Journal 11 – White Cruelty

It is evident in both Claude McKay’s works and Pauline Hopkins’ story that even after the civil war blacks still weren’t treated as equal. Both of these authors seem very outspoken and almost fed up with everything that is happening.

            In Hopkins’ story “As the Lord Lives, He is One of Our Mother’s Children”, people mistake a man for a murderer, and only after his execution did they figure out the truth. I think that overall this had a message of “don’t judge a book by its cover”, especially blacks. Hopkins was trying to convey that just because a person is black does not mean they are automatically and evil person and a murderer.

            Out of McKay’s poems, I feel that “Outcast” and “The Lynching” were the most emotional. It seems that these to poems seem to convey a message of sadness that he can’t ever be equal with white and especially in “The Lynching”; he says that they will never learn from the errors. “And little Lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced around the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.” It’s almost too horrific to read. That fact that little boys would be laughing and dancing around a lynched dead man just makes me sick. If I had children and they started doing that, I’d spank them so hard their butts would fall off. “Outcast” also pulls at your heart a bit, because no one wants to feel like his or her different from everyone else and almost everyone can relate to that poem in some way. The most gut wrenching part of the poem is the last two lines, “For I was born, far from my native clime, / Under the white man’s menace, out of time.” These two lines are both sad and interesting, because it gives you a kind of glimpse into what life was like for slaves and how they felt about it.

Journal #10: The Aha Moment

My Aha moment came from "Learning To Read" by Francis Harper. As I read through the poem it explained to me how after the civil war, teachers came down to the southern states to start educating emancipated slaves, but it wasn’t all sunflowers and daisies. Southerners still resisted the thought of teaching former slaves to read. “Well, the Northern folks kept sending / the Yankee teachers down; / And they stood right up and helped us, though the Rebs did sneer and frown.” The “Rebs” is referring to the southerners and the poem goes into detail about how many slaves tried to teach themselves to read before the war by little things such as listening to kids spell out words and hiding books and papers in a hat. Even after the civil war, people still didn’t want African Americans to read. It was thought that for some blacks, learning to read was hopeless because they were too old, but they learned non-the-less.

Also in previous works we read, it seemed that Yankees didn’t help the African Americans before the war, but now they are sending all these teachers down to help educate them. It kind of says something about their character. Only after they won the war did they start to help the slaves, only after they knew that no one could come after them, did they start to help educated African Americans.

Also, I learned that African Americans wanted to read not only to be seen as equals but also so, they could read the bible. “So I got a pair of glasses, / And straight to work I went, / And never stopped till I could read / The hymns and Testament.” It’s interesting to me that the thing that southerners were afraid of, was the thing that African Americans wanted, but not for the purpose that the slaveholders thought.

Journal #9: Response to Devin Spencer

I agree with most of what Devin is saying about how today we are hostile towards Mexicans as in the past we were hostile towards the Chinese. I especially agree with the fact that we as Americans want to have a unifying culture and language like all other countries, but the fact is, is that we aren’t like other countries. All other countries had one people that grew up there as a whole, but here in America, we come from everywhere. We stand for something different then other countries. We stand for equality no matter what ethnicity you are. We are the only country that is so diverse that people nowadays find it hard to trace back to where our ancestors came from.

I agree with this notion however, I do believe there is another difference between now and then. My question is was there such a thing as illegal immigrants? Was there such a thing as having to do something to become a legal US Citizen or could someone just walk right on to US soil and just say “Ok, I’m a US citizen now,”? If this is the case and there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant then we have to think about now is that we have illegal immigrants and that is why we are so hostile towards them because we all go by the rules and it’s unfair for someone to get the same things as us by cheating. In this country, we are all about Equality for everyone and that means in opportunity and in punishment. If one of us were to cheat to get something we are likely to go to jail, but if an illegal immigrant cheats, well one you won’t know it, because you don’t even know that they are an illegal immigrant and two they’ll probably get off somehow because of somebody somewhere who pities them.

Anyway back then and now are very different when you look at immigration. Back then, there were no rules, but now there are probably too many. I agree we do need to be a bit less hostile towards immigrants, but as for illegal immigrants, I am not so sure.

Journal 8: Response to Denzel Greene

While I agree with you that Brown and Garnet's use of christianity in their speeches helped address everyone, I also think that there was another motive behind it. Some slaveholders backed their view of slaver with the Bible, so to counter argue that view with other things from the Bible, it would make the christian slaveholders, who, as we have seen in other texts we read, were the most brutal, see the issues of their reasoning behind slaver.
I'd also like to point out that in Garnet's "From a Memorial Discourse" He uses God a lot in phrases like "in the name of God" and "if it shall please God" and "mercies and favors of God." So, you can clearly see that Garnet is a christian man and wants the audience to see he is a christian man and that he wants to please God. "In the name of God, the universal Father, we demand the right to live, labor and to enjoy the fruits or our toil." So I do agree that he is using Christianity as an overall theme because everyone practices it and he is also saying that God has given these rights to "live, labor and to enjoy the fruits of out toil," to every men, black and white.

