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Cedric Jennings, the main character of Ron Suskind’s novel A Hope in the Unseen is an anomaly at Ballou Senior High School, an inner city public school of Washington, D.C. Raised by a single mother on a measly salary from the Department of Agriculture, Cedric is accustomed to working hard for everything he receives in life. An honors student and participant of Ballou’s special science and math program, Cedric dreams of pursuing education as a means to escape D.C. and carve out a better life for himself. Being a star pupil in a poorly performing school that scorns academic achievement is no easy role to play. Viewing the Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an imperative step on his path towards a new life, he is shocked to find himself drowning in the work and competition around him. Cedric is surprised to find solace in returning to Ballou. After receiving admission to Brown University, Cedric feels he has finally proven himself to all of his naysayers and earned a ticket out of D.C. In his new Brown environment, Cedric struggles to adjust to the intense diversity and intelligence surrounding him. Although it takes the majority of his freshman year, eventually Cedric finds his own niche at Brown and transforms into a man capable of caring for his beloved mother. A Hope in the Unseen offers itself as a lens through which to examine sociological themes. Specifically, education, social deviance, religion and their respective implications can be thoroughly analyzed through the pertinent events of Cedric’s journey.…
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his classroom, Helene Tucker. Head over heels over this girl he would do anything to impress her. He’d wash his uniform every night and go to school just to see her whether his uniform would dry during the night or not. However his financial instability did prove to be a hinderance. His empty stomach would cause him not to pay attention in class and have the teacher label him as dumb in front of the class, making him sit in the “idiot’s seat”, and blaming him for trouble other students would cause. This did…
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After a Fieldtrip reunion with other 5 east LA schools, Paula realizes and recognizes the intense difference between the Hispanic and white schools. After that encounter, Paula becomes involved with a student activism group that demanded equality of all LA schools.…
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Eric Foner argues, in Give Me Liberty, that former slaves' definition of freedom mirrored that of white Americans. In The Souls of Black Folk, the author, W. E. B. De Bois supports this argument. De Bois says blacks just wanted to be treated the same as the white man. They wanted to be accepted into society, instead of discriminated against because of the color of their skin. De Bois states, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”1 De Bois goes on to say this is the problem that caused the Civil War. De Bois explains, “Negro slavery was the real cause of the problem.”2…
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For example, Luvenia, Tommy's aunt wanted to pursue her dream of going to college in Chicago during 1930 and has enough credit to get her high school diploma, but she gets stopped by Ms. Etta, " You finished the colored school and you are smart, but they don't let that many colored people in their college. They don’t want us over there" (Myers 146). This micro setting shows the conflict because segregation was a…
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W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”, introduces “the veil” and “double-consciousness” as two concepts that describe the typical Black experience in America. The concepts gave a name to the agony that many African-Americans felt but could not express. The concept of “the veil” refers to three things. The 1st veil refers to the dark skin of Blacks, which is a physical distinction from whiteness. The 2nd veil refers to a white person’s ability to clearly see Blacks as real Americans. The 3rd veil refers to Black person’s ability to clearly see themselves outside of the description that White America prescribes for them.…
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On one side Dubois never grew up as a slave and he had his education given to him. He never had to go without. He was the top of his class and everyone expected greatness from him. He graduated from Fisk University, Harvard University, and University of Berlin. “He studied with some of the…
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The poem I would like to write about from W.E.B Du Bois is called “The Song of the Smoke”. This particular poem relates to double-consciousness in a myriad of ways, I say this because the double-consciousness, in Du Bois, pointed in a direction to the African American person itself, you can say, who was both conscious of their African heritage and his American heritage. While W.E.B Du Bois wants to be both, the two parts clashes against…
