11- Response to Shelby Turner

It was really interesting that you brought up the way McKay called White people "hungry dogs" and "the monsters." I noticed this, too, and was shocked by how openly Black authors were beginning to write and speak their minds. The way these two authors wrote really shows how the tables turned in American culture. Before and during the Civil War, the countr was owned, controlled and dominated by White people. But when the war ended, more Black people were able to speak out in support of their race. Some, like McKay and Hopkins, went as far as to seek revenge from White people in their writing. With their new sense of power and freedom of speech after the war, Black people as well as White abolitionists were able to show their disapproval of slavery and discrimination in new ways.
Hopkins' story showed that, even though Black people could not be legally bound to White people anymore, there was still a lot that kept them inferior. Lynching was unforgiving. If someone even pointed a the finger of blame at a Black person, they were sure to be hunted down, even if they had truthfully done nothing wrong. Black people also still worked for White people. Since most of the money in the country belonged to White male landowners, like Reverend Stevens, Black people acquired jobs from them to earn money of their own.

Realizations about Slavery 10/24

When reading The Wife of his Youth, the moment I realized that Mr. Ryder was Liza's husband was when he stood up in the middle of his dinner party and told the story of his afternoon visitor. But I didn't know what he would do with that information until the last paragraph of the story. That is the point in the story when I learned something new about slavery; it was never too late for any of them. By the time Liza was freed, Mr. Ryder (Sam) had already begun his new life, but she didn't stop looking for him. She never gave up in the hopes that she could finally begin her life with him. In the Harper poem, in the last two stanzas, we find out that the speaker is sixty years old. When I first read the poem, the way it talked about beginning an education, I thought the speaker was much younger. It reminded me that, when the Civil War ended, African Americans of all ages were freed, and some of them were finally able to start their lives as free people when they were already in their later years.

Another point in the story that stood out to me was hen Mr. Ryder says, "we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black" (57). It showed that there was a heirarchy in society after the Civil War. It wasn't a utopia of free citizens. White people were still at the top, Black people were still at the bottom, and mulattos were not accepted by either group. In other words, mulattos were too white to be considered black and too black to be considered white. In this story they had their own separate society and it may have been frowned upon for Mr. Ryder to acknowledge Liza as his wife because she was a black woman born into slavery and she did not fit into their mulatto society.

The Contemporary Connection 10/20/11

There have been events in American history that play large roles in defining our nation. Most often, the reason these events define us is because of how people decided to progress afterward. The Civil War is one of those events. It changed so many lives and people in our country, and it cut our nation in half. Another one of these events was 9/11. On page 2 of the introduction, it says, "the gulf between life before and after the war continued to expand during the following decades." Life changed for people after the Civil War, and all of our lives changed after 9/11. I was not directly affected by this event, but I do remember that it was the last time I truly felt safe.
In our country today, there is a deepening split between Middle Eastern Americans and all other Americans. It's out of fear that people have begun to discriminate against Middle Eastern Americans, and it's because no one wants to see such a devastating event take place again. It must be a lot like the aftermath of the Civil War. No one knew quite what was going to happen, so they tried to go through their lives walking on eggshells so as not to cause such a great war again.
As they began healing from the Civil War, they ran into some issues that still exist in our nation today; immigration is still a problem in our country. America has been called a beacon of hope to the refugees of other nations, but even in over 100 years, the system is still majorly flawed. Is it really such a beacon of hope and promise if the people who come here have no promise of being able to stay? Americans in the 1880's struggled with an influx in immigrants, especially those from China. Many of the Chinese who immigrated worked on the transcontinental railroad, taking the physical labor jobs that other Americans didn't want. In our country today, this still happens. It's not Chinese men building the railroad, butsometimes it is stereotypically Mexican men and women doing yard work and cleaning houses. There is still a stereotype of the people who immigrate to our country, and they come here to try to achieve their dreams which become part of the American Dream. Wouldn't that make these people American through their ideals?

Journal #8 Response to Denzel Green

You brought up a lot of interesting points about using religion as a way that writers used to connect to audiences in the North and the South. To go off of what you mentioned in your post, I noticed that religion was also a common theme in Lincoln's second inaugural address. When says, "both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other," I think he levels the playing field between Northerners and Southerners. He shows that, although the two regions differ in their opinions of separation, there are a lot of beliefs they share. They hold the same religious beliefs and many of the same American values. The Civil War, in this way, was truly a war between brothers. They all lived in the same nation, but had beliefs about slavery and separation that drove them apart.
Religion is, and always has been, a strong symbol in America, and the fact that all three of these authors use different aspects of it shows that an argument based on religious interpretation is not a strong one in this context. Although I like how Lincoln brought up the common religious affiliations among Americans, I don't think that any author should base their whole pro- or anti-slavery argument on it. There is far too much room for interpretation on the subject, and people on both sides of the North-South border can use it to their advantage when talking about slavery.