, and societal views many try to uphold. However, the main problem that the story comes across is Armand’s pride overpowering his love for his wife. Armand Aubigny is somewhat a victim of society and the institution of slavery. .He held too much pride in his family’s name and how he had it all. His whole life revolved around his last name and himself. Désirée truly did love her husband Armand, who in return originally did seem to love her, but was later to be shown that his power and family name meant more for him. The ending of the story made Armand’s actions become ridiculous because he was what he was very against of. The problem in the story could have been solved and Désirée’s death could have been prevented if he only realized that family name is not what makes us who we are.
Topic: racism

Kate Chopin sets her story in pre-Civil War Louisiana, where she goes over the troubling past and the ongoing racism that many endured in the United States. By showing Armand’s racism towards his wife and child, who he originally loved dearly, she explores the deeply rooted racism that many of the elite southern whites had. Désirée’s pitiful and desperate pleas to her husband highlights another element of Chopin’s story about women’s roles and the need for more rights.
Topic: racism

In order to address the factors that affect human’s health, the World Health Organization (WHO), highlighted a few social determinants of health. The first key category of social determinant is social status. In the book written by Rebecca Skloot, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, it was mentioned that Henrietta lived with her grandfather Tommy Lacks, in a poor condition. From the book, Skloot describes the house Henrietta lived with his grandfather as “a four room log cabin that once served as slave quarters, with plank floors,…wind whipped through cracks in the walls.” The description portrays that Henrietta lived in poverty and could not afford a proper house to shelter her during the hot and cold weather. At a very young age, Henrietta had lived in an impoverished condition that affected her growth and health as a child.
Topic: racism

It is evidenced in her chart which it mentioned that she had “breathing difficulty due to recurrent throat infections and deviated septum” in her nose. We know that it is essential for humans, especially growing children and elderly people to live in a comfortable and clean environment. This is because children and elderly people are the two categories of age that could contract diseases easily. They have a relatively low immunity as compared to other age groups (Simon, Hollander, & McMichael, 2015). In Henrietta’s case, her social status is intertwined with another social determinant which is housing. As they were in a poverty-stricken condition, they did not afford to live in a comfortable house.
Topic: racism

Education plays a major role in determining one’s health. The people who are well-educated are more likely to experience better healthcare than the ones who are less educated. This statement is supported by Emily Zimmerman and Steven H. Woolf in their discussion paper entitled ‘Understanding the Relationship Between Education and Health”. It is mentioned in this paper on how our educational background can shape our cognitive and noncognitive skills. Simply said, we are able to weigh the good or bad of the decisions that we make for our health with a good education. Education can make us realize how important it is to care for our health. However, the point here is not to imply that a less educated person do not care about their health, but by being a more educated person, we can understand the real purpose of getting a certain treatment which eventually develops trust on our healthcare provider. Just like in Henrietta’s case, she did not feel the need to go for checkups but only went to Hopkins just because she had to. The education level that she had (sixth or seventh grade) made it hard for her to comprehend the unfamiliar jargon used by the doctors and that she felt like “she is in a foreign country” (Skloot, 2010). In addition, Henrietta and the people during that time, generally, do not have the knowledge in preventive measures that needed to be taken in order to take care of their health. In the book, Skloot mentioned that Henrietta thought the pain was from the sexually transmitted disease (STD) that was caused by her husband’s unsafe sexual activities. It shows that David did not have the awareness of having safe sex to prevent any STDs. His lack of comprehension in this aspect had affected Henrietta’s health and eventually affected their daughter, Elsie, with epilepsy. Henrietta’s biography is a great example in illustrating how important it is to have good education in taking care of our health.
Topic: racism

