Sethe Ignoring Slavery and its Effects

Throughout almost all of the books that we have read in class this year, the theme of identity has been brought up because it is so important in the shaping of African American history. It also happens to be one of Beloved’s central themes, with it particularly touching on Sethe’s journey to find an identity after slavery by supporting a family and starting a life in Blue Stone. However, Beloved shows how this past of slavery can affect African Americans in forming their identity. I know that in Mr. Sutton’s history class we are learning about how when slaves were suddenly released (but in Sethe’s case she escaped) they were still treated unequally and since they had no background in being an individual and making her own plans, they were completely lost, attempting to find a path to success.

In the case of Sethe, slavery had its serious mental toll on her, when Sethe was with schoolteacher I remember they started measuring her body parts and determining which ones were human or animal. In addition to this they stole her breast milk while she is awake is, which adds onto her further dehumanization. So after Sethe escaped it looked like she chose to ignore the fact that slavery had ever affected her, but by doing it seemed to me that she unintentionally made her mental state worse because her past kept on coming to haunt her. For example, when the school teacher comes back to take control of Sethe’s children, Sethe gets a sense that no matter how far she runs away the effects of slavery is inevitable, but because she thinks that there is still a chance that her children can avoid it, she kills Beloved.

On the other hand, I think it would have been better if Sethe confronted her past of slavery in order to empower herself and find her true identity. Morrison even shows how when Beloved is reincarnated she feels like she is losing her identity when she loses a tooth and irrationally feels like she is falling apart. To me the reason was because Sethe had always hid her past from Beloved and I think that Morrison is implying that in order for Beloved to form her own identity she must have a sense of what tragic part of American history her mother and family were a part of.

Ultimately, Morrison shows how African Americans must accept their history of slavery as something they have faced AND THEN move on from there in order to find themselves, even though it’s hard and painful to do so. With the return of Beloved and the teacher, Morrison shows that Sethe can’t be free from her past relating to slavery until she is open and accepting with it. But when she tries to avoid her unavoidable roots, in order to start a new life, it actually works against her. Slavery is such a large and long lasting setback for African American’s that it has in a way become embedded in their culture, and by ignoring it Sethe is ignoring a part of her and her relatives’ history.

A Continuation of the Reasons Behind Gunner's Depression

                This post is kind of adding onto and in a way answering my last post where I questioned if we would see how Gunner becomes the pessimistic person shown in the prologue. What I realized especially from the last couple pages of this book is that we did see this change, and that a lot of it had to do with the racism that Gunner thinks he can change but is actually unavoidable, which I talked about also in my last post. More specifically, in this post I wanted to briefly analyze how Gunner got to this point in his life where he was so depressed because of the racist systematic depression in the nation.

                Throughout The White Boy Shuffle I noticed that before Gunner got into this deep of a depression and crash he had a sense of hope that drove him. This sense of hope was the changing of the inequalities that African Americans faced, especially in L.A. Gunner early on in his life had a great sense of the inequalities that African Americans faced because of the fact that he had lived both in the hood and in wealthier white neighborhoods and gone to school there as a black student. Throughout his adolescent and teenage life, he realized this, but more importantly felt the need to do something about it and change the way things are. This resulted in Gunner picking up Poetry and writing a little about life in L.A as a black person. Then with the Rodney King beating, being the first to be caught on camera and spread nationwide, he had a larger drive for change. He said that he really hoped that the cops will be caught this time, and we can see his urge for change when him and Scoby really wanted to rob some stores and be part of the rebellious L.A riots.

But right afterwards he realizes that the robbery isn’t as exciting as he thought and it’s orderly and quiet, almost in a sense boring. This to me marks the change where Gunner is hit with this sense of hopelessness that grows to the character in the prologue, he thinks to himself “I never felt so worthless in my life”, and starts to feel like his poetry and all his work has done no change and is worthless. Even when he’s in the basketball camp it seems like his mind is somewhere else, because he hates listening to people talking about basketball and he rides horses in the middle of the day. When he visits Boston University, he notices that he’s actually a lot more popular than he thought, but once again becomes depressed because he found out that one of the main reasons he’s famous is because he’s a good black poet, his blackness having a lot to do with it. Therefore, he realizes that he hasn’t broken out of this racial barrier which he was working on destroying. Saying, “I felt like I had been outed and exposed by my worst enemies, white kids that were embarrassingly like myself but with whom I had nothing in common”. Basically meaning that they’re similar in that they both like writing and are intrigued by poetry, but they just don’t have the right mindset and are all part of this racist system which he feels like is surrounding him so much that he has to strip his clothes off to escape it, to which the students still grab his clothes and chase after him.

