1

Lou Buscio Experiences in literature 2-18-2014 Essay 2 Final Race in Literary Works While reading a literary piece, it is not always easy to figure out what the author is trying but turns out to be the exact opposite. This problem can be solved by using critical lenses. A critical lens helps you read a text from a certain point of view and gives the reader a better understanding of what the author is trying to get across. In the two works that we read in class, Toni Cade Bambaras The Lesson and Countee Cullen's "Incident the race critical lens was most appropriate. In these readings, we see a young girl's stubbornness keep her from being taught an important lesson about race and poverty and also an African American boy who is discriminated against and it leads to him being devastated in the end. Both stories show the authors giving us examples of the characters having to deal with the social gap between rich and poor and racism. In Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson," it shows race as a main focus because it is based in a time period in Harlem that was during the Black Renaissance, the feminist movement and a time where African Americans were having a very hard time being equal in society. The story is about a young, poor black girl growing up in Harlem. In the neighborhood that she lives in a trip is organized by a new local woman. The woman is one of the only educated people around and she takes responsibility for the girls to learn a lesson. This lesson is to expose the children of the neighborhood to the world outside of their oppressed community. The place that Miss Moore

takes them is FAO Schwartz in Manhattan, "This is the place, "Miss Moore says, presenting it to us in the voice she uses at the museum. Let's look in the windows before we go in (Bambara 1) In FAO Schwartz they sell the most expensive toys to only the richest of the white kids. Most of the prices they sell these toys for are equivalent to children in the neighborhoods yearly house incomes combined. After looking through the window the first thing one of the children says is, Can we steal? Sugar asks very serious like she's getting the ground rules squared away before she says." This showed how race in this time would mostly determine your place in the social gap between the rich privileged white child and the African American poor child. Race begins to come into play early in the story when Sylvia explains Miss Moore as "black as hell" Sylvia says, "Miss Moore was her name, the only woman block with no first name And she was black as hell, cept for her feet, which were fish-white and spooky" (Bambara 1). This example shows race being used in a different way then we usually see, usually it is one race discriminating on another, but in this case it is within the same ethnicity. In this example from Sylvia it shows the reader that she is not looking at Miss Moore as an educated adult, but instead judges her on strictly her skin color. This directly reflects on her home life, from the explanation of the girls poverty ridden neighborhood it is obvious to see that her home life is not the best. her in the position that when she first meets someone the first thing she does is use their race as their only trait Race basically outlines this entire story, while reading, the main focus that

stays in your mind is that these girls are poor and underprivileged African Americans in a troubling time. You see this when Sylvia asks Miss Moore, "Watcha bring us here for, Miss Moore?", and she responds by saying, "You sound angry, Sylvia. Are you mad about

something?" Sylvia then responds by saying, "I'm mad, but I won't give her that satisfaction." (Bambara 2) This shows Sylvia portraying her true identity. She shows her ignorance toward Miss Moore's lesson and she does not want to show her any satisfaction. The lesson may not be obvious, but Sylvia being smarter then she even realizes is seeing the social gap between her, her friends, and the higher upper class. Sylvia shows her lack of education when she is talking using words like "givin", "lookin" and "bein". This reflects on her neighborhood and the schools and children she hangs out with and grew up learning from. Miss Moore then attempts to see if the children have learned anything while being in the store when she asks, "Well, what did you think of the FAO Schwarz store?" followed by Rosie Giraffe mumbling, "White folks crazy" (Bambara 3). This tells you that the lesson Miss Moore is trying to teach these girls went straight over their heads and instead the only thing they noticed was who could actually afford the toys their and that is only the upper class white population. In the end of this story it shows Sylvia learning a lesson even though she did not want to and tried not to give Miss Moore any satisfaction she still learns. The lesson learned is that there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor and this fact angers Sylvia to the point where she will strive to work harder because no one can beat her. You see this when she says, "We start down the block and she gets ahead which is O.K. by me cause I'm going to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through. She can run if she wants to and even run faster. But ain't nobody gonna beat me at nuthin". (Bambara 3) When looking at the last line of the story from a race perspective you see that times were very hard for African

Americans back then and if you didn't want to be in poverty your whole life you were going to need the mentality Sylvia obtained in the end. Her mentality being that no one could beat her at anything and that race was not going to hold her back. In the next work, race is the reason for the author's poem. Countee Cullen's "Incident" is a poem about a young African American boy who goes on a trip to Baltimore. On his trip he is devastated by another boy his same age calling him a "Nigger". (Cullen 1) The racism is obvious right from the start. In the first stanza he explains coming to Baltimore with a "Heart-filled, head-filled with glee" (Cullen 1) After reading that you can understand that the boy traveling does not judge by color or appearance, but is just so excited to see the city and people Of Baltimore. The boy then comes across a "Baltimorean" child that is just stopped and starring right at him from a distance. Before you even read the next stanza you can almost guess what is coming next, and that is some type of judgment being placed on the boy whether its racism or not. It has to be something because this other boy is now frozen staring at the visiting black child. In the next stanza he starts with explaining this boy staring at him by saying, "Now I was eight and very small, and he was no whit bigger."(Cullen 2) This proves that color or race is not associated in this child's point of view and actually he is excited to find a boy his own age and size. The visiting boy follows by smiling in a friendly manner at the other boy and his reaction is sticking out his tongue and calling him a "nigger". Without explaining anyone can tell this is racism and at such a young age it shows the deep dark truth about how bad this problem actually was and that at any age racism was being inflicted on people. The boy visiting approached this boy happy and with a smile to show he saw right through race and

was just noticing a boy of the same age. Due to the visiting boy's color the Baltimorean dismissed him as a friend and immediately labeled him as a "nigger". All he noticed was that he was black and that shows racism in its worst way. The author is showing us that racism is terrible and that because you're an adult gives it no justice because obviously the apple doesn't fall to far from the tree when that racist elder says "nigger" too much around his young boy. What the Baltimorean child has heard now is used on the heart-filled, head-filled with glee boy and that results in the boy saying, "I saw the whole Baltimore from May until December; of all the things that happened there that's all that I remember," (Cullen 3)This is sad to see the author showing how devastated the boy was due to the racial profiling and it tells the readers how bad racism can hurt somebody no matter what age you are, size you are, or city you live in. To conclude race has helped explain both stories by showing two different types of authors portraying two different types of how race can affect someone's life. In Bambara's "The Lesson" it showed the struggle of poverty ridden young girl learning the lesson of the great social gap in our economy. In Cullen's "Incident" it is obvious in the entire poem that the topic is about racism and being called just a name because of your color can really affect the person being discriminated and that race does not only touch on color, but it also takes away from seeing someone's true identity.

Work Cited: Allen Brizee, J. Case Tompkins, 1995-2014 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University, https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/01/ General Inquiries