Past Mistakes

Utopia: Past Mistakes, Present Hardships, Future Triumph Maya Angelou, in her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, describes the strife she faced growing up a black woman during the early-mid 1900s in the highly segregated United States. However, in her poem composed in 1993, “On the Pulse of Morning”, which illustrates how realizing the similarities between human groups will foster communication and create a better future for all, that was read at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, an auspicious message is conveyed onto the reader. Initially, these two works seem to contradict one another, the book giving of a message of desperation rather than hope. But with further analysis, we can draw similarities from the poem and the book; the book

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, there is extensive focus placed on the oppression of black people in the 20th century. Teenage Maya had “no control over [her] life”(180) as a Negro, her people being “maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen”(180), with no way to leave the cycle of dependent labor that had consumed them for generations. The dearth of expectations those around Maya have for her causes her to not feel the need to diverge from the monotonous path of laboring jobs she is down because of her race. At her graduation, when she should feel inspired to contribute to society, a white man gave a speech describing how the athletic areas of her school would be improved rather than the academic ones like in the white school. In response, Maya has a minuscule amount of hope that she will amount to anything in the future, “because the world didn’t think...[she] had [a] mind”(182). Through depicting her outlook on life when it was made clear that she wasn’t equal, just separate, from the white people, Angelou is expressing the psychological effects that result from the fact that those above her socially have no expectations for her to become someone. By choosing to express their lack of expectations for her as mental rather than physical, Angelou is describing social Darwinism, the idea that because of race, certain people are intellectually and morally below others as “child races”. Yet, it’s not as if Angelou lived during a time when social Darwinism was accepted in the scientific world, rather, in a time where enduring prejudices against people because of race were conventional. In “On the Pulse of Morning”, Angelou begins by describing past mistakes such as racism and how we can’t seek “haven in [the] shadow”(13) of past occurrences, implicating that as humans,