In the end it is this rise of hope and sudden fall after realizing that nothing really has changed which affected Gunner to the point of depression. Gunner eventually thinks about suicide which is his form of not letting whites take advantage of him anymore. In all Beatty does a great job in the representation of black life in L.A and what makes this book so important is that it’s something we are still seeing today with the black lives matter movement where blacks like Gunner Kaufman are worried about the mistreatment of their race.

Can Color Be Avoided?

                Already in the first two chapters in The White Boy Shuffle, Beatty dives in and indirectly questions the universal problem asking if it is possible not to judge somebody based off of the color of their skin. Beatty uses the character of Ms. Cegeny—the main character’s third grade teacher--, and shows how she always pounds into the heads of kids should be judged for their “minds” and not their “color”. But through this process Beatty hints at how it is almost impossible in modern America to do so.

                The method which Beatty uses to show how racism is something hard to avoid, is by relating it to something that has embedded itself in the world, such as nature, human eyesight, and mental capabilities. For example, when Melissa –one of the students—reads an article in the class about sunlight, I believe that Beatty purposely left in the part where Melissa says “Dark colors such as black absorb sunlight and light colors such as white reflect sunlight”. He does this to show that even something as necessary and common in daily life as sunlight is not colorblind, but treats blacks differently than whites. Later on in the day the main character goes to the doctor’s office to get examined, and asks the doctor “Our teacher says that we should be colorblind. That’s hard when you can see color, isn’t it?”. Here Beatty is making a metaphor to race, where even though the teacher is asking the students to be colorblind it’s almost impossible when humans can see the color on people’s skin, and sometimes it’s hard not to treat others differently based off of the history that is behind the color of their skin and the stereotypes which come with that.

                In The White Boy Shuffle Ms. Cegeny is a perfect example of the naïve white, patriotic, American who although is under good intentions to try and forget America’s racist past, thinks that it can be forgotten in an instant, in this case by telling 3^rd graders to do so. Like I said before, it is smart to try and change racism in America, but it cannot simply be told to children at a young age. Children should be informed of the racism in America first, so they can understand why it’s such a deep problem, and how much harder it is to change. In result they won’t just think of equality as something that is morally right like washing your hands, but something which is more of a sensitive issue, that might be solved in a couple centuries.

 In Beatty’s prologue, he takes on a pessimistic point of view and implies that it is such of a problem that it will never be solved. Beatty says, “In the quest for equality black folks have tried everything. We’ve begged, revolted, entertained, and intermarried and still are treated like shit. Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction [] when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits [] our mass suicide will be the ultimate sit-in”. I wonder if similar to invisible man, this story will show a transformation illustrating how the main character changes from a fun-loving kid, being taught that everyone is equal regardless of their skin color, to the pessimistic man we see in the prologue who knows it is impossible to erase racism because he has experienced so much of it that it has become a permanent part of the world.

Comparing Invisible Man and Their Eyes Were Watching God

Currently, because we have just started Their eyes were watching God, and just finished analyzing Invisible Man, I noticed some important connections between the two books through the first five chapters of Their eyes were watching God.

 The first similarity to Invisible Man which I saw in Their eyes were watching God, was how the narrator’s start their respective books. In the prologue of Invisible Man, we see the narrator foreshadow his situation by telling the readers that he is an invisible man, and leading us into the book by saying “But what did I do to be so blue? Bear with me.”. Ellison then goes on to explain the narrator’s life to show how people like him can become invisible. In Their eyes were watching God, I also saw a similar introduction where Hurston foreshadows the book in the first paragraph. Hurston basically states that most of the time men do not achieve their dreams, and their dreams stay out on the horizon like a ship. But women never give up on their dreams, they make their dreams the truth and “act on them accordingly”. The narrator then goes onto give the example of Janie saying, “So the beginning of this was a woman” (Hurston 1). This made it easy for me to make the connection that since women never give up on their dreams, and that this book starts out with a woman, then it must be about a woman who never gives up on her dreams.

Later on in the book, I noticed the similarities in how both characters were treated with some invisibility, through the process of achieving their dreams. In Invisible Man, the narrator’s goal is to make an identity for himself, and by doing so he gets ridiculed. For example, in the Battle Royal scene, when the narrator was making a speech to share his thoughts on the advancement of African Americans, the white people there constantly laughed, interrupted, and asked to repeat information multiple times. The wealthy white men couldn’t care less on what the narrator was saying because he was invisible to them. Comparatively, in the first scene of Their eyes were watching God, Janie’s was struggling to achieve her dream of finding a man that she loved and could marry. That becomes the reason she leaves Tea Cake and walks alone through the town she lived in, wearing muddy overalls. Through this scene Janie is treated with invisibility, by being made fun of by the local residents, and talked about right tin front of her as if she’s another sub-human object. The only difference which I found here was that Janie was aware of her invisibility, where as in Invisible Man the narrator wasn’t.

