Zora discovers herself as being a colored person at the age of thirteen when she was sent to a school in Jacksonville. There she was no longer Zora, a young girl who loved to sing and dance, but “was now a little colored girl”. She was constantly reminded of her ancestors and slavery. Through it all she chooses not to let any of this affect her and says she doesn’t belong to the “sobbing school of Negrohood.”  There isn’t pity nor sorrow in her soul and the way she sees herself isn’t with the eyes of someone who possesses these feelings, she is simply Zora.

Zora was born in a time where slavery has now ended and she hasn’t experienced the hardships people of previous generations have. She has the mind of a free person with aspirations, goals, joy and passion. She says that her ancestors have paved the way to fly. The world is open and endless with possibilities. She doesn’t have time to look at the past and cry about it because she has to look forward, at all of the things she could now accomplish. She has so much in front of her and needs to focus on the future and cannot dwell on the past.

She’s even confused at the fact that someone wouldn’t want to know her. She says, “how can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” Her attitude towards discrimination isn’t to surround herself with pity, sorrow or anger, she simply dismisses them and can’t understand what their problem is. I can imagine her saying who cares about them let me continue to work on myself. She says “I do not weep at the world–I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

Instead of feeling pity for herself or her people, she actually feels bad for what whites have to feel. She knows she has done no wrong and she can sleep peacefully at night. That isn’t the same for whites who have “dark ghost” at night. She says “the game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.” The gift of getting, unwrapping a present, feeling the joy, excitement, and getting something new. Accomplishing and succeeding at things is exciting and thrilling almost like a rollercoaster, taking a risk and getting on, feeling your stomach in your mouth. Now keeping what you have, sort of seems boring and almost like a fight to not allow others to reach your belongings.

She describes a time when she was at a jazz club with a white friend. The music is within her and she starts to dance and sing and laugh and have a great time. When she goes back to her white friend she realizes that he hasn’t moved from where she left him. He simply says “good music they have here” while smoking. He either doesn’t feel like he fits in or he cannot feel the way she feels because of all the burden he has. The same way Zora describes the pity and sorrow colored people have when thinking of their past, she makes it seem that whites also have that resentment and can’t live free.

She feels she’s colored when she is “thrown sharp white background… For instance at Barnard…Among the thousand white persons.” College makes her feel colored, being the minority in a white dominant place makes her feel colored. Standing out because of the pigment of her skin is what makes her feel colored. Through it all she says she remains herself and even in the sea of white, when it is all said and done, when the water comes to shore, she is still Zora.

It doesn’t matter what color you are, we are all the same. She finishes off this essay by describing different paper bags, some brown, some yellow, some red and all being filled with different non-valuable things. When you dump what’s inside you get a pile of random things that each paper bag has. There’s no difference. The paper bags are humans and the random items are our goals, our intentions, our wants, our hopes, our dreams, the things that make us happy, the things that make us cry. We all feel these emotions and experience different things that brings us all emotions we have once felt at one point in our lives.

Hurston’s essay brings you hope. She allows the readers to see why it’s important to acknowledge the past and respect it but push and strive for the future we have been lucky to have a chance to even imagine. She’s telling readers to give thanks to their ancestors and now thank them by living their dreams. Doing what they would of want them to accomplish and not stopping there but even surpassing those dreams. To take advantage of what they have endured and fought for. She is Zora, not someone who you need to take pity or feel bad for, not someone to look at with whatever you think of colored people, she is Zora, someone like you, with dreams and goals, with passion with fear, with everything that makes you and I human.

In the first chapter, with the battle, it symbolizes how the white men, specifically high society white men kept the black men in a state of darkness and fear (and the white men enjoyed it too). The boys they made fight had their vision obstructed by a white blindfold, the narrator mentions how he never experienced darkness like the before and how it scared him.

In the second chapter we meet Mr. Norton, who is a trustee of the college the narrator attends and Jim Trueblood, who’s incest was shamed by the black community, but the white community was surprisingly supportive after the incest. However, in the dream Trueblood mentions being a dark tunnel “. . . it’s hot and dark in there. I goes up a dark tunnel” Then, when he wakes up he sees the reality is worse than his dream.

