Recently in class I was given the opportunity to participate in open discussion with my classmates. As usual, I found it so interesting to be able to bounce ideas off my peers, hearing their insight as well as their perspective on the topics that we learn about, both inside and outside of the class setting. One of the discussions we had I found particularly interesting, because it touched upon so many subjects. I was especially astounded as the fact that we started and ended the conversation in two completely different subjects, but these subjects were related in terms of the flow of conversation. I am going to share the main points of this discussion below, sharing my insight as well as my new findings and hopefully as you read you’ll gain a thing or two from the conversation. Continue reading “Sarah’s Take on An Open Discussion”
Hate and Humor
James Arthur Snead was a man who studied English, European fiction and taught courses on modernism and German literature at Yale University.
According to YAMP (Yale Aids Memorial Project), various students and professors expressed how they viewed him as a person and as a professor before he passed away from aids. Two individuals who posted on the page and who knew Snead personally shared deep experiences that they had with him. Peter Schneibner met Snead on a bus during the late 1980s and although he was fond of him and his personality, the experience that he had on the bus through him off. When Schneibner and Snead were on the bus together and on their two-hour road trip their bus driver pulled over for a fifteen-minute break. When Snead got off of the bus to use the restroom for a few moments a man who happened to be white pointed out that Snead was dangerous.
Schneibner shared:
“When he went for a pee, an old white guy sitting in front of me turned around and told me to be careful with the blacks. I should be very suspicious, he warned. A black guy talking in a foreign language can’t be any good, and sitting in the first half of the bus is bad behavior. By law, of course, blacks used to have to sit in the back seats.”
With the information that was shared with him, Shneibner did not change how he viewed Snead which was definitely a positive thing but, I found that that situation was quite funny because the following individual, Mark Schoofs who posted about Snead says, “He had a way of carrying himself so that race wasn’t able to obscure him. He was a visible man, the opposite of Ralph Ellison’s character, but it wasn’t because he acted white or avoided race. Hardly.”
I found humor in the story about the white guy calling Snead dangerous due to his skin color and talent in knowing multiple languages because according to his classmates, friends, and people that he knew, they found that Snead didn’t care much about race. He cared more about the historical events that have to lead us to where we are now or to how things were during the times in which he was alive. It is funny how there are people who want to be hateful or harmful to another person but don’t realize that their hate doesn’t matter much and shouldn’t matter as much as they think it does.
Masks keep you safe
According to the context of W.E.B Du Bois’ story, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” African Americans have been, “born with a veil, and gifted with with a second sight in this American world,— a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”
The story, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” was written in 1903 and Du Bois lived during the late 1860s when slavery was over but if you were black you were still chained to the racist systematic laws that existed and you were constantly surrounded by racist white people. When I say, racist white people, I don’t mean that all white human beings in the United States were racist but, the majority of the people allowed stereotypes to control their way of thinking and because of that, they were even more ignorant than anything. To be ignorant means to not give someone else a chance and to not allowing your self to be open to learning new things because a selfish mindset that you may have.
In class, we interpreted Du Bois’s statement about African American people being born with veils and being gifted with a second sight as living two different lives in a way to fend for their own life. People of color saw this veil as a tool that protected them and allowed them to learn how to act in the society and time period that they lived in and how they should conform to what white people would want at that time.
I titled this post as “Masks that keep you safe, ” because we also discussed the poem written my Paul Laurance Dunbar who wrote We wear the Mask. This poem stuck to me and it took me about an hour to really understand and take in the meaning of the poem. In order for me to truly comprehend the poem, I searched and listen to Maya Angelou’s version of the poem and her combining it with her own. I find that reading a poem verses listening to it serves a completely different effect on how you take it all in. Now, I will say, We wear the Mask is a phenomenal poem that depicts exactly what African Americans went through once they were forced to live by white standards. The lines that stood out to me the most and that I would tie in with W.E.B Du Bois’s line about being born with a veil from“Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” are:
“We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—”
Although the concepts are different the idea of being obliged to cover your true identity for the purposes of satisfying another group of peoples needs is what correlates. As W.E.B Du Bois’ story, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” stated “African Americans have been, “born with a veil, and gifted with a second sight in this American world,— a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”
Having to wear a mask all of the time ties in with the idea of having a second sight to survive in the American world that minorities struggle in. When you wear a Mask or a veil you are yourself behind whatever it is you are covering first. You see everything how you would regularly see things and you would have your original perspective but because of the society that minorities lived/live in they had/have to react differently compared to how they would have wanted/want to react originally to many racially related issues.
