Dreams From My Father-Post 1

Before reading this book, I was not aware of how much I did not know about my President. I knew little of his background, little of his heritage. To be introduced to Obama's siblings from Kenya really sheds light on his roots, how they intertwine the United States and Kenya. This book presents Obama at an angle from which the reader may view him with a very admirable and at times sympathetic perception. Obama is out to protect the common man, to save the suffering, to rescue the impoverished. It is obvious that Obama feels connected to these people, feels that he has a part to play in their well-being. In my reading, I paid special attention to the part in which Obama and a young mother named Sadie attempt to confront a housing association about a possible asbestos problem. It is evident that the housing people do not want to spend their time or money on the issue, and try to persuade the mother and her fellow young mothers to ignore the problem. They end up hosting a rally in which they invite the director of their housing association. The spokeswoman, Linda, another young mother, publicly interviews the director. She doesn't allow him to speak, except for yes or no answers. The director does not want to comply with this method of communication and he leaves. Before Obama can intervene, the crowd erupts in an uproar. Mrs. Reece says to Obama, "See what you done! This is what happens when you try to get these young folks involved. Embarrassed the whole Gardens, on TV and everything. White folks seeing us act like a bunch of niggars! Just like they expect!" (245-246). These words are very interesting to me. Obama set out to be an "organizer," a very broad term, and a very ambitious term. He wishes to help those who are oppressed by providing them guidance to organize themselves into proactive groups, striving for some sort of chance. Obama watched as these young mothers, for the first time in their lives, took initiative to change their conditions. However, the situation proved to be a bit overwhelming for them. Their effort turned into them acting "like a bunch of niggars." In this sentence the word "niggar" has a negative connotation. It suggests that the white people will see them just messing up again, unable to take a serious attitude towards themselves. Of course this isn't true. It's sad that their efforts had to be seen as a joke.

Push Chapter 3

an Abdul (se__ of God) to see
(and Abdul (servant of God) to see)
see the i
ey see
(eye)
see me
liv
(live)

or

die
poslv
(positive)

0r

negv
(negative)
wh? why?
(why? why?)
must
I li
(lie)
to misel
(myself)
I
must
no
(know)
the truf
(truth)

How does one describe poetry? Or make sense of it, even? What is a poem? An articulation of emotion, a state of being crafted, molded, strewn in words. I find that it often difficult to relay emotion into words for what I feel has more dimensions, is far deeper, than any word could capture. A poem is a series of words that attempts to draw on so much more than meets the eye. For the character Precious, it is a method through which she begins to gain a sense of identity. The poem above conveys this through simple and yet very raw words. What's special about this poem is that it is genuine, real, and honest. It does not try to alleviate through complicated diction, nor does is try to hide behind anything. It is exactly what Precious feels. For the first time in her life, she is able to feel exactly what she is going through, and in a way by writing it down, she is able to face it and carry on. Of course, she is still bogged by the dangers and miseries of her situation, but she is able to look at the more positive side of her picture. She was never able to do this before and poetry has become some sort of means through which she can step back and view herself with outside perspective and gradually realize how special she really is.

Push Chapter 1

Invisibility is the word that highlights the first chapter of Push for me. Precious reasons her invisibility when saying "Don't nobody want me. Don't nobody need me. I know who I am. I know who they say I am"(31). She recognizes that she is human, that she is not this vampire that everyone see's her as. This is why she says she knows what THEY say she is, and this is why she believes that she is invisible. Everyone sees her as a vampire, or welfare queen. A black woman whose sole source of income is welfare, whose "intelligence" is minute, whose sexual deviance is innate, this is the vampire she is seen as. But she is not a vampire, and she knows this. So the real her must be invisible. Makes sense to me.

One thing that struck me as a little ironic is her perspective of the other boys in her math class. She is seen as disruptive at first, after refusing to open her book and openly chastising Mr. Wicher. However, she becomes the authority of the class, keeping the other boys in the class subdued. This is where my interest stems from. I am trying to understand her relationship with the other boys in the class. At the beginning of the class Mr. Wichen had the perspective that precious was loud and disruptive, stemming from the fact that Precious couldn't open the book to the page because she is illiterate. He allows her to remain in class after she affirms her intent to learn in class. However she views the boys through a similar lens that society views her. She does not say that perhaps the boys are also disruptive because of their inability to read, or other factors that can lead to improper classroom conduct. She uses words like native, coon, and nigger (6-7)that make me recognize the irony behind it all. The irony being her misunderstand of the rowdy young men in the classroom.

Precious post 1- Kayla

"My fahver don't see me really. If he did he would know I was like a white girl, a real person, inside. He would not climb on me from forever and stick his dick n' get me inside on fire, bleed, I bleed then he slap me. Can't he see I am a girl for flowers and straw legs and a place in the picture" (32).