The next key category in social determinants is social support. Social support can be given in various forms such as giving material or psychological resources to someone (Cherry, 2018). Upon reading this story, I could not deny the fact how lucky Henrietta was to have the strongest social support in her life which was her family. Her cousins, especially Sadie and Margaret, were the ones who helped her to get through the radiation treatment by giving her the emotional support that she needed. It is mentioned in Chapter 5 of the book where “Sadie and Margaret spent their evenings in Henrietta’s living room” having fun together. Towards the end of Henrietta’s life, it was mentioned that Emmet Lacks, his brother and a few of his friends even donated their blood to Henrietta to repay her kindness to them (Skloot, 2010). I admire how she was able to be so positive even though she was sick. I know that people who are sick can be very vulnerable emotionally as they can get stressed or depressed easily, but this did not happen to her.
Topic: racism

Next, access to healthcare services is crucial in determining one’s health. For Henrietta, access to healthcare during her time was limited. This was due to the racial segregation law that was practiced during the Jim Crow Era. Due to the discrimination, some hospitals denied treatment to the Blacks even they were on the verge of dying. The only choice Henrietta had that time was Johns Hopkins. This hospital had separated sections for the Whites and “coloured patients”, but they still accepted them (Skloot, 2010). This lack of accessibility had caused the people who live in rural areas, which are mostly poor people (not all), to face challenges in terms money, time and transportation (Trying to understand and close the rural health care gap, 2017). Hence, due to their inability to cope with the hardships, they end up not going to the hospitals to get treatment. This not only put that individual’s life at risk, but also can affect the people around him/her if the disease is infectious.
Topic: racism

The joke here obviously cuts against the definition of “masculinity” held by the European whites. If one misses the irony, then Oroonoko seems demasculinized. But the irony sug-gests that Oroonoko is demasculinized only in relation to a European standard that measures masculinity in fluid ounces. Oroonoko is in fact the only true man left standing. In having Oroonoko represent the true standard of masculinity, Behn pokes fun at the idea of white supe-riority. Her manner of making slavery culturally intelligible thus does not require an essentialized view of race; i.
Topic: racism

If Oroonoko’s blood is royal, and yet he is a slave, then mustn’t it be race and not class that renders his status as a slave intelligible?. Not exactly. The whole point of the novel is that Oroonoko should never have been a slave, at least not in terms of the commercial order.. The commercial order would indeed account for Oroonoko’s status racially, eliding the “royal” half of the oxymoron. But from the narrative sequence of Oroonoko’s capture to the digressive adventures with tigers and the like, the novel consistently shows the “slave” part of the equation to be problematic and the “royal” part to be a good fit. Because of the natural rank commensu-rate with his blood, Oroonoko should have been treated as he himself had treated his noble bondsman, amoan, “(whom) he never put .. . amongst the Rank of Captives … without distinction, for the common Sale, or Market” (29).
Topic: racism

By placing Oroonoko “amongst the Rank of Captives without distinction,” the commercial order creates the cul-turally unintelligible “royal slave.” To picture the problem spatially, in Oroonoko’s treatment of Jamoan, we see the wholesome master-slave relation as having a hori-zontal as well as a vertical component. Jamoan is Oroonoko’s slave but he is also a “Prince” by blood and of Oroonoko’s own rank. Oroonoko’s sense of slavery takes this into account, and Jamoan becomes as much the companion and courtier as the slave. The implication is that in a heroic or landed culture deeply invested in the ideology of blood and rank, slavery cannot be culturally intelligible if it ignores that ideology. And the commercial form of slavery does just that. It forecloses the horizontal component of the master-slave relation without regard to blood quality.
Topic: racism

Trefry indeed seems to try to retain the horizontal com-ponent, as he “loe’d him (Oroonoko] as his dearest Brother, and shew’d him all the Civilities due to so great a Man” (35). But Trefry’s ineffectiveness marks an extra level of danger associated with the com-mercial order: not only does it corrupt master and slave alike, but it is hegemonic enough to disempower even the well-intentioned individ-uals who emerge within the system. Thus, the commercial order, in as-signing Oroonoko to the vertical rank of slave without regard to blood quality, fails to assign his identity in a culturally intelligible way. Oroonoko becomes the signifier of the commercial order’s failure to render slavery culturally intelligible.” And the tragic trajectory of the story follows from this failure. Oroonoko doesn’t “fit” the system; he is a kind of floating semiotic disturbance within the system, and also evi-dence that a fault line in a culture’s conceptual space can have serious material consequences.
Topic: racism

