The Dynamic of Racism in Beloved Compared with the Modern Day

Throughout the book, Sethe doesn't seem to experience a great deal of racism on a day to day basis. The oppression that she feels is almost entirely from her memories being kept alive. It's as though the racism will only disappear when the memories fade away. This reminds me a whole lot of the modern day, in a strange way. In contemporary society, racism is really only perpetuated because of the vivid memories (or perhaps the learned memories) of the past. It's like that really bizarre phrase that some people say where the surest way to eliminate racism is to collectively forget slavery. While I don't necessarily agree with this sentiment, Beloved seems to put an interesting spin on this idea.

Sethe seems to talk a lot about her "rememories" and how they can be shared between people and will never ever fade away. Isn't that something like what happens today? I feel like racism has definitely been on the decline since the times of slavery, and theoretically, one day it should just be pretty much nonexistent. Still, there are racists out there who are as such simply because it's somewhat of a generational or historical thing for their region or family. This is why Sethe feels the racial injustice and uncertainty about her future. Since the memory of oppression and racism is still very much alive for her, she knows that it must still exist relatively unrestricted in the real world.

The Art of Organized Graffiti

When I was much younger, my dad used to take me out to a lake near our house where we would walk our dog or go on bike rides. Just before the main path though, we'd always pass a railroad bridge with some of the most elaborate graffiti I'd ever seen before. One day as we were traveling by it, my dad stopped and said to me something along the lines of, "We've got some real artists around here." That was the first time I ever remember anybody using the word "art" in the context of graffiti, and I don't think I had really regarded it as such before. It made me think though, graffiti was just a form of paint on a canvas, so why not?

I really enjoyed seeing Style Wars. A lot. I knew almost nothing about graffiti culture walking into that classroom, and the movie/documentary really gave me something to think about. One of the aspects of the movie that struck me most was just how comparatively mature the kids doing the graffiti were. I suppose there had always been this nagging spot in my mind that kept telling me that graffiti is vandalism and vandalism is for bored, immature kids. The people depicted in this movie, although not necessarily "cultured" or well-off, seemed to do a great job of sticking together as a community, helping each other out, and fending for themselves out there.

The artists really did remind me of an expansive community of people, and they were. The level of organization that took place throughout the entire movie was really interesting to me, and not necessarily something I would have expected. I always thought of graffiti of just sort of appearing like magic, but these guys spend hours and hours and hours planning it all and making it just perfect, only to have it scrawled over by some opposing graffiti group or scrubbed clean by the mayor. That takes serious dedication. The whole thing really has given me a whole new perspective on and appreciation for the art of graffiti.

Generations of Hatred

The poem Night, Death, Mississippi by Robert Hayden that Louis read for us a little while ago really stuck out to me at the time. It's easily one of the most horrific poems that we've read so far this year, and the implications of it really are heartbreaking. The poem is told from the perspective of an elderly KKK member who's too old to continue to do what he loves, so he helps out and supports his grandson, "Boy." Everywhere I look in the modern day, I can spot instances of antipathy between younger generations and older generations, mainly doe to progressive social change making the world a better place (at least from my perspective, I suppose). That's clearly not happening in this poem. The grandfather is proud of the son for doing things exactly the same way that he did. No change whatsoever is occurring here, just generations of perpetuated racism.

Social Awareness and Stereotypes

Gunnar is probably the most socially-aware person in the entire book. Throughout the entire book, he's constantly seeing the subtly unjust social dynamics at play. During the Shakespeare scene where Nicholas messes up his monologue, Gunnar can see that this is exactly what the audience had expected of the black kids from Hillside performing Shakespeare. In response to this, he goes up on stage and calls them all out in order to draw a large amount of negative attention to it. Later on, he does the exact same thing on the basketball court by dressing up as a minstrel in order to make the performance aspect of the whole game blatantly obvious to them.

He makes his marks in very clever ways. When he notices somebody, especially himself, conforming to an unfair stereotype, he'll always call it out instead of just rolling with it. I think that it's a very good lesson to learn from Gunnar. It reminds me of the Narrator's thoughts in Invisible Man where he wonders if it really is or isn't rude for the white man to ask him to sing for them. Everybody should be themselves, regardless of whether they're conforming or not conforming to a particular stereotype, so long as they're still aware of it.

Gunnar's True Self

When Gunnar first enters Hillside, he finds himself desperately trying to fit in and find a place in the community. He resorts to being everything except for himself and really ends up getting nowhere at all with it. It's not until he settles down in school and meets Nicholas that he begins to let his true colors fly. He establishes himself as a fantastic poet and a natural-born basketball player, and everything about his character form then on out feels very organic. He is quickly accepted into the Hillside community and turned into a huge star.

