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"This Amazing, Troubling Book" by Toni Morrison

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"This Amazing, Troubling Book" by Toni Morrison

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Required Text

Toni Morrison analyzes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through her initial reaction she had to the book when reading it as a child. Her focus is on silences in the book that portray a message without the use of words. The history of African Americans and slaves is filled with silences by society. For a period of time after the Civil War, people didn't talk about slavery. They didn't talk about how even though slavery was abolished, they still treated African Americans as their slaves. Originally, nothing was said about the mistreatment of and discrimination against black people. Many people didn't see an issue with it, and those that did said nothing about it. During this time in history, the lack of voices and noise portrayed the content of white people with racism. Later in history when the silence began to fade, white people began to realize the wrong they had done and steps were taken to equalize blacks and whites. However, that equalization could only reach a certain point and the racism and discrimination still exists today. What's even more concerning is the silence about the racism against other minorities. A lot of the time, when you hear racism, you think of black people. But black people are not the only people that experience discrimination and I think that the silence about those people is staggering. That racism experienced by other people can be seen in another source called "What Kind of Asian Are You". As Americans, we don't think about how truly racist we are in terms of the entire world and not just the black population. Even in this project about racism within America, the majority of the suggested and required texts are about black racism. There still exists a quietness or a hush, hush attitude about racism within America; It's just not about the racism we think it is.

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"How to Raise a Black Son in America" by Clint Smith

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"How to Raise a Black Son in America" by Clint Smith

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TED Talk

Clint Smith summarizes that as a child growing up, his parents had to teach him how to understand the realities of the world while never accepting the status quo as inevitable. This was a purposeful form of education that his parents, and parents of black children, have to teach their children at a very young age. In doing so, parents have to take away certain aspects of their childrens' childhood, just to keep them safe. As a child, all you want to do is run around with your friends and have fun. In the moment, you don't worry about how what you are doing might look. But for black boys in America, their parents have to teach them they do have to worry. They can't do the same things that their white friends can do. A lot of times, because they're black, the same exact action can look "dangerous". For example, a water gun fight in a parking lot at night can quickly turn into the death of a young black boy playing with his white friends. As parents, you live with the fear that your child will be in danger. For black parents however, that fear is constant and amplified. The fear causes them to strip away basic childhood activities. Black children can no longer act like real children anymore. They can't be the naive, giddy, carefree kid that white children get to be. Too quickly, black children have to grow up and learn how to be smart so that they can be safe. This connects to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because Huck also has to grow up quickly and shed his innocent, childish skin. To escape Pap's abusive wrath, Huck has to learn how to be smart and live on his own. He has to see the reality of the situation and deal with it. The difference is that Huck is only protecting himself from his father. Black children in America have to protect themselves from a society that is too eager to assume the worst of them.

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Clint Smith: How to raise a black son in America

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As kids, we all get advice from parents and teachers that seems strange, even confusing. This was crystallized one night for a young Clint Smith, who was playing with water guns in a dark parking lot with his white friends. In a heartfelt piece, the poet paints the scene of his father's furious and fearful response.

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Short Film

Gabourey Sidibe's short film combines themes of police brutality and family to tackle the major topic of racism. The narrator of the film is the mother of successful black young adult who was murdered due to police brutality. This film combines the aspects I discussed within "How to Raise a Black Son in America" and [Brave New Voices]Philly: "Sean Bell". The narrator creates a video talking about the injustices of the American police system. She outlines it as not just a black vs. white problem, but an everybody problem. Because an unjust justice system should be of concern to everybody. I think she's absolutely right. An unjust justice system is just for white people today, but what about tomorrow? It's not a major concern for white people because it doesn't discriminate against them right now, only black people. But if tables were turned and white people were the ones experiencing the racism, it would be their problem. So really, its injustice should be everyone's problem. But when she says it's not a black vs. white problem, it's everybody's problem, I think that can apply to racism in all aspects of our society. The issue is that we see it as black vs. white. The races constantly in conflict and disagreement over whether or not racism exists where. But what we should be doing is working together to fix the problems. Most of the racism and conflict exists because it is black vs. white. If these barriers are broken down and we just accept all people as equal and the same, despite their skin color, there wouldn't be so much violence. In the case of police brutality, the white police officer is pinned against the black "criminal". And that's how it's viewed and televised. Why can't it just be the police officer and a criminal. Why is the color of their skin even relevant. It's only relevant because we make it that way. At the beginning of the film, the mother says it's time for a revolution. It's time for black people to stand up for themselves and force equal rights. This shows a step backwards in our society because black people shouldn't feel like the only way they can end racism is through violence. Black people already had to fight for their rights. The fact that they feel they have to again shows that America has not gone forwards in combating racism, but in fact very far back.

