Similarities Between Minorities In Graduation And Audre Lorde

“Graduation Day” illustrates Maya Angelou’s experience on her graduation day. All of Angelou’s feelings, reasoning, and thoughts of her graduation day are depicted between the pages of her short story. Her text covers multiple different aspects of a segregated community’s lifestyle and explains their decisions on coping with their limitations. The power of words impacts the community in several ways during Angelou’s story. Because words impact and shape people, they influence individuals into themselves.

Maya Angelou is a leading literary voice of the African-American community. She writes of the triumph of the human spirit over hardship and adversity. “Her style captures the ca-dences and aspirations of African American women whose strength she celebrates.” (Library of Chattanooga State, n. d.) Maya has paved the way for children who has had a damaged

Bobby Goodspeed is a protagonist in the novel The Misfits. He learns a lot through his journey in this book. He understands that names hurt, because those on the receiving end feel as if they are what everyone else says they are. He discovers that some people are more than meets the eye, such as Mr. Kellerman. He also realizes that love isn't necessarily the one way ticket to a happy life.

n American history, racial inequality has been a prevalent issue for many decades. Slavery is America's original sin. In the 1930s, racial inequality and segregation lived and breathed well. At this point in time, segregation in schools and other public places was still present. For preposterous reasons, white and black people had separate water fountains, restaurants, rest rooms, and areas on the bus. During this time full of racism and racial inequality, Maya Angelou was just a little girl growing up in St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis is a town in the South, like many others, had inequalities at the time. In 1938 Maya Angelou was only ten years old. At this age, she worked for a lady named Mrs. Viola Cullinan. Maya Angelou wrote briefly about her time spent working for Mrs. Cullinan in her short story “Mary.” Maya Angelou's’ use of vivid, direct characterization and alternating childish voice to mature adult narrative diction filtered through her authentic first person point of view helps to prominently establish the theme of Angelou’s distaste for racial inequality throughout the short story.

Maya Angelou and Sherman Alexie detailed their lives as a person of color growing up in predominantly white America. When reflecting back on their lives, both authors used various techniques in order to effectively make an imprint on the reader of the trials and tribulations both authors had to go through and what they learned from the experience. By analyzing Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education” and Maya Angelou’s “Champion of the World”, a stark contrast can be seen in how two authors can use structure and various other techniques to tell a story with a similar subject to a different effect compared to the other.

In Audre Lorde’s essay “ The Fourth of July,” and Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” both faced unfair treatments. In Hurston’s essay, she explored the process that she noticed she was colored and overcome white people’s discrimination. In Lorde’s essay, he described their graduation trip to Washington D.C., However, their families in discrimination. By these relationships, Hurston and Lorde explored African American faced serious unfair treatment, and injustices were presents in many different places.

In “The Fourth of July” written by Audre Lorde, an author and poet who took it upon herself to confront and address issues of racism, she describes the time she took a trip during the summer to Washington, D.C., where she obtained her own memory and meaning of independence. In her essay she shares with readers an account of experiencing racism on a day of the celebration of freedom. Lorde conveys her anger regarding her parents avoidance of racism and more specifically how she felt about the people and society surrounding her by her usage of specific tone, the repetition of words, and irony.

    Alice Walker and Maya Angelou are two contemporary African-American writers.  Although almost a generation apart in age, both women display a remarkable similarity in their lives.  Each has written about her experiences growing up in the rural South, Ms. Walker through her essays and Ms. Angelou in her autobiographies.  Though they share similar backgrounds, each has a unique style which gives to us, the readers, the gift of their exquisite humanity, with all of its frailties and strengths, joys and sorrows.

The separation of the African American displays the importance of graduation day. Angelou was only graduating from the eighth grade, but because of the sociocultural differences, graduation proved momentous in their community. Angelou later states “Oh, it was important, all right. White folks would attend the ceremony, and two or three would speak of God and home, and the Southern way of life” (Angelou, 2014, p. 181). The school making a minute event into a grand celebration conveys much about the state of the position African Americans were subjected to. Angelou displays this later when she describes the scene of small children presented in a play about buttercups and daisies and bunny rabbits and older girls preparing snacks and beverages. Normal society does not make such an event of Middle School

In her essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Audre Lorde details multiple groups of people and their actions and attitudes. She focuses on and criticizes different demographics’ actions and how they impede the achievement of equality for people like herself. She portrays the disenfranchisement and underappreciation she receives multilaterally because of her race, social class, sexual orientation, age, gender. Lorde’s prevailing goal of the essay is to demonstrate that the marginalized should not nullify, ignore, suppress, or attack the expression of differences between themselves. Rather, she asserts that they should recognize and celebrate those differences to unite across demographic boundaries so they may together

In her essay “The Fourth of July”, Audre Lorde described the enlighteningly awful experience of the reality of racism she had during her first trip to Washington D.C. as a child. While Lorde’s older sister had been rejected by her high school from traveling with the rest of the graduating class because she was black, Lorde’s parents decided to take a family trip to the nation’s capital on their own to compensate for such an injustice. Nevertheless, the reality of racism and discrimination the family felt while on their trip foiled their attempt to ignore and overcome such oppression, and led Lorde to view the trip as a frustrating experience. By employing this personal anecdote of her family’s replacement graduation trip for her older sister, Lorde successfully conveyed the impossibility of pretending to live in ignorance of racism and discrimination, and powerfully presented her anger at her family, the black community, and all of American society at trying to do so instead of addressing these problems.

Oppressed women have been unjustly held back from achieving full equality for much of human history. A woman no matter neither color nor education faces discrimination on a day to day basis. Barriers that are place in their way to advancing includes: lack of mentoring, lack of opportunities for career development, biased rating and testing system and counterproductive behavior and harassment by colleges (Schaefer, pg 15). In the past, women did not have jobs and were to clean, cook and care for the children, also did not have the right to vote. While the man work long hours to provide for his family and gave orders as the women followed. As time went on and rights were given to women, the men did not like the idea that controlled was being lost. They refused to let women become equal to males. Women are allow to work the same career as males, but will never be paid the same as males. This paper addresses Maya Angelou life and how her writing and public speaking inspired women to overcome discrimination.

In this article, Angelou talks about her eight-grade graduation experience. Angelou mainly focused about the unfair treatment of African Americans during that time because they were not values on their educational intelligence. Also, the white people were in charge of the African

In the essay “What’s Your Name, Girl?” Maya Angelou explores the injustice and suffering of her childhood as a black girl living in Stamps, Arkansas. Immediately, as the essay begins, you acquire insight on how Angelou seemed to be envious of white girls: “But Negro girls in small Southern towns, whether poverty-stricken or just munching along on a few of life’s necessities, were given as extensive and irrelevant preparations for adulthood as rich white girls shown in magazines. Admittedly the training was not the same. While white girls learned to waltz and sit gracefully with a teacup balanced on their knees, we were lagging behind, learning the mid-Victorian values with very little money to indulge them.” (17-18). Angelou recognized how unfair black people were treated. They had to scrounge up money whenever they could, while white people would effortlessly “waltz and sit gracefully” whenever they wanted to. She was envious of white people’s social statuses and what little work they had to do in the world and she wanted to be one of them; she wanted to live an easy life.

Maya Angelou and Alice Walker are two well-known contemporary African- American writers. Although both women are from different generations they share some of the same qualities and experiences. Both women used their past experiences of tragedy and hardship as a stepping stool for growth by turning that pain into what now are famous stories and poems. For most writers, majority of their work stem from their own experiences, and for both Alice and Maya a great deal of their works regarded the dilemmas many African American people faced during that time such as prejudice and discrimination.