I found it difficult to put into words how the first section of Precious, or Push, affected me. I found myself feeling physically sick at times. There were so many points to touch upon in this novel; I was overwhelmed when I sat down to write this blog. I decided to zero in on the quote above. In Precious's narrative, she often wishes she were white. Above she says a white girl is a real person. I have never before read a text towards which I became so emotionally transfixed. The raw material is jolting and coercive in the respect that I didn't want to accept it. I did not want to accept the weight and reality, the gravity of such unfathomable circumstances. And why does it make me so uncomfortable? I am a white female, grew up in a nice family, and I have had no traumatic events in my life. In writing this, I feel as if I am shifting the attention from Precious to myself, and that is not the intention. I merely want to identify why this quote made me so uncomfortable. To Precious, I am a real person. That stood out to me, and I am not sure how I should take it. It makes me feel awkward, undeserving. Why is it that I was born into cirumstances in which I did not have to be afraid, and I grew up with a sense of support and freedom. Why didn't Precious have that freedom or support? Or other girls who suffer as she does in the novel? Why do some people suffer and others do not? I realize there is no rational or concrete answer to that question. Unfortuneatly, because of the history of the country in which we live, a girl such as Precious must wish that her skin were lighter. Interestingly enough, I almost wish my skin were darker for this same reason. Perhaps then I will no longer be ignorant, spoiled, perfect, etc. Perhaps then people will not assume that I have the world at my feet. I don't mean to speak selfishly; I am merely trying to see this quote from all sides--from the perspective of the black girl and the perspective of the white girl. Even though I can stand back and say, "I'm not perfect, I'm not beautiful, life is hard for me sometimes, I am afraid of life." It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because I wasn't raped by my father. I didn't have a child at twelve, and I can read and write. My hardships are not as severe as that of Precious, or Rita, or Germaine, or any girl growing up in poverty, drugs, fatherless, motherless, fear. Does this make me a bad person? Sometimes I feel that it does. I feel that it is my fault that my life is easier than theirs. It is nothing I can help. Nothing they can help. Society, with it's rigid divides, ideals of ethnic dichotomy, scales of skin tone, society separates, breaks, ruins, hurts the heart and soul and body; leads us to believe that those who look differently are the other, people with which we cannot identify. Even myself--and I have always considered myself open to anyone--I fear a girl like Precious because I cannot grasp her reality and it is not fair to her.

We can all have a place in "the picture." I want us all to be beautiful and unique and ourselves, every distinction illuminated, in the greater picture.

Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers

Richard Wright does a great job of depicting the trajectory of his logic and reason throughout the early years of his life. His story of lighting the curtains, and half of his house on fire at age four, is a useful analogy of Wrights quest for knowledge. From Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass' books, I learned that knowledge and the quest to understand the world for what it really is, is a crucial part in attaining ones freedom and autonomy. When reading the text, Wright attains two types of knowledge, knowledge of advise and knowledge of experience. In his story of burning the curtains, Wright tests the advise of his mother (to keep quiet and stay out of trouble) and brother (that lighting the curtains is wrong) by choosing to go forth with the experiment. He burns half of his house down, gets beat unconscious and thrown into a fever for days after, but what does he learn? I think he learns that some knowledge and the quest to achieve it, can be deadly. If the experience it takes to answer ones questions doesn't kill you, the social environment that looks down upon attaining such knowledge can surely bring one close to death as well. This is seen again when the "uncle" that Aunt Maggie was dating, kills a woman and burns down her house. Richard attains the knowledge that this man killed someone, but he was unable to share this knowledge with anyone, for fear of being lynched.

Following the growth of Wrights knowledge in these first couple chapters, I also begin to see a struggle between the knowledge that is spoken to him and the knowledge that he gains through experience. He is raised with the Christian morals of his parents and grandparents, but he has a hard time applying what he sees everyday to such standards. We see this conflict surface when he so kindly tells his grandmother to kiss his ass, oblivious to crossroads of religion and culture he just reached. This struggle is present in his experience of beating the neighborhood bullies in order to get groceries for his mother as well. Wright is sent into confusion when his mother repeatedly sends him back to deal with the bullies. Eventually he is given a stick, and he must physically break his preconceived conceptions of fighting as improper, in order to survive reality.

What becomes more and more interesting is his knowledge of race and racism. I really enjoyed reading the conversation on page 48, between Wright and his mother. He is trying to ascertain whether his grandmother is black or white, his mother, speaking quite carefully on the subject, relays the facts to him, but refrains from applying reason, emotion or sentiment to the statements she provides. Wright is left to sort out a bunch of facts without the framework of racism to apply the reasoning behind them. I cant for certain say much more on this development, but I imagine what it would be like to read a bunch of statistics based on race, without knowing the racial context of society. It would provide me with as much confusion as Wright seems to get from his conversation with his mother.

