scholarly journals The Blue Eyes vs Untrue Ideas: A Postcolonial Critique of Pecola’s Persistence to Fit in the White American Society in The Bluest Eye

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
A.K.M. Aminur Rashid
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
White American ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
The North ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
American Society ◽  
Blue Eyes

Set in Ohio, the north side of America, the tone in The Bluest Eye features post-colonial treatment to its central character, Pecola Breedlove. This paper discusses how she experiences a sense of being completely ruined after she is raped by her father, and her quest for the blue eyes meets merely untrue ideas. The plot, as described in the paper, provides a post-colonial background of two racial conflicts regarding the blackness, and the white beauty in America. This paper critically draws on the idea of physical whiteness as being the only American standard of beauty while Pecola’s physical ugliness draws on how black people get seriously marginalized for their blackness of their own bodies. The storyline progresses to show how Pecola‟s tragedy becomes the central theme regarding the issue of seeing, and of being seen. The paper presents a binary opposite through the portrayal of black Pecola on one side, and Mary Janes, or Shirley Temple on the other. Consequently, the conflicts meet hardly any positive solution. Pecola receives exactly the behavior that the black slaves were used to receive from the whites in the past. From the historical perspective, The United States experienced inequality between the whites, and the blacks at that time when Morrison wrote this novel. She saw that the black race got segregated from the whites in the case of superiority. Racial tension also influenced the children in the schools, where the black ones were ridiculed there. However, the acceptance of the fair skin, actually, tormented black people both psychologically, and left a scar on them like Pecola Breedlove experiences.

scholarly journals ART AS OTHER COLLECTIVES

eTopia ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Davis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
The North ◽  
Common Structure ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
Summer Homes ◽  
A Site ◽  
First Time

Art and nature, art in nature, share a common structure: that of excessive and useless production—production for its own sake, production for the sake of profusion and differentiation. (Grosz 2008: 9)In 1986, artist Lily Yeh was asked by her friend, acclaimed dancer Arthur Hall, to transform the abandoned lot next to his house. He had seen the indoor gardens that she had created in galleries, and asked if she could do a similar project outdoors. When Yeh first entered the North Philadelphia neighbourhood of Fairhill-Hartranft, it was nothing like the neighbourhood she would leave in 2004. Walking down the streets for the first time she saw many adults with suspicious faces staring at her as she made her way past abandoned lot, after abandoned lot. Broken glass in boarded up doorways were the gathering places for people with nowhere else to go. Children played with whatever was lying around; hollering mothers worried about what they were picking up. The lines of poverty and racism, the systematic marginalization and neglect of (primarily) black people in the United States, resulted in the overdetermined positioning of the so-called‘inner-city ghetto.’These lines of death were produced through the conjunctions of policy, brutality, racism and poverty that resulted in a territorialization of this place as a site of crime, violence, drug addiction and hopelessness. But at the beginning of the 20th century, this neighbourhood was the site of summer homes, known for its fields of strawberries. It was then refashioned into a bustling heart of manufacturing, the fields were paved over, and the taste of strawberries turned to burning plastics. The depression hit. Factories began to close, leaving nothing in their wake but a faint rancid smell and contaminated soil. The neighbourhood transformed, riding a wave of white flight and racial tension. People rose up, spoke out and refused to suffer any longer, but in the turmoil, in their anger, they burned the neighbourhood. More suffering, but this time there was simply a feeling of abandonment, hopelessness, stagnation. The policies of the Reagan years left their effect. Lots collected garbage. And so it was that Yeh found herself in North Philadelphia.

scholarly journals Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-112
Author(s):  
Catherine O’Donnell
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
American Society ◽  
British Colonies

Abstract From Eusebio Kino to Daniel Berrigan, and from colonial New England to contemporary Seattle, Jesuits have built and disrupted institutions in ways that have fundamentally shaped the Catholic Church and American society. As Catherine O’Donnell demonstrates, Jesuits in French, Spanish, and British colonies were both evangelists and agents of empire. John Carroll envisioned an American church integrated with Protestant neighbors during the early years of the republic; nineteenth-century Jesuits, many of them immigrants, rejected Carroll’s ethos and created a distinct Catholic infrastructure of schools, colleges, and allegiances. The twentieth century involved Jesuits first in American war efforts and papal critiques of modernity, and then (in accord with the leadership of John Courtney Murray and Pedro Arrupe) in a rethinking of their relationship to modernity, to other faiths, and to earthly injustice. O’Donnell’s narrative concludes with a brief discussion of Jesuits’ declining numbers, as well as their response to their slaveholding past and involvement in clerical sexual abuse.

scholarly journals Evangelizing White Americans: Sacrifice, Race, and a Korean Mission Movement in America