Social hierarchy, in other words, was losing some of its ideological viability. In one cultural arena, the concept of “sensibility” blossomed into a new ideological centerpiece, a new way of justifying hierarchy and inequality, wherein elites earn their role not by birch but by showing a sublime sensibility surpassing that of this under-lings. As the concept of “sensibility” grew into a form that could offer ideological support to a hierarchy that was otherwise losing its ideolog-ical viability, so the concept of “race” came to give “slavery” a new kind of ideological support Neither “race” nor “sensibility” was invented in the eighteenth century, but each of these concepts was remapped into the cultural gestalt with a new significance that ended up outlasting the immediate political needs it served.
Topic: racism

Robinson Crusoe is poised between these two poles slavery justified by a landed class paradigm, as in Behn’s Oroonoko, and slavery justified by a race paradigm. In other words, when moving from Oroonoko to Robinson Crusoe, the conceptual zone of race and the conceptual zone of class merge slightly, so that there is now a space of overlap, and what one finds in the space of overlap is the concept called slavery. This is clearest in the case of Friday, who, when he is not being called “my slave,” is alternately called “my servant” and “my savage,” slipping freely between class and race paradigms.
Topic: racism

Interestingly, Friday is also frequently called “my friend,” conjuring up an image of a horizontal and sentimental bond between equals. It is almost as if Defoe, a “tire-less proponent of colonization,”.8 recognized the problem in com-mercial slavery’s full erasure of the horizontal component of the master-slave bond, and wants to retrieve something of that missing component. But what comes through in Robinson Crusoe beneath the his veneer of friendship is the essential dysfunction of the acquisitive psyche. Crusoe has a kind of Lockean property-orientation, as any aes-thetic pleasure the island might afford is eclipsed by Crusoe’s “plea-sure … to think that this was all my own … and [over it I] had a right of possession” (113-4).19 This attitude of possessive control first bleeds over into Crusoe’s relations with domestic animals, whom he
Topic: racism

By the time Friday enters the picture, it seems almost natural that the same attitude will be carried into human relations. After all, Crusoe had already had a recurring desire for “one, nay two or three savages … so as to make them entirely slaves to me” (204). With Friday, Crusoe fixes himself in to a position of control over his “slave,” but then de-mands of the other party the reciprocal, emotional benefits of a “friend.” Luckily for Crusoe, he exists in a fictional world where such a fantasy comes true, as Friday, following Xury, takes to slavery quite naturally, and with real sentimental devotion to his master.
Topic: racism

Thus, references to “my friend” become a way of sentimentalizing slav-ery, even as slavery itself becomes a trope for what many might call the characteristic dysfunction in human relations under capitalism.. In judging the competition between class and race paradigms as ex-planations of slavery, one might first consider that Defoe, as enthusias-tic about the new commercial order as Behn was suspicious of it, repeatedly criticized the ideology of blood and birth that had in-formed the traditional class paradigm. We see him questioning that ideology as early as The True-Born Engiishman (1701): What is, to us, what Ancestors we had, If Good, what better, or what worse. if Bad,
Topic: racism

For Fame of Families is all a Cheat, Tis Pelona, Virtue only makes us great. (1205-6, 1215-6). Twenty-five years later, the same note is sounded in The Complete Eng-lig Tradesman (1725): “Nor do we find any defect either in the ge-nius or capacities of the posterity of tradesmen, arising from any remains of mechanick blood?. The very conception of Robinson Crusoewould seem to be a visionary correlative to Locke’s tabula rasa, wherein the accident of birth privi-lege is removed and we are left with a clean slate for the inscription of economic individualism.
Topic: racism

