For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enu

This white fantasization begins with the comparison of the African-American woman to the white woman in countenance who have pale complexions and finer hair, which is directly contrasted with African-American women’s more curly-coiled hair and varying complexions that are darker than those who have mostly a European racial background. To achieve this

She hated the people at home when white people talked about their peculiarities; but she always hated herself more because she still thought about them, because she knew their pain at what she was doing with her life. The feelings of shame, at her own people and at the white people, grew inside her, side by side like monstrous twins that would have to be left in the hills. The people wanted her… For the people, it was that simple, and when they failed, the humiliation fell on all of them; what happened to the girl did not happen to her alone, it happened to all of them. (Silko 69)

The book Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson is about Jackie and how her childhood during the time of slavery and racism, leads her to be able to become a writer. The book shows how someone’s identity isn’t just based on how you’re born. Identity is how you react to things that are happening on the outside and also things that are happening on the inside. Because of where Jacqueline was living, her family, and the time period she was living in she was able to be inspired and become a writer.

Occasionally, once in a great while, a unique person comes along. Zora Neale Hurston was one of those bigger than life people. She would have told you so herself. She was just as she should have been. She was, "Zora."

In the beginning chapters of the book, we get a glimpse of the typical home and community of an African American during segregation. Many Africans Americans were too adjusted to the way of living, that they felt

At the start of the book a naïve, young and innocent African American girl lived life almost oblivious to the socially constructed issue of race. She did not see the difference of skin color and believed it was perfectly normal to socialize with whites. As far as she was concerned raced did not exist. This view was quickly altered and changed as the little girl named Essie-Mae Moody grew up fast in a society dominated by racial boundaries involving whites, blacks and a hierarchy of people who had parts of both. Essie’s first encounter with race which initiated her first change, from being oblivious to being confused, occurred early in life. When she was young, she was friends with and often played with white children. This all changed

Racism and stereotypes occur greatly throughout the life of Jesmyn ward. The Men We Reaped would talk about how African American males would not leave their town because all of the influences that are around their life. So the research articles in sociology and psychology talk a lot about the stereotypes of African American males and women are more prone to stay in their home town and not do much with their life. So these articles hopefully will give insight to anybody that reads these articles and realize how people actually stereotypes African Americans. The way Men We Reaped relates to the topic that I chose and the book has material that talks a lot about racism and stereotyping.

The two main themes that are seen throughout the memoir are race (white privilege) and class,

Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Williams into an upper white collar class African-American family. Her dad was an Air Force specialist and her mom a psychiatric social worker. Social icons like Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis and W.E.B. Dubois were consistent visitors in the Williams home. Shange went to Barnard College and UCLA, gaining both a bachelors and master degree in American Studies. Shange's school years were troublesome, on the other hand, and disappointed and hurt in the wake of isolating from her first husband, she attempted suicide a few times before centering her anger against the constraints society forces on dark ladies. While procuring a graduate degree, she reaffirmed her own quality taking into account a self-decided character

And although her writing is not one hundred percent “conversational” it is not too rigid and does not feel like I’m reading an informative paper. This also means that her writing style is not gaudy and is rather easy to read. However, one thing that may throw the reader off at first, is her syntax and although she is an award winning writer, your English teacher will still classify her style as “incorrect” because of her broken way of writing. Her sentences are written in smaller segments that may cause confusion in the beginning. Sentences like "...

She takes on the streets of Harlem, New York, with a mission in mind. Survive each day keeping up three standards: keep her reputation up, try to be herself, but keep her mother’s

At time she states she feels that she simple doesn’t have a race and is merely herself. “I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored” (Hurston, vol. 2, pp. 360). At the end of the short story she uses a metaphor: “I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of

Hurston prides herself on who she is because of her background. Her identity of being a black woman in a world

Even though her mother was a light skin black woman, she did not want to live her life as a lie, by living as a white woman. Her mother embraced her blackness, which forced her to find work as a maid; her employers did not treat her with the same dignity as a white woman would receive. After seeing what her mother went through for accepting her blackness and living her life as a black woman, she knew that was not the life she wanted to live.

Her style is unique in that it has the feeling of a story. The first reason being her use of anecdotal