Gwendolyn Brooks’, “We Real Cool”, is a poem about seven pool players that are assumed to be friends. The poem talks about how the players are doing things, while they are living; such as, skipping school and staying out late, which also signifies that the players are still in their youth. There is a bond of loyalty within the players because there is a repetition of “We”, which signifies unity of a group of people, used throughout the poem. Brooks’ attitude towards the players is very encouraging because she is trying to tell them that they only live once, so enjoy life while you can. Her attitude also tells the seven players to believe in themselves and be different from everyone else. The poem also represents the mindset and culture of African American men back when times were difficult. In the poem the repetition of “We” is used often. “We real cool. We/Left school” (Line 3-4). This line shows how the seven players are confident in themselves and nothing can bring them down. Brooks states, “So when the seven say …show more content…
No one really cared about what was going on in their lives because society already had a set image of them. It was hard for them to be comfortable, which is why black men resulted into not going to school, staying out late, drinking alcohol, and raping women. The black men thought that they had no potential to be something more than what society made of them. They struggled for years to remove themselves from this image and it still exist till this day. Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘We Real Cool’ is not only a poem with different sounds and literary elements. It is about the struggle of the African American community and what they had to do to make other people comfortable even if it risked their own comfort. This poem is also a reflection of society today and how things haven’t really changed amongst the years. How can society change this
This week’s reflection is on a book titled Girls Like Us and it is authored by Rachel Lloyd. The cover also says “fighting for a world where girls not for sale”. After reading that title I had a feeling this book was going to be about girls being prostituted at a young age and after reading prologue I sadly realized I was right in my prediction.
Gwendolyn Brooks in “We Real Cool” develops an ironic, sarcastic tone through specific word choice. The poem begins with the phrase “We real cool” (Line 1) so immediately, the reader knows that these pool playing buddies define themselves as “cool”. In their minds, they are the epitomes of
To define the groups of pool players, I studied a pool hall in Waterford, Michigan. This pool hall is located on the Waterford border with Pontiac, right off the main highway, in a collapsing business district. This area has seen its better days; it is now falling down the economic ladder. Now it resembles many inner cities of America. The hall is tucked back in off the highway, next ...
The Message of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Are Real Cool" "We Real Cool" is a short, yet powerful poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that sends a life learning message to its reader. The message Brooks is trying to send is that dropping out of school and roaming the streets is in fact not "cool" but in actuality a dead end street. Brooks conveys her message in an ironic manner, which is presented in the title of the poem. Before actually reading the 10 line poem, the first thing that grabs the reader's attention is the title. After reading the title "We Real Cool" one would assume that the intent of the poem is going to be about a group of people who are fortunate and live a flamboyant lifestyle.
... will keep going until some change takes place. Here, however, the author provides an illustration in his ironic essay for his coolness in the face of ignorance, oppression, terror, outlining the major downfalls in this struggle. Comparing the coolness of himself to other blacks and whites, Alexander successfully shows how lacking America still stands to move towards racial equality. Alexander feels integration has not taken place, rather whites and blacks live together having their own separate cultures and whites absorb desirable aspects of black culture and leave the rest. That is far from integration, and due to his research on this topic, Alexander feels “yes, blacks are cooler than whites.” (Alexander ???)
Kevin Young’s poem “Negative” has a very controversial topic which is currently on a rise throughout social media, mass media, and even protests. Young states that racial issues within the United States are the cause of Black people having diminished identities. He believes that color of the skin decides the fate of Americans, but later we discover that it is not. There are multiple themes within Young’s poetic work. It’s very hard to depict at first; however with closer examination and applying out of the box style thinking, the poem starts to reveal itself.