However, the attitude toward the old social hierarchies remains ambivalent. After all, the new commercial order, retrospectively, needed to critique the blood and birth ideology of the traditional class structure if it was to breach the traditional landed power base; but prospectively, it needed to lock in its own form of eco-nomic domination. Thus we see that the master-servant bond is still the medium through which relations generally become intelligible, as Crusoe dubs the dog from the wreck his “trusty servant” (82), enlists a parrot and a goat, among others, as “my domesticke (124), and main-tains a self-image in his isolation by imagining himself as “king and lord over all this country” (114).
Topic: racism

In perhaps the most remarkable pro-motion for established class hierarchies, Crusoe equates his own “orig-inal sin” with “the general plague of mankind, whence . . one half of their miseries flow; I mean that of not being satisfy’d with the station wherein God and nature has placed them” (198). The tension between ideological needs pushing for and against hi-erarchical social formations is ultimately resolved through the deploy-ment of slavery in Robinson Crusoe. In Crusoewe see how a discourse of race might be used to justify slavery where the class justification was in-secure, and also might be used to provide a general model of eco-nomic domination. The much-analyzed footprint episode might be read from this vantage point, as a lens upon the psychological and so-cial nuances of how this particular paradigm shift takes place.
Topic: racism

Crusoe begins the episode, “It happened one day about noon going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprized with the print of a man’s naked foot I stood like one thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an appari-tion …. [I fled] like one pursued … [and then heartened myself] with the belief that this was nothing but the print of one of my own feet … [yet] how often Hooked behind me … (as if] haunted with an evil con-science. (162, 166). The uncanny effect of the image might first suggest that Crusoe is reliving a primal trauma, perhaps the primal trauma of passing from imaginary to symbolic orders. But particularly interesting in this con-text is how Crusoe’s reliving of that early trauma develops coordinates on a cultural map as well as a psychological one. John Richetti sees something of this cultural map in viewing the cannibals as the natural “antitype. in “Crusoe’s drive for order and towards civilization… But folded into the more general cultural significance is a specific racial significance. As the coordinates on the psychological map mark the passage into the symbolic order, the coordinates on the cultural map mark a step-by-step formation of a concept of race.
Topic: racism

In psychoanalytic terms, those fifteen years of solitude before the footprint indicate a re-turn to the imaginary order, but in cultural is they indicate a re-turn to what Crusoe himself calls “a meer state of nature. (130). On the psychoanalytic level, the footprint shocks Crusoe into a differen-tial recognition of me versus the other; on the cultural level the differ-ence is of my type of people versus that other type of people, figured as “the savages of the mainland. (163).25 Crusoe’s first response to this racial recognition is to “[give] God thanks that had cast my first lot in a part of the world where I was distinguished from such dreadful crea-tures. (172).
Topic: racism

Indeed, the otherness of the savages leads Patrick Brant-linger to conclude that “emsoe remains just as profoundly isolated afterhe has rescued Friday as before–the isolation implied by mastery, as opposed to equality… This concept of otherness might provide a simple enough recipe for racism and slavery based on biological essentialism, but things become more complex. The incubating fea-ture of Crusoe’s concept of race is not otherness but the conflation of otherness and sameness. The racial other is not merely an other, but is an other-like-me. Hence when Crusoe moves from the image of the footprint to the image of the savages, he goes a second step in concep-tualizing race. His first response, justified by difference between those people and my people, is to kill them. His second response counters the first by recognizing the similarity between peoples.
Topic: racism