In the third chapter Norton gets compared a lot to animals, the narrator mentions Norton’s “amazingly animal-like teeth” which are usually hidden inside his mouth. Then when they are with the vet doctor, the women who are watching compared his organs to animal organs. They make Norton out to be very animalistic, kind of like how he described the white men watching his fight in chapter one.

Marisol Manica

The Invisible Man by Ellison starts off strong. This novel talks about the experience African Americans had in a white society even after being “equal”. Already with the start of the first paragraph the readers get a sense of common themes throughout the book. The narrator starts off by telling us he was naive, and nothing but an invisible man. He even comes to say he is ashamed of himself for one being ashamed. As a reader this leaves you with questions. What is he trying to say? What is the narrator ashamed of? his grandparents for being slaves? Or of his race? He leaves in the hands of the reader to figure out. He immediately jumps into the scene of his grandpas deathbed. He recalls his grandpa last words, of how he was a traitor and their life was a war. Of course, the narrators parents were more freaked out about it then he was. But the grandpa signifies a symbol of being afraid to face your past, a ghost walking around who is uneasy. Later on in chapter one the grandpa comes back as a ghost to tell remind of who he is.  His grandpa represents a past which they cannot escape of. A past in which his people are constantly reminded of because of society. The narrator at the end of chapter one even tries to say his grandpa usually curses his triumphs. But in reality we know his grandpa is a symbol of the past he cannot escape, he has to learn who he is and embrace it. Throughout the rest of the novel, we see a monotone voice from the narrator. We can tell the narrator is afraid to overstep his boundaries, he himself deep down does not believe in this so called “freedom.” One of the major key points is the car he uses to drive Mr. Norton, a founder of the college. Ellison, does not ever say Norton. We notice how every-time he writes Mr. Norton. Two last points, are the car when you drive you are the main conductor. You decide where you are going, but in this case Ellison ask Norton to make the decisions, he does not want to over step boundaries. He does not say it but we feel that he feels like a slave. He calls him sir, he is afraid of being taken off as a driver. Even when giving control of where to go he stumbles. He is clearly not in control. Secondly Ellison makes Norton say for your people to the narrator. this feels a little like discrimination, why does he refer to African Americans as your people? And why is Norton making it seem like Ellison should be thankful for these opportunities because him and a partner were making his dreams come true? And why is Norton trying to excuse the fact that white people do not know how to handle the new freedoms and directions for blacks?

In Fanon, The Fact of Blackness, we see a very similar approach. Both authors talk about their experience of being a black male. But Fanon seems to know what it means to be black and accepts his identity. He symbolizes it as his uniform. He knows that because of skin color that will determine how he is treated. Fanon knows that his identity is not created by there is one already of him created through society views. He even gives the reader an example of how a Jew, because he is white has the ability to still create an image for himself/herself even through the tragedy they went through but not him. Fanon knows that because he is not white like the jew it is pointless to try and bargain to create an image to show society. Fanon is trying to race time and create an identity that has been made through his ancestors. While In Ellison we see that he is scared to step on peoples shoes. He wants to be accepted and make his family proud, but he feels he trapped and not at ease around white people. The scary thing is that today this still going on. For example, we see in another store how black people are considered to be thieves by color and the way they dress, but if a white person came in with the exact same clothing will they be a thief as well?It is astonishing to see how society wants to say they believe in equality when their is still so much discrimination. A society that claims to be so evolved still deals with these issues today. Because of our race, our color our identities are pretty much written. It is sad to see books that were written a long time ago, talking about such tragic events still occur in todays world. Fanon and Ellison are not far apart, they both are trying to survive in their societies as we are today.

The white writers of today’s contemporary literature should all familiarize themselves with the culturally significant ideas presented in Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s article, “On Whiteness And The Racial Imaginary”. White writers, or “writers writing about race these days”, have a tendency to include characters of other races in their writing for the simple purpose of adding some diversity, which Rankine and Loffreda deem as reckless and untrue. The popular defense that these writers take is the idea that they’re free to use their imaginations in any way they please, and that any criticism hinders their individual creativity. Rankine and Loffreda point out a fact that should be obvious to all writers, which is that publishing your writing isn’t a mere act of your imagination. Instead, that writing is read and digested by many and has the power to shape how readers view specific races and even their own identities.

