Examples Of Racism In Fences

By investing all of one’s time, effort, and energy into one specific group of people, a person can be segregated from the rest of society. Racism in the play “Fences” is an impeccable example of a border created by societies that doesn’t just separate people from one another, but enmeshes communities inside themselves. “Fences” is a play about an African American family in the 1950’s. The family is constantly encountering societies borders, or fences, in the form of parenthood, marriage, religion, and racism. The main character, Troy, can be described as a tough father, unfaithful husband, angry deity believing African American man searching to maintain a sense of control and protection of a family that is slowly falling apart. The border of

However, Troy was right in the idea that racism was still very much alive in this time. For example, Bill White, the first African American President of the National League of Baseball, experienced this racism first hand around the time of the setting of this play. In the 50’s, he was attacked by people with racist views. In his opinion, the professionals weren’t the behind the scene people or any of the people who ran Baseball as a business. To him, “the players are the real professionals, while the owners, executives and journalists are the ones routinely engaged in juvenile pettiness. 'You can't win their game,' White concludes. 'So why play it?'” (Baseball). It is understandable why some people, like Troy and Bill White, would find it not worth it to try to fight a force as devious as racism. Troy even commits on the fact that he’s seen a lot of African American players better than Jackie Robinson, the first African American Baseball player to play his respective sport in the Major League, but they did not make it anywhere because they were not lucky or white enough to make it on a league. Rose even states how she saw Josh Gibson’s, a man known as the black Babe Ruth, daughter with raggedy shoes. According to James Saunders who did a full cited report on this particular quote from “Fences”, Josh Gibson was objectively better at baseball than the majority of other

America in the 1950s was a rough time for racial diversity in American culture. America, being at the brink of a heavy cultural shift, was still controlled by racism in ways that are hard to conceive. People were embarrassed to enjoy things that they truly enjoyed due to other people’s ethnocentrism. This is conveyed in Fences: “Ain’t said nothing. Figure if the nigger too dumb to know he carrying a watermelon, he wasn’t gonna get much sense out of him. Trying to hide that great big old watermelon under his coat. Afraid to let the white man see him carry it home” (Wilson 1518). Troy and Bono are talking about an old co-worker, Brownie, that had a watermelon, and was hiding it from their boss because he was embarrassed to be a black man carrying home a watermelon. The stereotype that all African Americans love watermelon became shameful toward Brownie. This shame was understandable, of course, but racism clearly held Brownie back from a very simple task in this particular experience. The effect of cultural preference to white people has had many studies. Judith porter has documented her findings on this particular matter. She states, “Even at an early age, white children were found to express clearly negative attitudes toward blacks, and black children were aware of these cultural attitudes and often responded with self-evaluation” (Porter). She studied young children,