He now con-siders “hat authority or call I had, to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals. (177). If they are men-like-me, a simple biological essentialism will not work. But all-soe wants to own a savage so badly that he even dreams about it (202). The question he is left to struggle with is how to justify enslaving mem-bers of another race in the absence of a simple biological essentialism. Crusoe manages to cut through that Gordian knot by putting forth what might be called a kind of racial essentialism that works diachroni-cally rather than synchronically. The simple form of biological essentialism holds whites and blacks up in a synchronic relation and pronounces whites to have superior capacities.
Topic: racism

If we read the text through the lens of this synchronic relation, we might conclude with Lieve Spaas that mutually conflicting discourses are at work: “Defoe’s novel sustains the view of the undisputed superiority of white man . . . yet, the text reveals a hesitation and a resistance which, consciously or unconsciously, subverts some of the existing beliefs.”28 But I suggest that what we have, rather than mutually conflicting discourses, is an essentialist form of racism that is disintegrating on a synchronic axis and reconstituting itself along a diachronic axis. In synchronic terms, Crusoe, usually laconic and practical in his rhetorical style, is quite lo-quacious about the biological equality across races. He explicitly grants that God has given the natives “the same powers, the same rea-son, the same affections, the same sentiments of kindness and obliga-tion, the same passions, and resentments of wrongs, the same sense of gratitude, sincerity, fidelity, and all the capacities of doing good and receiving good, that He has given to us.
Topic: racism

Slavery for women was far more complex than slavery for men. Undoubtedly, they went through the same hardships, but the experience was very different for women. Women had to suffer daily through their hardships, but they also had to experience their children being taken or having to leave their children. Women were also used as “breeders” and were forced to have children to add more slaves for their master. Women were also denied their rights to take care of their children.
Topic: racism

In the narratives, I chose it is very clear that women were treated differently than men. For example, Mattie discussed how her father and step-fathers left the family to obtain freedom. While I understand, their thirst for freedom, this left her mother and the children alone. Her mother had to worry about obtaining freedom for herself and her kids. Also, Linda discussed how her uncle left her grandmother for freedom. The grandmother wanted to buy his freedom so he could come back, but he chose to stay.
Topic: racism

In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, Linda’s life had been a constant fight since she was six years old, and she never saw it change over the years (Jacobs 34). When she found out that she was pregnant, she couldn’t help but envision all the hardships and racism that the baby was going to face being a woman in slavery. All the emotional anguish and grief that she felt throughout her life as a slave was about to passed down to her daughter.
Topic: racism

In the novel, Linda emphasizes that the life of a slave woman is incomparable to that of a slave man, in the sense that a woman’s suffering is not only physical, but also mental and emotional (Jacobs 55). Whether or not a woman is beaten or not, she still suffers from mental torments. Unlike men, women must deal with sexual harassment from white men, and the loss of their children from death or slavery. Men claim that their masculinity are stripped from them, but women deal with their loss off dignity and morality. Females deal with the emotional hardship of losing their children and being sexually assaulted. Many women feel shame from being sexually assaulted.
Topic: racism

Family is an emotional anchor, but it is also a physical anchor. Family is a big component in Linda Jackson’s life. Linda was in a crawlspace for seven years so she could watch her children grow up. Family also helped her stay sane through her hardships. Her aunt Martha helped her stay hidden from her master and his sexual assault. Family is also an interesting dynamic for the master’s family. Slavery affects every member of every family. Linda says this because “slavery makes white fathers cruel and sensual, the sons violent and licentious, contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched” (Jacobs 55). Linda believes that Mrs. Flint is mean toward the slaves because her husband has fathered mixed children.
Topic: racism