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In Du Bois' "Forethought" to his essay collection, The Souls of Black Folk, he entreats the reader to receive his book in an attempt to understand the world of African Americans—in effect the "souls of black folk." Implicit in this appeal is the assumption that the author is capable of representing an entire "people." This presumption comes out of Du Bois' own dual nature as a black man who has lived in the South for a time, yet who is Harvard-educated and cultured in Europe. Du Bois illustrates the duality or "two-ness," which is the function of his central metaphor, the "veil" that hangs between white America and black; as an African American, he is by definition a participant in two worlds. The form of the text makes evident the author's duality: Du Bois shuttles between voices and media to express this quality of being divided, both for himself as an individual, and for his "people" as a whole. In relaying the story of African-American people, he relies on his own experience and voice and in so doing creates the narrative. Hence the work is as much the story of his soul as it is about the souls of all black folk. Du Bois epitomizes the inseparability of the personal and the political; through the text of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois straddles two worlds and narrates his own experience.…
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His go to and residency in the South was Du Bois' first involvement with Southern prejudice, which at the time included Jim Crow laws, extremism, concealment of dark voting, and lynching’s; the lattermost achieved a crest in the following decade. After getting a four-year college education from Fisk, he went to Harvard School (which did not acknowledge course credits from Fisk) from 1888 to 1890, where he was unequivocally impacted by his teacher William James, noticeable in American rationality. Du Bois paid his way through three years at Harvard with cash from summer employments, a legacy, grants, and credits from companions. In 1890, Harvard recompensed Du Bois his second four-year college education, cum laude, ever. In 1891, Du Bois got a grant to go to the human science graduate school at…
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One central idea in “Our Spiritual Strivings” is self-consciousness. Dubois states that “true self- consciousness” is something African Americans don’t have because they are forced to see themselves through the eyes of white people, that African Americans need to know themselves on their own terms instead of white world terms, and that this recognition of their own value is necessary for the attainment of respect for the “ideal of human brotherhood”.…
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Educated Blacks could afford certain luxuries that other Blacks could not. This would not be in the best interest of the community because communities needed a sense of unity, especially Black communities during that time. Du Bois thought that educated Blacks had a duty to pass their education and awareness to other Blacks so they can progress past the oppression that whites placed upon…
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According to Du Bois the prejudices of white people elicit “self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals” among black people (Edles and Appelrouth 354). The internalization of anti-black sentiment from the outside world thus begins to shape the black American experience. Through the concept double consciousness DuBois becomes better able to explore the social problems he studied in his earlier work “The Philadelphia Negro”.…
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The set-up for the beginning of the story describes the narrator’s social status. It appears that when the narrator was young, she came from a low income family, her mother states: “You gonna go there and learn about the whole world” (Jones 29). The mother says these words as if she was aiming for her child to achieve a great goal, the narrator says: “For as many Sundays as I can remember, perhaps even Sundays when I was in her womb, my mother has pointed across I street to Seaton…” (Jones 29).This indicates that it was her mother’s dream to initiate her daughter’s studies in what she believed was the best school. A parent of higher income would not dream to send his or her child to a high class school; the parent would just do it. Also, the narrator gives an in-depth description of the preparation that she endures as her mother attempts to perfect her appearance, wanting to make the impression that her daughter belongs at school, and does not deserve a life in poverty. Furthermore, the narrator gives another hint of her past social status when she says: “I am learning this about my mother: The higher up on the scale of respectability a person is-and teachers are rather high up in her eyes- the less she is liable to let them push her around” (Jones 29). If the narrator’s mother considers teachers to…
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To grasp an understanding of the Southern States of America is something that Edward L. Ayers argues is hard to achieve: “When they speak of 'Southern culture' they are creating a fiction...as The South's defenders claim, it is not easily understood by outsiders; as its critics claim, it is apparently not understood much better by its resident defenders.”1 This might be the case, however, it is the experiences, although they might differ from one another, that contribute to an understanding of the South. When focusing on the racial aspects in Southern culture, it is an essential aspect in understanding the South as racism due to the legacy of slavery was still very much present in the early twentieth century. Therefore, Zora Neala Hurston perhaps deviant experience to other African Americans, reflected in her essay 'How it Feels to be Colored Me', illustrates the different issues that play in Southern society. Hurston's essay 'is an essay that highlights the author's experience of being African American in the South and in American in general and shows her pride in being the person that she is.…
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