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Gabourey Sidibe is no stranger to telling the stories of marginalized women. Since rocketing to worldwide fame for her Oscar-nominated performance in 2009's Precious, the 34-year-old actor has been breaking barriers with roles on mega-hit shows ranging from Difficult People to American Horror Story. This year, she added "author" to her long resume, penning a memoir about her tumultuous childhood and tenacious Hollywood rise, This Is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare. Now, Sidibe has teamed up with Refinery29's Shatterbox Anthology for her directorial debut, The Tale Of Four - a poignant call to action for the Black Lives Matter generation.

Inspired by Nina Simone's haunting 1966 song, " Sidibe's film bravely captures the harrowing realities of the mothers, daughters, and undaunted revolutionaries fighting back against police brutality and the specter of mass incarceration. Studded with a powerhouse cast including her Empire co-star, Jussie Smollett, The Tale Of Four premiered to rave reviews this past June at the Nantucket Film Festival, cementing Sidibe's status as a fresh directorial voice to be reckoned with.

Weaving together narratives from female activists, sexual assault survivors, and the children of imprisoned moms, the film resonates as a portrait of contemporary American society still infected by the racism elegized by Simone over 50 years ago. But if the brave women of Sidibe's short seem doomed to have to fight the same cruelties and prejudices perpetrated against Black bodies for centuries, their fearless honesty also echoes the hope that things might finally start to change. "As I do with most things I'm afraid of, I talk about them, make them audible, hoping that addressing the fear will alleviate it," Sidibe told Refinery29 earlier this year. "That's what the film is about: addressing it, saying it out loud, and hoping that through sharing my fear and my outrage that it will cause more outrage and more fear."

An unflinching look at the everyday trauma endured by people of color in this country, The Tale Of Four feels as heartbreakingly familiar as it is enduringly relevant. Catch the film above.

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Why Gabourey Sidibe Took On THIS Urgent Issue In Her Directorial Debut

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Gabourey Sidibe is no stranger to telling the stories of marginalized women. Since rocketing to worldwide fame for her Oscar-nominated performance in 2009's Precious, the 34-year-old actor has been breaking barriers with roles on mega-hit shows ranging from Difficult People to American Horror Story.

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Slam Poetry

"Niggers and spicks, the only trash on the street that talks. So don't call it police brutality, call it sanitation." This is one of the quotes made by the man pretending to be the white policeman. The man pretending to be Sean Bell tells the audience how he became voiceless when the bullets shot through his heart. Voiceless to protest the 50 shots aimed towards his chest. And when the white policeman says so many black people are filling our prisons that we can't tell the difference between escaped prisoners and black men, it's clear that the aim of this slam poetry is to comment on police brutality and racial profiling. Despite protests by many policemen, racial profiling is a real factor in investigations. However only if the suspect is black or of any other race besides white. Because the assumption made is that all black people look the same so everyone is a suspect, and therefore police brutality becomes self defense. The racist policemen thought they were shooting at an armed suspect just because he was black and looked slightly similar to the real suspect. There are so many cases of police brutality within our country that it is illogical to believe there isn't something else going on. As black people see it, "they're trying to put us on the endangered species list." Black people hide from policemen because they're afraid for their lives. No matter what your truth about police brutality is, the fact is that fear exists. If an entire race fears the people that are supposed to protect them, hides and cowers away when certain people drive by, racism exists. Whether or not real injustice against the black race is still present in our society, black people feel endangered. That fear cannot be taken away from them, and because we, as white people, don't experience that same fear, we have no right to say racism doesn't still exist. However, we still feel the need to comment on the subject and how black people have overreactions to everything. Until the white race has developed the history and experiences black people go through everyday, we cannot deny that reactions to discrimination and racism are unwarranted. Because as a race we do this, our society has taken steps backwards in dealing with racism.