Racism is prejudice or discrimination directed against a person or people based on their skin color or racial group. Racism is very evident in these narratives. Linda faces racism everyday through her master, master’s wife, and towns people. Linda’s grandmother faced racism when she did not receive the money that was owed to her. Her new master did not give it back because he knew that during that time period she could not say or do anything to receive the money. Mrs. Flint showed racism towards Linda a lot throughout the book. For example, Linda’s grandmother gives her boots because it is cold. Mrs. Flint cannot stand that the shoes squeaked, and she told Linda that she should throw them away. Mrs. Flint did not care that she did not have another pair, so she made Linda walk barefoot outside in the snow. Linda experiences racism when Mr. Lewis continuously beats her even though he has direct orders from the general to not beat the slaves. He beats her and sends her to the yard. Luckily, the arsenal saw her in the yard and for punishment, Mr. Lewis had to be whipped one hundred times with a cow hide and pay three thousand dollars. In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, Linda sees two children running around. One child is black, and the other child is white. She knows that one day the white child will grow up free and protected while the slave girl will only know sadness and misery.
Topic: racism

Religion helped dull the pain that the African American men and women slaves faced every day. Some slaves believed in God because they needed something to believe in, while others didn’t believe or hated God because they did not understand why he would let them suffer. In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, the whites hire a preacher to teach the sermons. The preacher teaches the slaves the importance to obedient to their master. Linda was appalled at this message and could not believe what she was hearing. Elizabeth implemented her religion daily and even enjoyed preaching to others. Many communities did not accept her because she was a woman. Instead, she began to hold prayer meetings in homes and continued this practice for many years, despite strong church opposition. Another activist like this is Sojourner Truth. After gaining her freedom Sojourner became a Christian and believed that God was urging her to abolish slavery and have equal rights for all (Washington 7). Her most famous speech was “Aint I A Woman” which pointed out the discrimination that she experienced as a black woman. Also, Sojourner was the first black woman to sue a white man in court and win the case.
Topic: racism

The jobs that these woman obtained throughout these narratives consisted of the same work life. Jacobs was a nanny, wet nurse, seamstresses, etc. The women in these narratives had easier jobs than the men, but they had two jobs in one. They had to be a mother and finish their daily tasks as a slave. For example, Jacobs grandmother could not bake her treats until she was done with all her daily duties. Also, being a mother was a scary job. Your master could sell your children at any moment and for any reason. Being a mother, you always had to put your children first. Linda could have gone up North to obtain freedom, but she decided to stay and sit in a crawl space for seven years.
Topic: racism

Reasons the main characters in Desiree’s baby and Battle Royal choose different paths to solve their problems Racism has deterred many Africans from living happily, for from the two given stories we saw that one took her own life for that and the other had to suffer all the cruelty and inequality of the whites in order to continue his academic life. In the stories, our main characters had both chosen different paths, solutions to their problem. The reasons that lead to this dissimilarity were that both of them were different people with different stands in society and also their situations were not alike.
Topic: racism

Furthermore, Desiree was adopted by a well-respected family and also she married Armand who was also from a wealthy family, which put a lot of pressure on her to be a perfect woman. So when her husband falsely accused her of being black, she was confused since it went against everything she had been in her whole life: good, kind, and pure. She was shocked to see happiness taken away from her so easily and also to see that she had became a humiliation to her husband’s and her own family. That also is why she chose death as her solution. In contrast to Desiree the narrator’s family in Battle Royal were all slaves. They were not ashamed of it.
Topic: racism

They believed in “Equal but separate. ”, they always taught their kids to be good and their good deed will be rewarded. This point was proven when white people gave the narrator a scholarship. At that point he had caught glimpses of the cruelty of the white society but still he was very grateful for that scholarship hence, it blindfolded him from the real truth. Moreover, Desiree chose death for herself because she thought she had nothing left to live for in this world, she was treated like an outcast. Of course we can argue that she had to live for her baby, but in the end she did what she did to save both of them.
Topic: racism

She was scared and she knew for sure that in this society no one would accept her baby. She did not want her child to go through what she had thus ending both of their lives was the easiest choice. However, our narrator in Battle Royal, not like Desiree, he had a choice. He could go to college be an obedient African-American like he was and everything would stay perfectly fine. He could have a life and he was not going to throw that rare opportunity away which is why his choice of path was not remotely as same as Desiree’s in the other short story. In conclusion, our characters had unraveled their problems through different ways.
Topic: racism

