English 101
Your midterm essays are due this week. Please be sure to watch all videos, read all of the materials in the modules, and complete all readings in order to do your very best on the exam. There is no set page limit or word count, but you must feel as though you have answered as completely as possible, including as many examples from The Bluest Eye, Imitation of Life, The Littlest Rebel, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and one of the visuals as you can. Include many specific examples to prove your points. No outside research is necessary. Remember to paraphrase the quote provided in the question (choose one) and answer the questions below the quote. Give the context for the quote and tell me what is happening at that point in the novel. Use both paraphrase and direct quotes from the readings to support your points. Quiz #3 on MK is also due.
Before taking the exam:
Week 4 4-Page Essay INTRODUCTIONS AND EVIDENCE
7/6-7/12 “Writing Introductions” Chapter 12: pp. 197-206 (Older edition: Chapter 13: pp, 223-232)
“Prove It!: The Five Types Of Evidence” Chapter 11: pp.187-196 (Older edition: Chapter 12: pp. 207-214)
Read MLK, “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”: please see publisher supplement. Also available online: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.)
Listen to link about the “I Have a Dream” speech from YouTube:
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” Speech | History (Links to an external site.)
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” Speech | History
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP4iY1TtS3s
Watch my video lecture on Martin Luther King in Modules.
Quiz #3 due online by Sunday.
MIDTERM: 4-page ESSAY due Sunday.
Essay on all readings through Week 4, due online. I will ask you to think about topics that have come up in class from the readings we have read so far and tie them together into a 4-page essay. Please be sure to watch the class lecture videos before you take the Essay Exam.
Before taking the exam: Read in The West Guide: Chapter 20: “In-Class Essay Exam Strategies” (pp. 339-348).
Good luck!! I can’t wait to read your essays.
ANSWER
Children are more vulnerable to the harsh realities if an environment that does not nurture them. Works for literature from Toni Morrison in ‘The Bluest Eye’ (1970) and Martin King Luther Jr. in ‘The Letter from Birmingham Jail’ support this sentiment through their characters and series of events. Children are not protected from their harsh environments and the realities that come with it and the people tasked with the responsibilities to take care of them, terrible fall short. They are subjected to emotional, physical and even sexual abuse in their very young ages and the consequences of this are further abuse. In this essay, using the two pieces of literature, the concept of innocence and purity embedded with racial identity and whiteness as the pinnacle of beauty will be applied to show how often society fails in the role of protecting its youth from the harshness and cruelty of the world.
We meet Pecola in ‘The Bluest Eyes’. Her life is difficult and constantly rages in between fear, uncertainty and unpleasantness. In comparison, others in the novel like the MacTeer girls seem happy and well taken care of by their protective, loving and caring parents. Pecola’s story becomes the mark of the theme, loss of innocence. Her father is abusive and as the story goes on, her father in a drunken state full of love and lust rapes her at the age of eleven. As if that is not enough, her father burns down their house and she is left homeless. The narrator, Claudia, describes Pecola saying that she was, “a girl who had no place to go” further indicating, “that old Dog Breedlove had burned up his house, gone upside his wife’s head, and everybody, as a result, was outdoors. Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life” (Morrison 1970). In addition to what her father did to her, Pecola is constantly abused by society. It affects how she perceives herself where she feels ugly, poor and black, all which she understands to be the most terrible properties for a girl.
The idea that beauty is subject to race, and that white girls with blue eyes are the epitome of prettiness, Pecola labels herself as ugly and undeserving. Society plays an important role in her perceptions, for instance, in school, Claudia says that “when one of the girls at school wanted to be particularly insulting to a boy or wanted to get immediate response from a boy, she could say ‘Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove” (Morrison 1970). That the biggest insult among her peers is being associated with Pecola. It goes much to show Pecola’s alienation and societal disregard. She goes out looking for blue eyes believing that they would make her prettied and eventually she starts to slide off in a dark mental state. “Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright”, the narrator says (Morrison 1970). For crimes that none belonged to her, she is blamed, ridiculed and ignored and her innocence snatched away.
Martin Luther King Jr. described a scene of police dogs attacking children and teenagers while being pinned down on the walls by the force of fire hoses (King 1964). These are the events that surround protests by the civil rights movement against segregation. Even more than the actual cruelty that was been done on children, King’s biggest disappointment was the division created among the Negros. One type that has surrendered and lost their sense of ‘somebodiness’ and the other that was bitter and filled with hate and thought of the white man as the devil. King explains that he had tried to stand in between the two forces saying that he knew for certain that “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever” (King 1964). To King, children being brought up with their own ‘somebodiness’ is more fatal because it is robbed the children of their pride. He talks of a five-year-old son asking questions like, “Daddy, why do white people treat coloured people so mean?” (King 1964). And a six-year-old daughter who cannot go to a park advertised on the television because of her skin colour and suddenly, “depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people” (King 1964). His notions go towards expressing the loss of innocence of children by merely the fact that they were black which he sees as the biggest failure any society can experience.
Children have a right to right to be protected from the harsh realities of the world. This particularly refers to things and situations they are not responsible for like simply being born black. The illustration painting shows a group of five children. Two of the children, coloured and with a cat, on one side and three others, white and with a dog, on the other side. It seems as if the two coloured kids are new to the neighbourhood with a truck behind them containing furniture that is being unloaded, or loaded. The major idea of the illustration is the demeanour of the children. The white kids seemed amused by the skin colour of the black kids. The two animals in the illustration show the wide range of disparity among the two sets of kids. This perfectly represents what King talked about, the initial discovery that a child is different from the rest and that his or her race is associated with inferiority. Were it a depiction of Morrison’s novel, the black girl in the illustration would perceive her blackness as a problem and wish for lighter skin and blue eyes like the white children.
In a society that is more cautious about its children, people should only be judged from the actions they take and not their birth properties like being black. The two pieces of literature carefully demonstrate the state of society in the previous century. The concept of innocence and purity embedded with racial identity and whiteness as the pinnacle of beauty is applied to show how often society fails in the role of protecting its youth from the harshness and cruelty of the world.
References
King Jr, M. L. (1964). from Letter from Birmingham Jail. Liberating Faith: Religious voices for justice, peace, & ecological wisdom, 177-187.
Morrison, T. (1994). The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York, 751-59.