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Russell Simmons presents Brave New Voices All over the United States, a new generation of poets is emerging. This new HBO series captures teenagers picking up the pen and taking hold of the microphone with passion, intelligence, creativity, honesty and power.

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"Let's Talk About Racism in Schools" by Rick Wormeli

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"Let's Talk About Racism in Schools" by Rick Wormeli

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Scholarly Article

The topic of this article is how to talk to kids in grade school about racism. One of the main points made is on the childrens' natural instinct to categorize people by their differences. As a young person, you tend to hang out with and become friends with other people that share similarities with you. It's easy to think negatively about people that don't share similarities with you. For example, someone that listens to smooth jazz might think their neighbor that listens to hard rock is annoying. In making these negative conclusions, the people isolate themselves from really understanding what the dissimilar people are really like. Because of the isolation, people who are different jump to conclusions and stereotypes for identification purposes. So that guy that listens to smooth jazz might say his neighbor that listens to hard rock does drugs and lives a risky lifestyle. Obviously, just because someone listens to hard rock doesn't mean that their lifestyle is dangerous. But when this idea of categorization and differentiation us applied to skin color, stereotypes become the truth while discrimination and prejudice take place. Because children normally have been placed into situations where this categorization has already taken place, (the communities they live in) they are raised in an environment where the production and acceptance of stereotypes and racism are inevitable.

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"Confronting Maine's Racism" by the Kennebec Journal

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"Confronting Maine's Racism" by the Kennebec Journal

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Scholarly Article

Through this article, the author is trying to comment on recent racist comments made by Paul LePage and shows a slight bias to the right. However, the author still makes a good point about the history of racism in Maine. Maine is a predominantly white state and has very little exposure to any other cultures besides its own. Because of this, racism has made itself comfortable in the mindset of many Mainers. This is because as a state, there is such little exposure to black culture or other cultures from around the world. For example, growing up in a public school, we don't learn much about racism. We don't learn about the KKK, we barely touch on the black rights' movement, and we've never been taught the role Maine has played in some unspeakably racist events. There are major silences about racism in the Maine public education system. Unlike the silences I talked about in This Amazing, Troubling Book, the silences in our culture also relate to black culture and not just other minorities. This failure to educate the upcoming generations of Maine have caused the state to become a breeding ground for bigoted people. The resulting racism however, is not necessarily of the malicious nature. This racism is based on ignorance and not understanding. As the whitest state, Mainers are not racists because of supremacist or bigoted philosophies, but they're racist because of misunderstandings and lack of exposure. But these can be accounted for the absence of attempts to truly understand.

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"Most Americans Think Their Own Group Faces Discrimination" by Joe Neel

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"Most Americans Think Their Own Group Faces Discrimination" by Joe Neel

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Article

This article shows a series of poll results conducted to show discrimination within the United States. Through these polls, it's shown that successful black people (yearly income of $75,000 or more) experience the most discrimination out of all income levels. To me, this seems backwards as to what I thought it would be. Successful black people overcame the stereotype of black people always being poor and not having a future. So I figured people would actually treat them with more respect. However, I think that because of the typical stereotype of a black person, and because they don't fit that stereotype, people are more likely to discriminate against them. White people think that they are entitled to everything, and that the world revolves around them. They're taught that they are always right too. This is just how society raises them. So when these stereotypes about black people form and someone comes along to disprove them, they get defensive. They think that something must be wrong with this person because they aren't like what white people said they'd be like. Because of this, those successful black people get discriminated against to prove to the white people that they do fit the stereotype.

