Racism In Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Attending an integrated school like Handley all my life, I have never opened my eyes to the true brutality of racism. I catch myself rolling my eyes every time someone declares something racist because it seems that it is called for attention. I learn about more racism stories in history classes every year to the point that it no longer influences my opinion of the subject. Racism seems so normal because of the fact that the south has always been a racist place, but my generation did not live through the worst of it. The most racist times in the south can only be explained to us in videos and text books, but these will never elucidate the true struggles African Americans were put through. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou delineates

This level of detail allowed the reader to imagine walking in the footsteps of marguerite, the main character, experiencing her trials and feeling the way she felt. Marguerite longed for the day she would wake from her “black ugly dream”(4). She wanted long blonde hair that she could straighten and hypnotizing light-blue eyes; she wanted this curse of being a “too-big Negro girl”(5) to be lifted so she could live the life as a pretty white girl that she believed she was meant to live. The way she described her longing to be a beautiful white girl, she also described how people talked down to her, and the times she witnessed racism towards her family members. The author explicated the racism she faced through the use of pathos, ethos, and

Freeman, the boyfriend of Maya’s mother, Vivian, in chapters eleven and twelve. “I didn’t want to touch that mushy-hard thing again”(76). Pathos was expressed by detailed inside look of her day to day life much like this one. Along with the emotional appeals through pathos, Angelou uses the ethos appeals to describe the racist situations where she lived. There was unequal educational opportunities, lynchings, and her whole life she believed that black people were lower types of human beings than white people because that was how the people around her were treated. In the 1930s Marguerite and her brother, Bailey, worked in their grandmothers town store from the age of four; this is an example of the use of logos. Pathos, ethos, and logos are all strong appeals used in the structuring of this autobiographical life story.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography with a particularly unique structure. Most stories would be in chronological order, and each chapter is connected to the next. Angelou decided to take a different route; few chapters in her book are connected. They are written as if she began telling any story that popped in her mind after she finished each