We as black people have been led to believe we are inferior, because one ethnic group decided that they were better than the rest of the world. That one ethnic group did all it could to destroy our chances of having any kind of happiness or sense of normalcy. We were brought down as a race, because they saw our weak-mindedness and used it against us, and we as a people chose to believe them rather than fight back. That only left us one option to express how we felt, which was to learn and be like the man that oppressed in the first place. Literature could not tell whether we were black or white. All literature saw was the talent in the work until it became time to reveal who wrote the work, and even then a white person judged. When it became time to reveal the author the judges assumed everyone was white because of how well the works were written. We as a people had to learn how to be like the white man, and now that slavery is over we judge our own kind because some still follow the path of the white man. Just because a black person might speak properly and does not sound like the "stereotype" that the white man made us out to be. Black people got the short end of the stick in life, and for that we are still paying for in life and in literature. Some believe African-American literature is not important anymore because slavery no longer exist. That statement alone is lie; because of the fact some black writers were slaves making some of our stories slave narratives, which have become a part of history. Times may have changed since the times of African Americans writing of their oppression and suffering. The Harlem Renaissance let African Americans be freely accepted into literature with no regard for race, but what about problems...
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... nothing in literature, and it was man that made race important.
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3) Stereotypes of Race “Who, Negroes? Negroes don’t control this school or much of anything else – haven’t you learned even that? No, sir, they support it, but I control it. I’s big and black and I say ‘Yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when it’s convenient, but I am still the king down here” (Ellison
Frederick Douglass 1818-1895. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton, 1998. 1578-1690.
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Douglass wrote three biographies about his life as a politician, slave, and abolitionist. However, the historical value of these works does not remain as important as the quality of the works themselves. Frederick Douglass’ writing deserves recognition in the canon of great American authors, because his work meets the chosen criteria for inclusion in a collection of important literature. Douglass influenced many famous abolitionists with his literary works, and this impact, coupled with his desire to write an expose about oppression in America, makes him a winning candidate. Although his published works, mostly autobiographies, received much acclaim from abolitionists, this paper explores the quality of Douglass’s work from a literary standpoint. This paper also details the events shaping Douglass’s impressive life and writing career. By examining the prestigious “life and times” of this black author, the reader will recognize the widespread influence of Douglass’s writing on other antislavery writers, politics, and hence, the public. In a look at his first and greatest work, Narrative of the Life, the following paper will demonstrate why Frederick Douglass deserves a place in the hall of great American writers. To fully appreciate the impact of Douglass’s autobiographies, we must examine violent period in which he lived. Douglass, born in 1818, grew up as a slave on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation in eastern Maryland. At the time, abolitionist movements started gaining speed as popular parties in the North. In the North, pro-slavery white mobs attacked black communities in retaliation for their efforts. By the time Douglass escaped from slavery, in 1838, tensions ran high among abolitionists and slaveowners. Slaves published accounts of their harrowing escapes, and their lives in slavery, mainly with the help of ghostwriters. Although abolitionists called for the total elimination of slavery in the South, racial segregation still occurred all over the United States. Blacks, freemen especially, found the task of finding a decent job overwhelming.
*Frederick Douglass, "Narrative of the Life Of Frederick Douglass," in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1987)
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middle of paper ... ... Douglass, Frederick. A. A. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Atlanta: Kessinger Publishing, 2008. 8.
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In this article “The Danger of a Single Story” Chimamanda Adichie talks about how the exclusively English and American books she read as a child lead her to believe that books were, essentially, about foreigners, and that they “had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.” Not only did this lack of representation of Africans in books make the author feel like books weren’t for or about people like her, but it also led a reader of her books to make negative sweeping generalizations about African people, because her book was the only representation of Africans that that reader had seen. This lack of representation hurt not only the people lacking representation, but the people