By the time that college recruiters take note of him and his tremendous skills, Gunnar no longer cares about impressing anybody at all like he did before. He's become so used to obtaining respect through nothing other than being himself and doing exactly what he wants purely for the sake of doing it that he no longer cares in the slightest about what others think of him. Gunnar knows that he has exactly what they all want.

Gunnar is very conscious of the dynamic at play and he uses it to very strongly assert the fact that he is an individual who is defined by more than just his exceptional set of skills.

Janie's High Standards

In chapter 11 Janie has an experience where she very quickly develops her own ideas about love and marriage that don't appear to really be based anywhere in reality. In class, we had come to the conclusion that from that point on Janie had an unreasonably high expectation of what to expect out of marriage. But does she really? I think it is true that what she's looking for is a perfect man and a perfect relationship, which really is a stretch, but I think it's also true that the men in the book tend to be extremely sexist and really don't care about love nearly as much as she does.

Both relationships up until now (I have not read past chapter 9) have deteriorated drastically within a relatively short time of being married, even though one technically lasted until death did them part. We've been assuming that her expectations for these men are just too high and she's just not willing to allow herself to enjoy the good things in them. But what about the men themselves? From what I can tell, nearly every single man in the book so far has managed to objectify Janie in some way or another, which tells me that sexism may be a big part of this book's setting, something that we're not used to to nearly such an extent today.

Within a very short time, both Logan and Joe began to take Janie entirely for granted and told her how to think and what to do. Joe even had his own moment of unrealistically high standards, where he tells her before he dies that he was never satisfied with her and was constantly trying to change her. Both of them only ever complimented her beauty rather than her intelligence or really any other characteristic of her. I really don't think that Janie's standards and values were too off base at all, especially considering theirs,  but it certainly seems to be the case for the setting of the book.

Reflecting on Narrative Voice and Dialogue

When we first discussed the narrative voice and the dialogue of Their Eyes Were Watching God in class, we were mostly going off of first impressions since we hadn't read very far into the book yet. We were examining the distinct differences between the two, and found most obviously that the narrator tended to talk in a literary voice that we as readers were very used to, whereas the dialogue in the book was very dialect-oriented. The contrast was pretty striking. We also talked about how the narrator used free indirect discourse and spoke in a very human voice, indicating that they probably had some connection to the setting of the book. Finally, we touched on how the dialogue could potentially be seen as being very condescending with its phonetic vernacular, especially in contrast to the explaining voice of the narrator.

I still haven't read especially far into the book, but I've noticed that my initially very slow reading of the dialogue has begun to gradually pick up speed as I get used to it. To a certain extent I find myself reading the dialogue with just as much fluidity as I read the narrative voice. It makes me feel like the striking differences between them are becoming less significant and I definitely see them as closer together. The dialogue also continues to feel less forced as I read, and I find it a whole lot easier to visualize actual people in these scenarios. I think the whole dynamic incredibly interesting and I hope I continue to feel this way for the duration for the novel.

Parallels Between Ellison and Invisible Man

The narrator of Invisible Man had been thrown out college after his third year and immediately went to New York, where he sought to earn some money with the hope of returning. While we were watching the documentary on Ralph Ellison in class, I couldn't help but think how funny it was that Ralph Ellison himself had left college for New York during his junior year, intending to return once he had made some money, but never did. It really made me wonder if there were any other parallels between his life and the book he had written.

Clearly there are a number of character traits and experiences that they both share, like spending a huge amount of time in New York and enjoying jazz music and improvisation, Ellison to such an extent that he studied it in college. Beyond that, especially during class discussion, I also noticed how he appeared as somewhat of a Bledsoe figure, even though he probably wasn't really. Some critics like Howe saw this, by saying essentially that his work wasn't "black" enough, considering his skin color, and he was trying to appeal only to white people in his novel. As untrue as it may have been, it's easy to imagine, since his work was so well-recieved by white critics and had a tendancy to be denounced by a number of black critics.

Additionally, I saw a couple of major themes in his life relfected in the book. He was described by his peers as being "elitist" after he had finished it, which reminded me a lot of the narrator. By the end of the book, he had ultimately decided that the best course of action, at least for him, was to dissociate himself completely from society in order to discover himself. This sounds a lot like the snobbishness and elitism that Ellison's peers describe him as.

Finally, a somewhat surprising but important piece of information to consider is that Ellison refers to himself as a Negro, despite its increasingly negative connotation. This greatly follows one of the important patterns in the book, where Ellison never truly denounces racism, but rather looks at it very carefully under his magnifying glass. All of these similarities are really interesting to look at and are a good reminder to me of just how closely intertwined an author is with their book.

Predestined Fate

At what point does the narrator's life stop following a predetermined route constructed for him before he was even a part of it? When does he believe he's no longer a part of it? At any given point during the book so far, had the narrator been asked, he would have almost certainly said that he was where he was because of his own free will, and not really anything more. However, it's evident to me, as a reader, that this really isn't the case.

