In recent years we have seen a rise in fake stories popping up in our news and it is becoming harder and harder to sort through the mess to find the meat a potatoes of today’s society. Making it difficult for on to be able to find socially relevant pieces of art and or literature to match the issues going on in the United States and countries alike. If we were to focus closing on certain elements that are going on with the African American culture and the people we can look at older pieces of literature that will help shed a deeper light enabling us to be able to identify where elements of the culture stem from and if certain thing are still evident till this day. Further, we can see this specially through one of the many WPA former slave narratives
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With the stories circulating in the news in the past four years, one could say that the United States has had multiple public lynching’s similar to that told in Johnson’s poem. For example, the Eric Garner story. A man who pleading and repeating I cannot breathe over and over again all to have people around him just staring in aww and as another man, friend or foe, recorded this indecent is no better than the men who photographed lynching mobs. In the poem Johnson paints the picture of a man who is being prepared to be hung and he created a dialog between to mob and the man. This dialog opens the discussion some more allowing us to examine the relationship between African Americans and Whites in the United States. Throughout this poem the men in the mob ask the man being lynched how did he become this beastly form? and the mob receives an answer stating the treatment blacks received during enslavement followed by being forced to remain loyal crafted the beast he became. I found this to be interesting because it connects to a poem named The Game by poet Ashley August. At one part in the poem she goes on to say that the members for her volleyball team treat her very disrespectfully by making comments about her race and at one point someone calls her a nigger. Becoming infuriated by the word she states “I became the animal they had already viewed me as,” I see this as a way of being able to opening that dialog for some African American like myself to say that I am terrified of being seen only as some kind of beast or animal that will do a person
With the stories circulating in the news in the past four years, one could say that the United States has had multiple public lynching’s similar to that told in Johnson’s poem. For example, the Eric Garner story. A man who pleading and repeating I cannot breathe over and over again all to have people around him just staring in aww and as another man, friend or foe, recorded this indecent is no better than the men who photographed lynching mobs. In the poem Johnson paints the picture of a man who is being prepared to be hung and he created a dialog between to mob and the man. This dialog opens the discussion some more allowing us to examine the relationship between African Americans and Whites in the United States. Throughout this poem the men in the mob ask the man being lynched how did he become this beastly form? and the mob receives an answer stating the treatment blacks received during enslavement followed by being forced to remain loyal crafted the beast he became. I found this to be interesting because it connects to a poem named The Game by poet Ashley August. At one part in the poem she goes on to say that the members for her volleyball team treat her very disrespectfully by making comments about her race and at one point someone calls her a nigger. Becoming infuriated by the word she states “I became the animal they had already viewed me as,” I see this as a way of being able to opening that dialog for some African American like myself to say that I am terrified of being seen only as some kind of beast or animal that will do a person