Another similarity which I found through both novels so far, is that there have been strong forces, which the main characters become passive to. In Invisible Man, the narrator is naïve to the intentions of Bledsoe kicking him out of the school, and listens to his advice to go to Harlem and get some discipline. While in Their eyes were watching God, Janie becomes controlled by her Grandmother who forces her to marry Logan Killicks, even when Janie comes back protesting that she’s not in love and cannot keep her marriage.

It would be interesting to see how the end of Their eyes were watching God plays out, and if it’s similar in any way to Invisible Man, because I am still finding more similarities. For example, Janie recently is disillusioned with the thought that she has to stay in marriage with Logan, and marries Joe Starks instead –showing that she is still following her dreams--. This is just like in the Invisible Man when the narrator realizes through Bledsoe’s letter, that he was sent to Harem so that Bledsoe could get rid of him. From then on the narrator realizes the truths behind the forces he has been blind to, and I hope that, similarly, Janie overcomes whatever manipulative forces she encounters throughout the rest of the novel.

Mr. Norton and the Narrator's innocence

Through the discussions of Invisible Man I noticed how large of a change the narrator went through to achieve self-realization of invisibility. I immediately noticed the narrator’s intense awareness of his image to others in the end of the book, and found it funny to look back and see how innocent he was in the beginning. I specifically wanted to analyze the narrator’s innocence and how it was affected and encouraged by Mr. Norton’s innocence in the beginning of Invisible Man.

One of the more obvious scenes where the narrator and Mr. Norton’s innocence was exposed and ridiculed, was when the vet was treating Mr. Norton in the Golden Day. The vet comes into Mr. Norton’s room as this wise figure who can see the narrator’s and Mr. Norton’s blindness at first glimpse. The vet tries to test the extent of their blindness by telling Mr. Norton “To some you are the great white father, to others the lyncher of souls”. Stating that, to people like the narrator you are their savior and a godly figure that has money, power, and benevolence, but if you’re not blind you can see Mr. Norton’s ignorant destructiveness. The narrator, confused, then asks “What do you mean [Lyncher]?”, and to answer the question the vet shows how Mr. Norton is blind to his destructiveness.

He asks Mr. Norton why he’s interested in the school to which Mr. Norton replies, “I felt, and still feel, that your people are in some important manner tied to my destiny”, his destiny being his success. Then Mr. Norton states “I’ve watched it grow each year I’ve returned to the campus”. First of all whenever someone uses the words “your people” it never sounds good, in this case because he doesn’t know how to classify the group of people yet he wants to learn about them. Also Mr. Norton says that he’s “watched it grow each year [he’s] come back to the campus” in order to find out the how his success has grown through the success of black people, but he’s blinding himself because he’s blocking himself from the outskirts of campus where the real poverty is. Basically setting up a system that always leads to his destiny being successful because he’s checking the Campus where all the successful blacks are.

When the vet realizes that the narrator is confused by this, he goes on to ridicules the narrator because he’s so blind that he couldn’t even consider the possibility that Mr. Norton is misguided. So the vet goes on to making comments to Mr. Norton like, “He has eyes and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life” “He registers with his senses but short circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning”, and “Behold! A walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible”. So the narrator is just going along with the way things are, and even though he sees all these inequalities he doesn’t do anything about it because he’s so innocent. I also noticed that the vet says these comments in a rhetorical tone because he knows that they are both blind to each other, and there’s no use changing it, because like Bledsoe and the narrator’s grandfather said, there’s no use in changing the way things are you just have to keep running.

Ultimately, the narrator’s innocence is affected by Mr. Norton’s innocence because the narrator believes in Mr. Norton’s destiny being the success of people like him, and Mr. Norton depends on him for success. So in a sense their innocence complement each other, and keep each other running because they both believe in each other’s false ideals. One of the last thoughts I want to put out there is that, if you notice it, it’s interesting to see how in the beginning of the book the narrator’s surroundings are invisible to him, but in the end he becomes invisible to his surroundings, showing us both sides of the spectrum.

The importance of self-reliance and identity gained through Emerson

           When the Invisible man is sent out of college to go to Harlem, he is sent with seven letters of recommendations, but after a while he finds himself in a bad situation with one letter left. This letter is directed to Mr. Emerson whose son is a key factor towards the making the invisible man’s self-reliance.

            Now Mr. Emerson might not ring a bell in some readers’ minds, but because the author’s name is Ralph Ellison, and the invisible man is about to meet Mr. Emerson, I immediately put it together to get Ralph Waldo Emerson, a popular transcendentalist who taught of self-reliance. Additionally, because Emerson was the invisible Man’s last chance, it served as a metaphor to the invisible man’s last chance of gaining this self-reliance. Which he indirectly does so through the son of the man whom the author is comparing to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson’s son attempts to push the invisible man towards a path of self-reliance and identity when he reads the so called letter of recommendation and realizes the situation the invisible man is in.  Afterwards, Emerson realizes how naïve the he is, and tells the Invisible man, “To help you I must disillusion you”, but the invisible man is still clueless as to what is going on and totally confused. So when Emerson’s son sees this, he knows that it’s going to take more convincing for the invisible man to realize what scheme he’s a target of, so he shows him the letter. When the invisible man finishes reading the letter, Emerson’s son says “there’s no point in blinding yourself to the truth, don’t blind yourself” and immediately the invisible man got up “dazed” at the situation.