Black Boy, Chapters 1-3

How is racism "made?" I would argue first that racism is an artificial mentality that humans create within themselves, by means of socially constructed influences. But it must begin somewhere, right? Society must get the idea from somewhere within themselves. Throughout the first three chapters of "Black Boy," the author, Richard Wright, describes his early childhood in the Southern United States. While we follow this narrative, we also witness the evolution of the notion of "blacks" and "whites" and the strict separation of the two. We meet Richard as a young, four year old boy. From page one to one hundred, we watch as a child grows into a young man, gaining more and more self awareness the more we flip the pages. At one point in the story, Richard learns that a "black" boy was beat by a "white" man. It was his understanding that it was okay for the "white" man to beat the "black" boy because surely the "white" man was the boy's father. In Richard's head, it was acceptable for a parent to beat their children. Once his mother explains to him that the "white" man was not the "black" boy's father, he is puzzled. This passage demonstrates that our narrator has no connotations attached to the words "white" and "black" in regards to labeling people. This is perhaps the first time that he views the "white" person as the "other," a separate kind of people. Wright explains that after having learned of the beating, he "...stared at ["white" people], wondering what they were really like" (24). Here, we see the young Wright consider "whites" as different from himself.

Over the progression of the the next couple chapters, we see the awareness grow, and grow into a rather negative mentality. Richard develops a fear for the "white" man, and soon, a hatred. He writes,

"The hostility of the whites had become so deeply implanted in my mind and feelings that it had lost direct connection with the daily environment in which I lived; and my reactions to this hostility fed upon itself...Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites...I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings" (74).

This is a powerful passage. Basically, Write explains that while he had never personally been mistreated by "whites," he had a hostility "deeply implanted" in his mind towards them. This was the result of social influences; in a sense he was "trained" to have hostility towards them by his peers. Slavery continued to leave it's mark, even after it was abolished. The effects of such racism rippled out and touched even a young boy without prior prejudices.

What "makes" racism? What makes one person hate another person for no rational, reasonable, justifiable reason? I have no idea, to be honest. It is a scary thing that human beings can be capable of hating without motive; or just can hate with such passion in general. Something to note in "Black Boy" thus far is how Richard becomes racist of white people and begins to separate himself from them without fully understanding why. Racism is a two way street, in some respects; if one "race" hates another, the other "race" will inevitably hate them in return. It's a vicious cycle.

Ole' Dixies Church Below

“Ole Satan’s church is here below, Up to God’s free church I hope to go.”

Jacobs religious fervor was blinding through chapter XIII to XX. She does a great job at differentiating between Christianity and what she calls “religion at the south.” (84) I think she does this in a very interesting way in chapter XIII. The comparisons and contrasts between Reverend Mr. Pike and the” very different clergyman” (82) help the reader draw the line between the two ideologies. Jacobs places Mr. Pike as the representative of the “religion at the south,” and the “very different” clergyman as the representative of true Christianity. We first learn of Reverend Mr. Pike, Jacobs satirically uses words such as gentleman and pious when describing him. He preaches of the connection between a slaves master in heaven (God) and a slaves master on earth. Mr. Pike says, “If you disobey your earthly master, you offend your heavenly master” (80). These are the beliefs that Jacobs wants us to associate with the “religion at the south.” Instead of embodying Christian morality, they are fearful, reactionary hate speeches that use the name of God in order to quell the civil unrest amongst slaves and abolitionists. The religion at the south is defined more as a tool to install fear (for whites that slaves will rise up, and for blacks that someone is always watching) and promote complacency in slavery than a doctrine of morals and religious beliefs.
When describing the different Clergyman, Jacobs actually refers to him as god or god like amongst the slaves. His wife taught her slaves to read and write, and once that was accomplished the clergyman set about helping needy slaves around him. So from the very beginning Jacobs is attaching community service and social cooperation with true forms of Christianity. I thought that the descriptions of the themes of the clergyman’s sermons were very sophisticated. I was especially happy to hear that his sermons were “adapted to their comprehension.” (82). I took this quote to mean that the clergyman understood that Christianity meant something different to slaves than to free whites. I think it shows that this preacher knew that for slaves Christianity was the word of freedom, equality lies within the lines of it. He quoted the Bible, saying that God judges a man by his heart and not the color of his skin (83). These are the characteristics that Jacobs attaches with her conception of Christianity. She calls it a “strange doctrine,” which seems ironic at a time when bible study was common in a majority of households. She wants the reader to know that if one were to use the reason behind the Bible, that one could not condone an institution such as slavery. The only thing that could justify would be “the religion at the south.”