Color Purple

In this letter, Celie is telling Nettie about a conversation between her and Shug. In the conversation, Celie says that she is done with God. Shug starts to defend God and gives Celie new ideas about God. Before, Celie had seen God as a white man with white robes and a white beard. Her God was the white God. Shug explains to her that God isn’t just a man in the sky, God is everything. She describes God as “It.” It is okay with everything that they do, even the things that some people would think is sin, because It created everything and wants people to enjoy them and every emotion that goes with it. Shug says that everyone just wants to be loved, and so does God. She finds God in nature, and sees God whenever she walks through a field of purple wildflowers. God wants to please them too, not everything is about pleasing God.
At the end of the letter, Celie tells Nettie that she likes this idea of God, but is having trouble chasing the old white man out of her head. Celie talks about rocks, and says that she ends up just throwing the rocks. This shows that she feels anger. She had earlier denounced God because her life was so bad, and she didn’t understand why he had let all of these things happen to her. When Shug spoke to her about the God she knows, Celie realized ideas she had never thought about before. She is angry because man has always been in the way of God, and she has always had men on her mind. She wants to start thinking about God and keep man out of her head. She wants to start thinking about God being in nature and stop thinking about men.

Fires in the Mirror

The movie made me very uncomfortable, but I think that was one of her intentions. I felt as if she was always yelling, and I got so stressed out while watching it. Every person that she interviewed was important to the entire movie because has something important to say about their race, identity, religion, or the situation in Crown Heights.
The situation itself with the Jewish man and the young black boy that died was very sad and full of turmoil, especially with the other Jewish man being murdered. This is why I think she tried to stress the viewer out.
I really like how she acted out the people on both sides. She seemed unbiased because she presented the views from the Jewish community and the black community verbatim of what the interviewees said. The story was very confusing and it made me mad at the Jewish man when I listened to the black side, and mad at the black community when I listened to the Jewish side. It was hard for me to pick a side because the situation is so confusing. In my last blog I wrote about how I felt more compassion for the Jewish people because although the young black boy died, it was an accident. A group of black men killed Yankel Rosenbaum just for being a Jew.
It was good to hear this story from both sides, because with most situations, you are unable to hear both sides of the story. I believe that Anna Deavere Smith was very efficient and thoughtful in how she presented all of the different views.

Crown Heights

The part of the documentary we saw today was very confusing and stressful. It was the section with a Rabbi, a Reverend, and a teenage black man who was on the scene.
They were all talking about the same incident, but I was able to hear all the sides of the story. It is hard to side with either the blacks or the Jews because there were so many things involved in it.
However, I do know this: The Jewish man did not purposely kill the young black boy. It was a car accident. Incidents like this happen all the time. The group of black men that killed Yankel Rosenbaum purposely did it. They purposely killed him because he was a Jew, even though he had nothing to do with what had happened with the Jewish man and the young black boy.
Riots broke out in the black community because of the young boy’s death. But no riots broke out in the Jewish community because of Yankel Rosenbaum’s death. In the riots, many people were hurt, and there was a large amount of damage to cars and property. This is why I sympathize more with the Jews than I do the black community.
The Jewish man had to live with the guilt of accidentally killing the little boy forever, and it wasn’t his fault that he was taken away in the Jewish ambulance. He got out of the car to help the boy, and was immediately attacked by angry bystanders.
The teenager points out that Jewish people never get arrested and that the police are always bothering black people just because they are black. But, the way that he described the white man treating the black man is just how they are treating the Jewish people.