This poem is written from the perspective of an African-American from a foreign country, who has come to America for the promise of equality, only to find out that at this time equality for blacks does not exist. It is written for fellow black men, in an effort to make them understand that the American dream is not something to abandon hope in, but something to fight for. The struggle of putting up with the racist mistreatment is evident even in the first four lines:
Today, blacks are respected very differently in society than they used to be. In “The Help”, we see a shift in focus between what life is like now for the average African American compared to what it was like for them to live in the 1960’s.“The Help” teaches readers the importance of understanding and learning from our history. The novel is a snapshot of the cultural, racial and economic distinctions between blacks and whites in a particularly tumultuous time in American history. “The Help” encourages readers to examine personal prejudices and to strive to foster global equality.
Here, Hayes uses words like “We”, “I” and “theirs” in the poem rather than the definitive names. The word choice displays that Hayes is talking about the group. As he describes in a poem,
In his essay, “On Being Black and Middle Class” (1988), writer and middle-class black American, Shelby Steele adopts a concerned tone in order to argue that because of the social conflicts that arise pertaining to black heritage and middle class wealth, individuals that fit under both of these statuses are ostracized. Steele proposes that the solution to this ostracization is for people to individualize themselves, and to ‘“move beyond the victim-focused black identity” (611). Steele supports his assertion by using evidence from his own life and incorporating social patterns to his text. To reach his intended audience of middle-class, black people, Steele’s utilizes casual yet, imperative diction.
Without details, the words on a page would just simply be words, instead of gateways to a different time or place. Details help promote these obstacles, but the use of tone helps pull in personal feelings to the text, further helping develop the point of view. Point of view is developed through the story through descriptive details and tone, giving the reader insight to the lives of each author and personal experiences they work through and overcome. Issa Rae’s “The Struggle” fully emplefies the theme of misplaced expectations placed on African Americans, but includes a far more contemporary analysis than Staples. Rae grapples as a young African-American woman that also struggles to prove her “blackness” and herself to society’s standards, “I feel obligated to write about race...I slip in and out of my black consciousness...sometimes I’m so deep in my anger….I can’t see anything outside of my lens of race” (Rae, 174). The delicate balance between conformity and non-conformity in society is a battle fought daily, yet Rae maintains an upbeat, empowering solution, to find the strength to accept yourself before looking for society’s approval and to be happy in your own skin. With a conversational, authoritative, humorous, confident and self-deprecating tone, Rae explains “For the majority of my life, I cared too much about my blackness was perceived, but now?... I couldn’t care less. Call it maturation or denial or self-hatred- I give no f%^&s.” (Rae 176), and taking the point of view that you need to stand up to racism, and be who you want to be not who others want you to be by accepting yourself for who you are. Rae discusses strength and empowerment in her point of view so the tone is centered around that. Her details all contribute to the perspectives as well as describing specific examples of racism she has encountered and how she has learned from those
Brent Staples focuses on his own experiences, which center around his perspective of racism and inequality. This perspective uniquely encapsulates the life of a black man with an outer image that directly affects how others perceive him as a person. Many readers, including myself, have never experienced the fear that Staples encounters so frequently. The severity of his experiences was highlighted for me when he wrote, “It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto.” (135) Having to accept that fact as a reality is something that many people will never understand. It is monumentally important that Staples was able to share this perspective of the world so others could begin to comprehend society from a viewpoint different from their
The image of African-American’s changed from rural, uneducated “peasants” to urban, sophisticated, cosmopolites. Literature and poetry are abounded. Jazz music and the clubs where it was performed at became social “hotspots”. Harlem is the epitome of the “New Negro”. However, things weren’t as sunny as they appeared.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
...ey for African-Americans. 12 Million Black Voices could not have depicted it better. Their unhappiness, shown on their faces in the photo, their weariness, fear, hopes, and highlights talked of in the text worked together to give us a look into the African-American life then. Today, our lives are better. African-Americans’ lives are better. We have more opportunity and more equality. What we do not have, we fight for. Yet we still see the traces of the past sufferings of our people’s lives today. We still see those traces of racism they were subjected to being repeated in our kin’s lives. And so the struggle continues, but with time it gets better. And this is the new hope. That one day racism will not exist and that no other will suffer like they did.