Desiree chose to commit suicide and our narrator in Battle Royal continued with his life though he was unsure what he should do. They chose differently because they were different person, they came from different society class at that time, and their problems were not the same. But in the end, Desiree and the African-American narrator were both victims of racism which were portrayed differently in both of our short stories but still were saying in Desiree’s case what tragic did racism brought and in our young narrator’s case that how racism can be covered with the sentence “Equal but separate. ”
Topic: racism

It has come to my attention as of recent how devastating racism is today. Despite social laws and equality rights, racism still plays a huge part in society in the United States.There are many active hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists and more. Racism is difficult to define because it has so many meanings, but it usually classifies as a belief that one race is most pure and more superior than any other race. Common races that are discriminated against in the United States are African Americans, Mexican Americans, and people of Middle Eastern descent (this includes refugees).
Topic: racism

So many races are discriminated against due to stereotypes. Many people, such as Middle Easterns, are judged based on the act of a couple of people from their race (The attack on 9/11 being one example).Immigration is also a huge problem in the racism epidemic currently in the United States. There are countless heros that have contributed greatly to the end of racial discrimination and immigration rights of all people like Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Eva Longoria.
Topic: racism

The United States accepts people from varying points in their lives and takes them in as if they are our own. Or so it seems. In reality, there is a large amount of America’s citizens that believe only the white Christian majority should be allowed to live in the United States. The main organization who believes this is called the Ku Klux Klan. Many people in this group also classify as white supremacists and black separatists. This means that they believe the white race is superior and that the white race should not mix with any other race, such as African Americans because it would taint their skin color. The KKK are very proud to be white. There are many ways that citizens protest against this group. They do marches and they also promote the hashtag black lives matter and all lives matter. However, these protests aren’t doing much to end the seemingly growing Ku Klux Klan. The KKK on average had twenty nine active groups around the United States in 2017 and they all compete for members, media attention, and the title of being the “true heir to the Klan”. Since around 2010 the group has steadily been on the rise, due to anxieties towards illegal immigration and same-sex marriage. Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, has gained a lot of support from the Ku Klux Klan because of his intention to rid America of illegal immigrants. In 1865 the Ku Klux Klan was created by six confederates from Tennessee. They wanted to protest that slavery should not have been banned. They would kill innocent victims in the dark of night with their faces hidden in an effort to fight the new civil rights law. In the 1860’s, the group was a secret organization. At the time, most of the Klan members were veterans of the Civil War. The first “Grand Wizard” of the KKK was a confederate general by the name Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Grand Wizard in the Klan was considered the head of the organization. The most famous Grand Wizard Klan member who recently left the post was David Ernest Duke, white supremacist and convicted felon. He was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. Duke has published three books on his beliefs of Judaism, racism and communism. Though the Grand Wizard only applied to the reconstruction era, high ranking members are able to be inducted as a Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Many KKK members deny any form of Communism, stating that it is against their beliefs. Most Klan groups don’t accept Neo-Nazis.
Topic: racism