This doesn’t mean that writers should abstain from creating characters of other races, but they must instead acknowledge the cultural consequence behind the way they write about race. According to Rankine and Loffreda, a white individual crafting an inaccurate depiction of an African American is just as harmful as any racial slur or inaccurate stereotype. In reference to these imaginative acts, the authors state, “So to say, as a white writer, that I have a right to write about whoever I want, including writing from the point of view of characters of color…is to make a mistake”. Both writers implore that authors question “why” they’d like to include outside cultures in their work, instead of just doing so blindly.

In “The Fact of Blackness”, Frantz Fanon approaches the issue of whites writing about other races similarly, but through film. In relation to the film If He Hollers Let Him Go, Fanon writes, “I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theatre are watching me, examining me, waiting for me” (265). Fanon expresses that not only does this portrayal of a “Negro” affect the self-confidence of the African American and feed the racist ego of the white man, but it creates an uncomfortable atmosphere for minorities in social situations. To portray a certain race or minority through art is to represent an entire population, and that is something that Fanon shows should not be taken lightly.

Times have changed drastically between the publishing of “On Whiteness And The Racial Imaginary” and “The Fact of Blackness”, however, there are still critical issues that remain. Unlike the 1950s, it has become unacceptable among society to include African American characters in novels and films that are racist caricatures. However, although we have progressed in that sense, white writers are still crafting characters of other races that are inaccurate. As Rankine and Loffreda state, “White writers can get explosively angry when asked to recognize that their racial imaginings might not be perfect…”. What Rankine and Loffreda seem to propose is that in order for the white writer to write say, a true African American character, they must exercise patience and care. It is not something they can just delve right into with ease, as they aren’t African American themselves and can’t automatically envision their personality and experience. In Sarah Schulman’s article “White Writer” she points to Carson McCullers, a female writer who managed to capture race, gender, and status in an accurate manner. McCullers challenged stereotypes and dynamics as well as focusing on the humanity of her characters. Writing about race or creating a character outside of your own isn’t an impossible or hostile feat, but should be done with alert consideration.

To crack open a book and find an inaccurate depiction of your race or to walk into a theatre and feel the discomfort of a false portrayal, are situations that no one wants to be in. The evident message in “On Whiteness And The Racial Imaginary” is the simple fact that white writers need to reconstruct the way they write about race. Following this mindset is something that will not only increase the authenticity of literature but also the way in which authors approach diversity.

The idea of whiteness has been strongly contested ever since its inception. There are many who both embrace whiteness into their culture, and there are those who very much despise the nature of “whiteness” and how it impacts their daily lives. Whiteness as a concept has been hazardous towards black Americans and black culture due to its intrinsic nature of harming them. However, a more particular area in which whiteness can be seen is in literature. How can whiteness affect what the avid reader may see from time to time? The answer can be shockingly deceptive, but not very surprising.

As seen in On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary, Rankine highlight how difficult it is to talk about race in the current political climate. She explains that the imagination cannot be free of race and to say that it can be is technically incorrect. To be free of race is to be living a dream, and ahistorical writing is just not possible. Rankine is making a point to say that this kind of thinking is dangerous, and that white writers tend to fantasize this idea of aracial and ahistorical literature.

The major problem with this type of thinking is less about how white writers feel about racial ambiguity in their writings, but how the perceived ignorance affects writers of color. As Rankine puts it in her essay, black writers do not have the same type of luxury as white writers to be free of the past and to be free of color, as they are usually “addressable subjects”. This means that they are often shackled by their color and their history, basically rendering it impossible for their literature and other art forms to be ignorant of the aforementioned things. Whiteness in literature, by attempting to subvert history and color, is not a helpful tool for anyone. Rather, it hurts people of color by persisting a racial power structure.

Rankine states that the ahistorical viewpoint is not only used by white people, which means that its influence has been brought into other works of literature. However, it does not negate from the fact that it is still overall harmful and causes writers to lose their focus. Every person has a background and a history to themselves, which more than certainly carries over into their writing, whether consciously or not. To say that no writing has a history or cultural significance to it is, for better or worse, a falsehood. It is a falsehood that has proven itself multiple times. DuBois often wrote about his childhood, which are moments that are certainly not ahistorical, since his intent is to show the world what it means to be a black person in a country that hates black people. To say that writing has no history is to insult writers like DuBois, subconsciously telling them that they have no reason to bring history or race into the discussion. While some may not see whiteness in literature that way, it is evident that there are silencers that mitigate the struggles of people of color.