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Majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people's daily lives, according to a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The poll asked a wide range of questions about where Americans experience discrimination - from the workplace to the doctor's office - and people's perception of it. The groups polled include whites, blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and LGBTQ adults.

White Americans are among those who feel their group is discriminated against, with 55 percent saying discrimination exists against whites in the U.S. today.

These results are part of a large national statistically representative survey of 3,453 adults from Jan. 26 to Apr. 9.

We will be releasing the full results of the poll over the next several weeks, starting Tuesday with results from the survey of African-Americans. We will highlight and analyze the particular acts of discrimination that each group experiences.

The African-American results, in 802 adults, provide insight into the historically high levels of discrimination blacks have faced since arriving in America. These experiences happen across a broad range of situations: interacting with police; applying for jobs or seeking promotions; trying to rent an apartment or buy a home; or going to a doctor or health clinic.

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The findings on African-Americans have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

The perceptions of discrimination are not primarily based in actions by institutions, as some might expect. "Most African-Americans believe that discrimination is due to the attitudes of individuals that they interact with," says Robert Blendon, the poll's director and professor of policy and political analysis at the Harvard Chan School. "A smaller share believes it's actually government or institutional policies."

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Fear of discrimination, possibly triggered by past encounters, plays out in different ways. We found that this fear significantly influences people's decisions whether to seek medical care, to call the police when in need, and even whether to drive or attend social events. Nearly one-third (32 percent) of African-Americans polled said they have personally experienced racial discrimination when going to the doctor or a health clinic, with 22 percent avoiding care out of fear of discrimination.

"If someone is avoiding seeking medical care out of fear of discrimination, they're at risk of going undiagnosed for serious conditions," says Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "We know that repeated stress from discrimination and racism can actually make some of those conditions more likely in the first place and shorten lives."

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And repeated stress comes from many kinds of discrimination and the fear it engenders. Numerous studies have shown that African-Americans are more likely to be stopped by police compared with other racial groups. In the poll, 60 percent of people told us that they or a family member have been unfairly stopped or mistreated by police because they are black.

That has consequences for them personally and across society - 31 percent of poll respondents say fear of discrimination has led them to avoid calling the police when in need. And 61 percent say police are more likely to use force on a person who is African-American than on a white person in the same situation.

Where people live can make a big difference, too. Our survey found that 64 percent of blacks live in non-majority-black areas. For these people, perceptions of local discrimination, opportunity, police and government and community environment were generally better when compared with majority-black areas, sometimes by wide margins.

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Our poll found substantial numbers of African-Americans who say they have been slurred or have been the target of insensitive or offensive comments or negative assumptions. A story later in our series will explore the split by income and gender in the chart below.

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Persistently higher premature death rates in blacks compared with whites was one of the issues that inspired this poll and series. The most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that gap at 16 percent, even though it has narrowed since 1999, when death rates for blacks from all causes were 33 percent higher than whites.

Many factors play into the gap, including a considerable drop in crime rates involving African-Americans over that period and improved access to medical care for many people. What we're trying to explore with our "You, Me and Them" series and poll is how the stress-inducing experiences of discrimination in everyday life affect health.

"Over 200 black people die prematurely every single day in America, in part because of racism in society," says David Williams, a professor of public health at the Harvard Chan School who has pioneered work in the field of racial disparities in health care. "This poll helps us see where we need to take action to address the problem."

The poll was conducted in the first quarter of 2017. A final report discussing major highlights from the series will be released in December.