Open Theology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kim
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
White Americans ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
White American ◽  
American Society ◽  
Korean Missionaries ◽  
Mission Movement

AbstractThis paper examines the phenomena of non-western missionaries evangelizing in the West through a case study of a Korean mission movement in the United States. It discusses how Korean missionaries of color were able to evangelize white Americans in the late 1970s and have had some success in crossracial evangelism. It argues that Korean missionaries practiced a theology of sacrifice to evangelize white Americans. They practically embraced suffering, self-denial, and service and specialized in sacrifice to evangelize Americans. An important part of this theology, however, included uplifting and privileging white converts. Given their long history with white-American missionaries and American imperialism, Korean evangelicals were privy to a white-dominant racial hierarchy in American society. This affected those whom the missionaries in my study viewed to be the “real Americans” and the “ideal native” converts in America. It also shaped how they sought to evangelize and draw the white population into their congregations.

scholarly journals THE ABORTION‘S ACT AMONG BLACK AMERICAN IN THE UNITEDSTATES

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Merissa Octora
Keyword(s):  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black American ◽  
White American ◽  
Library Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
Descriptive Method

This research focuses on the act of abortion among Black People in the United States based on history, the society environment, and two big major issues regarding the abortion act such as Roe vs Wade, and Pro Choice - Pro Life. Black people become the central point on this research because the fact shows that the largest population which do the abortion act and mostly considered as Black American in the first plce and the second one is from Hispanic American rather  than any other minority groups or even the White American itself and this happened  based on the history of racial discrimination or segregation toward BlackPeople. This research uses library research in term of qualitative method, and applying  descriptive method in analyzing the data. The approaches which are used in this research are the approaches which have a great related with the society and social problem. This approaches well known with the term of interdispliner study which have main purpose to elaborate many perspectives to become primarysources. The different treatment toward Black People based on racial discrimination experienced becomes the trigger why do Black People placed the highest number in doing abortion act in the UnitedStates.    

Antiblackness and the Adultification of Black Children in a U.S. Prison Nation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir A. Gilmore ◽  
Pamela J. Bettis
Keyword(s):  
Justice System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Black Children ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
White American ◽  
Gender And Education ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Black Life

Discourses in the early 21st century surrounding the presumption of childhood innocence were undergirded by antiblackness. The theorization of antiblackness within the context of race, gender, and education has been beneficial to understanding how the mistreatment of Black children and the illegitimacy of Black childhoods within the white American racial imaginary is seemingly justified. Foundational to the United States, antiblackness is a race-based paradigm of racial othering and subjugation through a litany of organized structural violence against Black people. Structured outside the realms of humanity and civil society, Black life, through this paradigm, is regarded as other than human. Arguably, antiblackness shapes all racialized, gendered, sexualized conditions and experiences of all Black people, including the age compression of Black children. Antiblackness scholarship posits that there is an institutional unwillingness to see Black youth as children. Discourses on what it means to be a child, who can occupy that position, and when a particular stage of a child’s development is reached, are all structured against Black youth. Pathologized as deviant, adult-like problems, Black children occupy life in a liminal space, where they are denied childhood status but carry adult-like culpability. As adultified Black youth, they lack autonomy and are not granted leniency to learn from their mistakes like their white peers. With their actions and intentions perceived as deviant, ill-willed, or hypersexual, Black children are susceptible a wide range of violence from school punishment, the criminal justice system, sexual abuse and exploitation, and excessive police force.

Adams, Henry (1838–1918)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroki Yoshikuni
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Teaching History ◽  
The North ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Third Person ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Critics ◽  
American Society

Although he was known as a historian during his lifetime, the work of Henry Adams—like that of Henry James—is often seen as an American precursor to Modernism. This is mainly due to his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. His autobiography not only registers an aristocratic intellectual’s despair at the loss of ideals in the transformation of American society but, written in the third person, it also secures a distance from that despair in order to observe it self-consciously and ironically. After his death, Adams’ literary significance was appreciated by new critics, such as Yvor Winters and R. P. Blackmur. Adams was a great-grandson of the second president of the USA, John Adams, and a grandson of the sixth president, John Quincy Adams. He was educated at Harvard University and later in Germany. During the American Civil War he served in London as a private secretary for his father. After teaching history at Harvard and editing the North American Review, he settled in Washington DC, researching American history (which led to The Life of Albert Gallatin and History of the United States of America), and making his house a salon of politicians and intellectuals. Works created during this period include two novels, Democracy and Esther, both of which portray the vicissitudes of ideals in contemporary America through the heroines’ adventures.