White Supremacists are individuals who believe that the white race is superior to any other race and should therefore be commanding over the other races. Different white supremacist groups highlight a certain race as the enemy. White supremacy had foundations both before and after the American Civil War. During the 1800’s in the United States nearly all white supremacists owned slaves. Throughout most of America’s history, humans of a different race than caucasian were not allowed to vote or hold a government office job. They had practically no rights at all. Post 1960’s white supremacists held the “far-right” ideology. Neo-nazis typically fall under this ideology also. The far-right, or alt-right as it is also called, reject mainstream conservatism and embrace racism and white supremacy. There really isn’t an alt-left because alt-right is white supremacy but everything else, believing in equal rights, doesn’t fall on the opposite side of the spectrum. There is simply an alt-right, and an everything else. White supremacy also classifies as white pride and white power. The Ku Klux Klan is composed of white pride individuals. White pride characterizes as loving the caucasian race above all other races. People in the white pride belief system disagree with interracial relationships. This is when two different races are together. Whether it be friendships, or romantic relationships. In the present day, white supremacists are generally okay seeing different races, and sometimes they will even interact with different races, but they absolutely hate seeing a couple mix. They would prefer to see an African American man than a mixed race man. Because of this belief, white supremacy has a bad reputation. They are known for sticking with old traditions and aren’t afraid to resort to violence. On the other hand, some well known hate groups prefer the peaceful protests, such as the Ku Klux Klan group in Madison, Indiana, who held a peaceful picnic for recruitment. It wasn’t unless protests broke out on the other side that things went downhill.
Topic: racism

The races that are discriminated against find it very upsetting that there are so many laws aimed towards equality and yet racism is so prominent. African Natives were brought into the United States against their will, forced to stay here without any rights, and then fought for freedom but was still discriminated against. Over 179,000 African American men fought in the American Civil War in over 160 units. Some slaves were even forced to fight on the Confederate side of the war in labor positions. Many of the African Americans who fought on the Union side were previously slaves who sought freedom. They did not receive equal pay for fighting, though. African American men typically collected ten dollars a month, while white men made thirteen. Today, about ninety two percent of African Americans reported feeling discriminated against at some point in their lives according to a recent study by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The people who submitted the survey were of many backgrounds and ages. Beverly Reeves, who was in an interview about African American individuals, being an African American herself, said that being treated differently than caucasians was “duh”. It was to be expected and she had experienced racism throughout her life. She goes on to tell a story about how she booked a manicure appointment for her and her friends. It was a mix of black and white women. The white salon owner looked right past her and helped the white friends before helping her, even though she was there first and was the one who booked the appointment. The conductor of the interview states that this sort of situation isn’t uncommon. Another individual reported being told there were no houses available for real estate in her area, but gave a different answer to a white couple. This stereotype isn’t just expressed within African Americans, but many other races as well, such as Mexican Americans.
Topic: racism

People have heard innumerable rumors about Mexican Americans, or Mexican immigrants such as “mafia members”, “they steal our jobs!”, “all they do is drugs”, etc. There is minimal truth behind these stereotypes. It’s like saying that all Americans are fat. They simply aren’t. There might be a percentage who are, but still many who diet and workout. The same goes for Mexican Americans. There has been racial discrimination towards Mexican Americans since the 1840’s. It was at that time that it was officially announced that Mexican American segregation was present in American schools. There was also illegal deportations and lynching that echoed Jim Crow laws. When the United States won the Mexican-American war in 1848, a large portion of Mexico became property of the United States, therefore granting immediate citizenship to those who decided to stay in that area. As the nineteenth century went on, Mexican American discrimination became more prominent. Mob violence killed thousands of Mexican Americans in the early twentieth century. One case noted in 1851 the accused murder of a white man by Josefa Segovia resulted in a lynching after a fake trial. Over 2,000 men came to watch. Today Mexican American discrimination doesn’t typically result in violence. However, it is still very outstanding the amount of racial discrimination directed towards Mexican Americans. America’s own president, Donald Trump, has made a great number of stereotypical remarks towards those who immigrated to the United States legally. In one of his speeches, he stated that “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” This of course caused many outbursts from the American people, some of whom even support Trump because of that remark. He also said “somebody’s doing the raping!” which can translate to the fact that he doesn’t think anybody born in America could possibly be raping anyone, only immigrants. Donald Trump said that America is the dumping ground for everyone else’s problems, even though America proudly interferes with wars. As previously mentioned, America is known as a diverse country, so Trump saying that remark didn’t make any immigrant happy, especially refugees. Refugees aren’t here because no other country wants them, but because they don’t have the basic needs to survive.