Journal 7: Abolitionist Poetry

I am choosing to focus on the imagery of the poem by Frances Harper named “The Slave Mother”. She invokes a sense of woe in the reader in telling how a young boy is taken from his mother. Her imagery of how the mother clings to her son, terrified that he will e taken away is sad and almost brings the reader to tears. “She is a mother, pale with fear, / Her boy clings to her side,/ And in her kirtle vainly tries/ His trembling form to hide.” This is very moving to mothers because the thought of someone tearing your child away from you is terrifying. Also it is terrifying for the child because the child has no knowledge of where he/she is going to be sent. The last stanza in this poem, to me, is the most saddening. “No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks/ Disturb the listening air: / She is a mother, and her heart / Is breaking in despair.” The mother is crying out in agony for her child who is being dragged away by the slave owners. This sad story drives women, both black and white, free or enslaved to fight for these mothers and their children to maintain the family unit.

Journal #6: Race and Culture

            The main characters in the stories Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and “The Quadroon” by Lydia Maria Child both suffer from not being fully white. In The Life of a Slave Girl the main character Linda was a daughter of a well known black carpenter and so didn’t realize she was a slave until she was six years old. Also, she wasn’t fully black, she was what they called back then “Mulatteos”. “In complexion my parents were a light shade of brownish yellow and were termed mulattoes” But that did not have any difference she was still a slave. The problem of race and culture is more prevalent in the story or “The Quadroon”. The story starts out explaining how a little girl named Xarifa, comes to be. The mother who is a black woman falls in love with a white man and they marry, but not legally. The have a little girl together, whom they name Xarifa. So Xarifa is half black half white and her skin is an almost golden brown and deemed really beautiful, but she still isn’t accepted by the “white world” After bother her mother and father die she is sold into slavery were she becomes really depressed and is eventually killed by her owner.

            Both of these stories are really sad in that both Linda and Xarifa where white in part, but were still sold into slavery and not treated as equals. They were still treated as lowly as regular whole blacks were. Reading these stories I realized how bad it was back then. Now a days we just kind of shrug off the whole slavery thing and not really think it was a big deal, but it was. People who had even 1 past relative who was black, if people knew about it, then you would be old into slavery because you weren’t as good as whole whites and that’s just wrong. Obviously they just wanted to fit in and I know that all people should be treated equally, but if we are going off what the morals of the whites were back then, then at least the people with some white blood in them should be treated better.

Journal #5: Societal Reform

Both Lydia Sigourney’s “Indian Names” and William Apess’ “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for The White Man” exhibit an overall theme for societal reform, specifically to that of the treatment of the Native Americans. However, the two authors go at the issue differently. Sigourney seems to be more aggressive in her poem, while Apess’ work is more mild, but still gets his point across.

Lydia Sigourney’s “Indian Names” addresses the issue of how can the Native Americans be forgotten when many of their names are names for our land features? “but their memory liveth on your hills their baptisms on your shore,” How can we forget these people when their names are present in our daily lives? In a way, she is almost mocking the United States saying that if you really wanted to completely wipe out these people you wouldn’t use their names at all. “Your mountains build their monument, though ye destroy their dust,” Instead you raise up their names even though you’re destroying their very lives.

I can very much relate to this. I spent most of my life in a town called Okemos near Lansing, MI. The town was actually named after a chief of the Saginaw Chippewa tribe named John Okemos. We also have a middle school called Chippewa and a river called the Saginaw River. However I did not learn all of these names were after Native Americans until about the seventh or eigth grade.

William Apess takes a very different approach to try to bring this issue of societal reform to the “white man’s” attention. Being raised in a white family’s home, Apess takes an approach that is more of an “I want to say something, but I don’t want you to get angry,” tone. Almost like he wants to give his opinion, but is almost too shy to. He wants more to be accepted by the white people than stand up for his own race. However, he does get his point of treating the Native Americans equally, across and he does it in a rather biblical way. He uses the example of how Jesus Christ was born a Jew so he was of color. However, he did not judge on color, but on “the hearts” of men. Apess devotes a whole paragraph and a half to different scripture backing up his point of “love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is very significant because the major religion in that day and age was Christianity.

Even though Lydia Sigourney and William Apess had different means of getting to the point of treating the American Indians as everyone else, the point is that they got there. All people, no matter their color, should be treated equally.