Indigenous Food Systems: Battling Whiteness through Decolonization

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie King
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Community Gardens ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alternative Food ◽  
Farmers Markets ◽  
Alternative Food Networks ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The North

Shaw (2006) argues that “the rubrics of difference against which Whiteness is commonly juxtaposed rarely includes Indigeneity, or the experiences of Indigenous peoples regardless of the North American domination of the field, and its settler context” (853). Viewing Canada and the United States as post-colonial nations, this paper seeks to broaden understandings of Indigenous food production, distribution, and consumption practices and/or projects and how they work to resist colonial histories of oppression. hooks (1992) defines decolonization as “a process of cultural and historical liberation; an act of confrontation with a dominant system of thought” (1). Using the concept of “Whiteness”, this research attempts to prove how small-scale Indigenous food systems located in North America decolonize dominant ways of seeing alternative food systems as white food spaces. To present this research to an interdisciplinary audience I will first attend to defining key concepts informing this research including: post-colonial nation, decolonization, Whiteness, and Indigeneity. I will then spend some time exploring what Sarah Whatmore describes as “Alternative Food Networks” (AFNs) and claims as “white food spaces”. Finally, in an attempt to decolonize alternative food systems as white spaces, I will share various forms of present-day, small-scale Indigenous food systems such as Wild Rice production by The White Earth Anishinaabe, the ‘Food from the Land’ program in the O-pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation, and various Indigenous farmers markets and community gardens.  

scholarly journals Ethnic Discrimination in The Bluest Eye

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-206
Author(s):  
Anisha Dahiya
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Ethnic Discrimination ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Great Role ◽  
Ethnic Stereotypes ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Blue Eyes

Ethnicity is one of the most debatable topics in contemporary times. Human culture is divided along ethnic and national lines. Ethnicity and Race function as most powerful language of human difference and human community. An ethnic group that is dominant often tends to make its own culture specific traits normative in that society. The Bluest Eye is one of the landmark novels of Toni Morrison in which the markings of ethnicity play a great role. The aim of this paper is to explore the traces of ethnic discrimination of the African Americans at the hands of dominant White Americans in the novel The Bluest Eye.  It illustrates how ethnic stereotypes propagated by White Americans for their selfish purposes victimised the black people at that time. Particular emphasis is given on the psychological effects of the oppressive environment on the protagonist Pecola. Morrison portrays Pecola as a marginalized and oppressed character who yearns to have blue eyes to have a respectable position in the community.

Civic leadership, emotions and social change: decolonial ethnographic research on an American Indian non-profit organisation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Jimenez-Luque ◽  
Melissa Burgess
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leadership Studies ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Civic Leadership ◽  
American Society

The non-profit sector in the United States (US) plays a key role in reproducing racism and classism. These two systems of oppression within non-profits mirror colonialism since their agendas and decisions about their implementation are made by elites rather than by people directly affected by the issues at hand. Through a case study of a Native American non-profit organisation in the north-west of the US, this article explores how emotions, particularly the processes through which people regulate emotions, can be used as resources for social change. Drawing on decolonial theory and combining critical non-profit and leadership studies, the research included observations, the gathering of artefacts and 13 interviews/conversations with individuals and groups. This article offers leadership strategies and actions for decolonising structures of the non-profit sector using emotions as assets for meaning-making, communication and resistance. Two central findings emerge: (a) emotions can change the dominant script; and (b) emotions can be used to resist, raise voices and contribute to social change. These findings bring new perspectives and nuances to better understand public leadership within postcolonial societies and are especially relevant for non-profit organisations led by marginalised social groups that have initiated collective struggles of social change to decolonise American society.

The African American Denominational Tradition: The Rise of Black Denominations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis C. Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Black People ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
African American Leadership ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Church

From the formation of the first independent African American Protestant denomination in the 1810s and 1820s to the opening decades of the 21st century, independent African American denominations have stood at the center of black religious life in the United States. Their longevity and influence have made them central to the preservation of black beliefs, practices, and rituals; have provided venues to promote movements for black freedom; and have incubated African American leadership in both the church and civic spheres. They have intertwined with every aspect of American and African American life, whether cultural, political, or economic, and they engaged the international involvement of American society and the diasporic interests of black people. Parallel assemblies composed of black ministers pastoring black congregations that remained within white denominations also emerged within the traditional white denominations, including the white Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational Protestant groups, plus the Catholic Church. Although they eschewed withdrawing from the white denominations, their extramural bodies functioned as a virtual black ecclesia, or institutional bodies, even though they remained smaller than the growing independent black denominations. Together, the black preachers and parishioners in independent black denominations and inside traditional white denominations maintained churches characterized by proud histories and long records of frontline involvements in black freedom pursuits.

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