Poetry Read vs Time Spent on it
Almost everyone has been exposed to poetry in some form or another. Some throughout middle and high school, some continuing in college for pleasure, others yet pursue it rigorously in a discipline. I think I fall somewhere in the middle, as I have taken courses with Dr. Doggett that include hefty amounts of poetry gone over in extreme detail, yet I don’t consider myself a scholar of poetry quite yet. In reflecting on the poems that we have been given thus far in Dr. McCoy’s class, I find myself not really understanding much if anything about the poetry (further than syntactical content and plot) that we have read, except perhaps #AllyFail by J Mase III as that poem has a strong relation between the content and form that (at least on the surface) gets a pretty clear point across about checking our privilege if anyone is to consider themselves an ally.
I suppose I feel as though I don’t understand the various conversations going on within the poetry that we read in class. I know there could be a whole major devoted to African American Poetry, but I know I’m yearning for a little more when it comes to the time we spend on poetry in this class. In an effort to satisfy that yearning, I’ll attempt to dive deeper into one of the Black Nature poems, namely Kwame Alexander’s “Life”.
Community Through Artistic Collaboration
Before attending class on March 29th, 2019 I was excited. I knew that during class we were going to paint. Therefore, when Garth Freeman first began the lecture with other artists I was intrigued. Before taking this class I would have looked at art and thought how is that art? But now, with all the additional tools I have collected along the way, I was able to see why a certain person was an artist and try to interpret the work instead of looking at it.
Deconstructing Mac and Cheese
Over Thanksgiving break this year, I went home to visit my family, relax, and celebrate the holiday. While I was sitting on the couch lazily watching television, my mother called out to me to come help in the kitchen and make her family-famous mac and cheese. Now, while this may seem like a simple task, it was an incredibly intimidating feat at the time. What if I messed it up and everyone at the Thanksgiving table disliked it? This wasn’t normal mac and cheese! This wasn’t the simple task of boiling water and adding macaroni! My mom’s recipe was both a long and complicated process. When mac and cheese has bread crumbs, you know it’s serious. Continue reading “Deconstructing Mac and Cheese”
Artist Intention
When viewing artwork, I tend to search for the artists’ message within the piece. In doing this, I neglect the thought of the process behind creating the piece. Garth Freeman helped me realize the importance of the creation process with the print activity done in class. Our class separated into groups and created prints, which is the first time I have done this. At first, I was not too excited for this activity because I do not think of myself as an artist. By the end of the class, I started to think more about how an artist gets to their final piece of artwork. Continue reading “Artist Intention”
For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend- Pat Parker
Within the packet of poems that Dr. McCoy presented to us, a few of them stuck out to me immediately. Similar to what Analiese stated in her blog posts, I would not usually go for poems if I were. There are certain poems, however, such as Pat Parker’s that draw me in almost instantaneously. Parker’s poem gave me a conversational feeling which sparked more of an interest than poems usually do. I found myself making commentary while reading along because I could relate all too well and there were certain aspects of it I found to be humorous.
Continue reading “For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend- Pat Parker”
Culture and Property
Over break, I re-read a prompt that Dr. McCoy provided for us that talks about culture and how it relates to property. I’ve talked before about Bernice Johnson Reagon and her ideas about how church is the black community’s property. Recently in class, we have been talking about how the concept of culture can be a kind of property. In Pat Parker’s poem, “For the white person who wants to be my friend”, she expresses how blackness can be seen as a property, but not just property as an object, rather property as an idea.
DuBois and Sociology
I don’t like to admit when I’m struggling, but I have to say, I have been having a difficult time with The Souls of Black Folk recently. I didn’t realize that I was until we read “Of the Passing of the First Born;” part of the problem with reading the book both not in order and in a manner that breaks up the work into smaller chunks makes it difficult to grasp the work as a definitive whole, which is something I have been trying to do recently. While it is a collection of essays and thus some discrepancy in tone is expected it is still worth considering the work in its entirety; after all, DuBois chose to publish these essays together, not separately.
This past week, I sat down and actually thought about the work as a whole and the crux of my struggle with the tone of the work is this: certain chapters, such as “Of the Passing of the First Born,” are incredibly personal and the ways that the way that the Veil and Double Consciousness affect DuBois personally are so clear. However, some chapters are so deeply impersonal that they read more like an anthropological or sociological survey than a work that deals with fundamental societal issues that the author himself experiences. This divide makes it difficult to grasp the work in its totality, especially as the more anthropological sections come across as almost judgemental (more on this later). Continue reading “DuBois and Sociology”