Malcolm X

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X varied a lot in their approaches. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted the races to work together to find peace. He was all about being passive. He was never violent. He went about his movements by marches, sit ins, and other peaceful approaches. Malcolm X is more radical. The piece we read started out when he was in jail, where he learned how to read. He became Muslim and started to believe in the religion strongly. He focuses on being against the white man and the way they treated the blacks. He was strongly against the white man, even calling him the devil. He was pretty much saying that the white man’s only purpose is to keep the black population down. Malcolm X didn’t believe that the whites and the blacks could coexist peacefully.
One thing that I found very interesting, and I somewhat agreed with was when Malcolm X talked about how before they tried to gain civil rights, they needed to achieve human rights. If people treated African Americans as humans, civil rights wouldn’t even be an issue. If people didn’t look down on other people and thought they didn’t even deserve to be treated like a human because they were different, everyone would treat each other better. Malcolm X wanted to be equal to the white man, but he didn’t want them to be together. MLK Jr. wanted everyone to live in peaceful harmony.

Sonny

Sonny first starts going to drugs because his life is hard. He is unhappy and he has no release to help him through his hard times. Someone turned him onto drugs because they said that it feels good. Sonny’s life is bad and so he figures that it would be a good idea to start doing drugs because it makes him feel better. Heroin and his drug habit become his escape from reality. It helps him get away, because he doesn’t know how else how to.
Earlier, his brother did not understand why Sonny played the piano so much, but when he finally sees his play, he realizes that music is his release now. The music that Sonny plays allows him to express himself. It is his new escape. People listen to music to make them feel better. And it is certainly a healthier way to express yourself than drugs. Sonny has struggled in his life, and it helps him express in music in such a way that it helps other people too. His piano music is full of emotion because he has struggled so much in his life.

Ethics

The ethics in my life has been taught to me mostly by my mom, who is responsible for who I am today. Ever since kindergarten, I’ve been taught to treat others how I would like to be treated. It’s true that the Golden Rule is one of the most important rules.
My mom is a strong believer in karma and she has taught be that if you do the right thing, it will come back to you. I’ve never been a bully, and I feel I have always been welcoming and friendly to people who needed it.

Growing up, I was around my brother a lot, and I saw who his friends were. He used to have a friend in junior high that I hated, and who used to be so mean to me. We would get in actual physical fights and it would end up with him hurting me. I knew that if I was the older sibling I wouldn’t be friends with people that wouldn’t even respect my sibling, or even hurt them. They are not friends anymore, and I don’t know where that guy is now, but last time I heard he was getting into a lot of trouble. I learned what types of friends I wanted to have by seeing what types of friends my brother had.

The basic ethics I have been taught are to be able to differentiate right from wrong. When I see something that I don’t think is right, and I’m sure that my mom wouldn’t think is right, I stay away from it. Of course, I’m a teenager, so I do what I want a lot of the times but I make sure that I am being responsible and not causing harm to anyone.

My peers and friends don’t influence my ethics as much as my family did growing up, because by the time I started making a concrete group of friends, my ethics were already established. However, I know that if I ever do something out of line, my friends will call me out and set me back on track.

Hughes and McKay

The poems that we read in class by McKay were mostly sonnets. They followed a strict style of writing. It was very interesting how McKay wrote his poems this way, because it was a very high level of poetry that requires a certain intelligence that people wouldn’t expect of an African American. McKay wrote sonnets very well to show people that he was educated and intelligent. Sonnets are what people like Shakespeare wrote. It is difficult to write a sonnet because every syllable in every word in every line is important to the poem as a whole. Langston Hughes did not write a majority of his poems as sonnets, but his poems were beautiful as well. His poetry was much more informal than McKay. We read a couple of his poems, including Negro Speaks of Rivers and Theme for English B. In Negro Speaks of Rivers he talks about how his ancestors have seen so much history happen and that he is part of his ancestors because they are in his soul. And all of what his ancestors have done and seen has made his soul grow deep like the rivers. Langston Hughes’s poems were easier to relate to, and although some of his poems were angry, it was productive anger.
In McKay's poem, To the White Fiends, he talks about how the white men have done very evil things to the black man, and the black man is just as capable of doing those same cruel things, but they won’t because they don’t want to be savages just like them. Both of these poets write about what it is like to be a black man through their poetry.