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Poll: Most Americans Think Their Own Group Faces Discrimination

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Majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people's daily lives, according to a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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The N-Word: An Interactive Project to Explore a Singular Word by the Washington Post

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The N-Word: An Interactive Project to Explore a Singular Word by the Washington Post

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Required Text

Through this source, it can be concluded that the n-word doesn't have as much meaning as it once did. A lot of the older generations still hold this word on a derogatory level and see how hateful and malicious it is while the younger generations have so much more ease in saying it, and almost see it as part of their slang. This shows how people have maybe taken some steps backwards in terms of race because as a society, the n-word used to not be used. People understood the spite it held and hatred it represented. But now, teenagers and even adults feel like it's okay to use the n-word since they don't understand what it really means to African Americans and their history. This source relates to the interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates because both sources show that white people, especially younger generations, don't have a true understanding of the impact of the n-word and why it's really not okay to say if you aren't black.

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Explore perspectives.
Select three to see a custom video.

Start your own conversation

Add a question or use one of the submitted questions to start a conversation with your social network. (Note: The n-word has not been filtered from submissions.)

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n-word; donte stallworth; neal brennan; dave chappelle show; nfl; national football leagues bans nword; nfl bans the nword; nigger; nigga; nigger vs nigga; kkk; ku klux klan; jay z; oprah;

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The n-word: An interactive project exploring a singular word

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After the National Football League made the controversial decision to ban the n-word on the field this year, a team of Washington Post journalists explored the history of the word, its evolution and its place in American vernacular today.

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"What kind of Asian Are You" by Alex Dang

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"What kind of Asian Are You" by Alex Dang

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Slam Poetry

Throughout the slam poetry, Dang presents us with many stereotypes of Asians. There are so many ridiculous and unrealistic stereotypes about different races and ethnicities that are just completely wrong. By grouping for example, all Asians together under these stereotypes, we're taking away their sense of self-identity. If so many Americans are telling Asian people about Asian culture and what it means to be Asian, despite being completely wrong, the Asians will be confused about who they really are. This is because a giant group of people are telling them one thing about their culture when they know something else. Most of the stereotypes are also very offensive so Asians start to associate shame with their culture or race. Through this stereotyping, the true Asian culture is muddled and Asians are not seen for who they truly are, aside from being Asian. This stereotyping relates to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through morality and Jim. Over the course of the novel, Huck develops his sense of morality and realizes that Jim isn't how he expected him to be. Huck is able to overcome the typical black slave stereotype and see Jim as who he really is and not just a slave, but a friend. If people like Huck can look past the color of other people's skin and realize that stereotypes do not define others, people like Alex wouldn't feel so ashamed of their culture. Huck could teach people a lesson in not categorizing others into generic boxes so that stereotypes don't arise anymore.

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Alex Dang (Ft. Alex Dang) - What Kind of Asian are You?

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So he said to me: "What kind of Asian are you?" / And I said back: / That's a loaded question. / What kind of Asian do you EXPECT me to be? / Because any way you slice that egg

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"When Every Word Doesn't Belong to Everyone" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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"When Every Word Doesn't Belong to Everyone" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Video

Ta-Nehisi says that white people can gain a lot of insight from refraining from using the n-word because they get to feel just a tiny, tiny piece of what it means to be black. Because to be black today means you will always experience discrimination at moments in your life. There will always be things that you want to join in on or do that you can't because you're black. White people feel they should be able to say the n-word and they want to use it. But by not using it, they slightly get to see how African Americans live their whole life. However, not all white people refrain from using it. Many white people actually do still use it, and that shows how America has taken a step backwards in terms of race. Because the fact that white people use the excuse, "Well that's racist against me if I can't use the n-word", shows how little understanding white culture has of the impact of the history of that word and what it means to the black community. Although some generations have an understanding that it's not okay to say, most don't. It's the younger generations that are the ones that don't understand, so that means there are only more generations of misunderstanding to come. If the future generations of our society are the ones with the misunderstandings, society will only go backwards in dealing with racism.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates just explained why white people shouldn't use the n-word in the perfect way

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