In result of the invisible man’s state of shock, I realized that he started to show emotions for the first time. For example, when the invisible man brings up the idea that maybe he was cheated out of the job “Suddenly [he] shook with anger”. Then when he thinks about how he fell for Bledsoe’s plan he “laughed and felt numb and weak”. These emotions, gained through this self-reliance, were the first signs I saw of the invisible man’s true identity, with the laughter implying that he has moved on from the naïve way he treated people in the past. Showing that he’s his own person now, not caring about what others think about him and not molding himself to be what others want him to be.

Overall in my opinion this chapter was the real turning point for the invisible man because he finally realized that throughout his whole life so far he was blinding himself from the inequalities and flaws in society, which was hurting him. His blindness being that he was constantly overlooking people and society because of the seriousness and ambition which he took upon life. Causing him to look at people solely for their position in society and race but not any deeper, which in result slowly made him subject to the corruptness of Bledsoe and society itself while he was still in his own world. For the most part I enjoyed this moment in the book and felt a sense of relief when he started showing his true identity, because I realized that it meant he was changing from the clueless, law abiding, and confused invisible man, to the self-reliant and independent invisible man. 

How Bigger Thomas’s social state affects his actions

Richard wright who portrays Bigger Thomas as the stereotypical black man living in the South Side of Chicago, shows the oppression and racism that Bigger has to experience every day. Through Native Son, I noticed how Wright implies that Bigger’s actions were a product of his (Bigger’s) trapped feeling in this white world, while giving a glimpse of how other upper class whites would confuse the meaning behind Bigger’s actions as a generalization of the evil nature in every black human being.

            These frequent little examples, in Native Son, which give Bigger this trapped feeling, almost become normal to the point where sometimes I passed them over, disregarding it. For example, in one of the first scenes of Native Son when Bigger walked out the door of his house for the first time, and saw a poster of Buckley with his “index finger pointed straight out to each passer-by” and written above “were tall red letters: YOU CAN’T WIN” (Wright, pg. 13), I saw the extent to which Bigger is oppressed, with the sign, as if it was waiting for him right outside his house, being a metaphor reminding Bigger that everywhere he goes, he has to follow the rules of what society tells him he should be.

            This constant pounding of oppression Bigger is receiving, has its effects and shows itself in one of the next scenes where Bigger is with his friends, Jack, G.H, and Gus. Immediately, I noticed how aggressive and dominant he tries to act around them, and at one point he even threatens Gus by putting the “tip of a blade into Gus’s shirt” (Wright, pg. 39). Initially when I read it, I thought to myself that Bigger just had some anger problems, and didn’t know how to control it. But I realized later on that there was more to it. He acted the way he did because when he’s around people of his own race, it’s the only time he can express his freedom showing them he can do what he wants, therefore convincing himself that he is living in a free world.

            On the other hand, when Bigger is around whites, he is noticeably humbler and conserved, almost a totally different person by saying as little as possible and following instructions. So it comes to him as a surprise when he is introduced to an energetic Mary Dalton, who tries to be empathetic to him by “respond[ing] to him as if he were human”. This attitude somehow makes Bigger feel even more trapped because he doesn’t know how to act when approached this way, so he’s not used to it. When he is in the car with Jan and Mary, he can either express all his feelings to them and comply, or act formal and humble, the way the country has taught him to act around white folks. Later on, this discomfort brings Bigger to kill Mary, and by doing, so he also breaks free of what people would think the stereotypical black male would do, “he had done something that even he though not possible” (Wright, pg. 106) and he enjoys that feeling of freedom he has, owning up to it.

            But what is of greater importance to this narrative, is what Max expresses in court. He tells the judge that this case is not solely Bigger’s fault, but that there were also some serious social aspects in his life that made him act the way he did. He says that “It was but a tiny aspect of what he had been doing all his life! He was living, only as he knew how” (Wright pg. 400), so Bigger was just a product of society and acted the only way he knew how to. Max goes onto say that if the larger problem of this court case isn’t solved, which is saving this racist society first, then there will be hundreds more Bigger Thomas’s in this world, and nothing is achieved in the long run by executing Bigger. Looking back on it, Mary Dalton was only trying to help this race problem and happened to start with Bigger, but Bigger didn’t realize and took it negatively because of the life he’s had, which taught him these irreversible tension between blacks and whites.