Starting from the very beginning, the narrator believed that the speech he had given was what ultimately led to him going to college, despite the fact that there were only a handful of audience members who cared at all about that he had to say. From there, he continued along the path where he made it through part of college before being dismissed rather suddenly by Bledsoe, where he seemed to be derailed from the set course. Still, the letters that the narrator carried with him only brought him onwards along this set trail, and he really didn't even become aware of it until Emerson showed him what the letter said.

Is this the point at which the narrator veers off the path of predestined fate? The narrator can't help but shake the feeling that it's not. Throughout the next few chapters, he becomes increasingly suspicious of authority, especially with Kimbro and Brockway. Even in the hospital, when he's talking to the director after his little visit, he asks if he knows Norton or Bledsoe, as if he's suspicious that even he is in on the little charade that has been put on for him for most of his life. Even though it would appear as though he's out behaving of his own free will now, I'll be very interested to find out if he ever truly believes it, or if maybe he's never left the predetermined route at all.

Freedom and Identity

Throughout the book, the narrator seems to undergo alternating periods of having a solid identity and times where he really doesn't know (or care) who he is or what his purpose is. It's interesting to view these on and off intervals in terms of the amount of freedom he has, or at least he perceives himself to have. Initially, when the narrator is in college, he very much feels like he has goals and a purpose in life: to become well-known and respected, like Bledsoe, through hard work and education. At the same time, his freedom is relatively restricted. For a large portion of his life so far, although he's passionate about what he does and has aspirations, he's essentially on a very set course that's been laid out for him way before he became a part of it.

Once he actually gets a chance to meet Bledsoe for real though, he's dismissed from the college and finds himself making decisions for himself. He acquires a newer sense of freedom than he had before, doing more of what he wanted to do rather than what he felt he should do. He gets this feeling again after his confinement in the paint factory where his sole purpose was to mix paint and assist a crazy old engineer. After his "operation," he talks much more openly to those above him and describes having a newfound sense of freedom, even though he has lost a huge part of his identity and purpose.

This lasts for a while until the narrator is taken up by the Brotherhood, where they impose a brand new identity upon him. Instead of expanding his freedom with this new identity, it actually constrains it a little bit more because even though he's now part of something larger than just himself, he's constantly underneath the Brotherhood's thumb. This constant cycle of identity and invisibility and freedom and confinement is really interesting to look at, and I'm especially interested in seeing how the narrator ends up like he does at the end where he becomes practically invisible with no identity associated with him, but with the power to do almost whatever he wants.

White Ignorance in Native Son

Native Son really did contain a number of protests throughout the novel. In class, we talked about the emotion-fueled justice system, the society that completely stifles ambition, the white concept of "your people" referring to all blacks when they spoke to just Bigger, as well as a few more. One that we didn't really touch on very much at all though was just how ignorant some of the white people in the book who really cared (or at least wanted to care) about black culture, people etc. actually were of it.

Right away, Mr. Dalton says that he's doing his best to give to the black community by making donations through the NAACP, but it's so disconnected from black society that, when asked, Bigger doesn't even know what it is. It's later pointed out by Max that Mr. Dalton is actually charging blacks way more for housing than whites, and so his donations of relatively useless things like ping-pong tables are largely in place to make him feel less guilty. It makes it painfully obvious to the reader that Mr. Dalton really doesn't have much idea about the real issues or obstacles that constantly face African Americans.

Shortly after, when Mary and Jan first meet Bigger, they do their very best to become his best friends. Both of them are incredibly polite to him and they try their hardest to get Bigger to open up to them. Unfortunately, by the end of the night, Bigger has killed Mary and is trying to frame Jan for it. Why? What could have possibly been so bad about that evening that it drove him to murder? One of the biggest answers, of course, is that Mary and Jan didn't know a single thing about Bigger Thomas. Their desire to become his friend was purely based on the color of his skin. Naturally, Bigger is uncomfortable about the whole encounter and hates them for it because, as Max points out later, he has no template or prior knowledge about how to act around Mary and Jan because it's simply so foreign to him. Bigger's terror over this alien behavior is what justifies the murder in his mind.

Bigger's entire way of life is built around this invisible boundary between blacks and whites, and Mary and Jan are both too ignorant to realize this. Bigger isn't able to just put it all aside for them, he truly doesn't know how to. When Jan tells Bigger "I'll call you Bigger and you'll call me Jan. That's the way it'll be between us." (66) or when Mary asks Bigger to take them to "one of those places where colored people eat" (69) Bigger doesn't have a clue how to respond. How could he? He wouldn't dream of going up to any white person and asking them these questions nor vice versa, and here are Mary and Jan, treating him like he should. It's unfair toward Bigger and neither of them realize it.