Flamingo Think Tank

In White Boy Shuffle, we see that Nick Scoby (the yeast man {you did this to me Bella}) is an extremely important character in Gunnar's development. His undeniable nerdy or geeky qualities make it easy for him to connect with and accept Gunnar, but he also functions as something as a role model for Gunnar, someone for him to look up to, and helps him become accepted in his new neighborhood. In his role as a someone that Gunnar looks up to, Nick Scoby has qualities that seem impossible, even magical. His most obviously superhuman quality is that he is seemingly incapable of missing the hoop in basketball. His Curry-esque consistency when shooting under any circumstances seems far from what should be possible for a professional, let alone a high school student. He also has the ability to read a bar code and tell the price of the object from it, and he can tell if a person has black ancestry without knowing them (even if they aren't black). In class today (thank you Xanthe), a

Let me start by saying that what Sethe did in the Woodshed is undeniably a horrible thing. There is nothing that can make that ambiguous, it's just awful. However, in my opinion, it doesn't make her a bad person.  When trying to reconcile her actions with the character we were initially presented with, it gets pretty complicated. Sethe is an extremely strong, caring, tough and loving person. She does what needs to be done when there is a crisis, and she doesn't let anything stop her. Before this scene, she is presented as the ultimate mother, overcoming superhuman odds to make it back to her children, and protecting them at all costs. In this context, what she did can be extremely difficult to understand. How could a person who had such a love for her children do what she did? After everything she went through to get them out of Sweet Home safely, and to make it to them herself, why would she want to kill them? First of all, I don't think that she wanted to kill the

In Richard Wright's response to Their Eyes Were Watching God, he criticizes Hurston's characterizations of black people, and her lack of an explicit political message. He aligns himself with the message of "To the Pale Poets" and accuses Hurston of "having no desire move in the direction of serious fiction." In doing so, he seems to have totally missed what's so important about the novel.  Strong and independent female black characters were pretty much unheard of up until this novel was written. While Janie was not always depicted in the most progressive way by Hurston, and she spent most of the book being defined by men, her character also showed strength and, by the end of the book, was totally independent of men. The fact that Eatonville has no white people in it also allows for Hurston to explore what a woman's life experience could resemble, instead of allowing her to be grouped with men of the same race who don't have the same experience

The two poems "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks and "Those Boys that Ran Together" by Lucille Clifton have similar imagery and messages. Both poems depict young people who played pool and went to bars, and eventually died/were imprisoned. Both poems are about how black boys' lives in America are disproportionately stifled (either by death or early imprisonment for extended periods of time), and the verdicts/attacks are unfair. The people depicted in both poems are also unnamed, pointing to the commonness of police brutality and systematic oppression in America, and how it has become normalized. However, both poems also have important differences.  "Those Boys that Ran Together" is told from the perspective of the boys' community, while "We Real Cool" is told from the perspective of the boys. One poem has a sense of nostalgia, while the other has a sense of foreboding. "Those Boys that Ran Together" also explicitly states tha

In Invisible Man, the narrator is taken in by a group known as the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is an organization that presents itself s revolutionary, pro-equality, and free. Yet somehow, this organization manages to promote and perpetuate racial stereotypes, inequality on the basis of race and gender, and forces its members to conform to a strict system of rules. It functions very similarly to Liberty Paints and to the college that the narrator attended which are both very much a part of the system that the Brotherhood is supposedly fighting to overthrow. The Brotherhood holds within itself a paradox--though it claims to be a radical and egalitarian organization, it aligns itself with practices and beliefs that are big parts of the inequality "the system" promotes. The Brotherhood claims to be a "rainbow coalition," a post-racial society and an equal society for all people. However, the behavior of the members of the organization, when they interact with the na

In Chapter 11 of Ellison's  Invisible Man  the narrator goes to work at a paint factory called Liberty Paints. This factory is enormous and seems to function as its own city. Many of the qualities that it possesses are parallel to those possessed by America. The way that it is run, the positions held by African Americans, even the name seem to have symbolism relating Liberty Paints to the American system. In this way, Liberty Paints seems to serve as an allegory for the country of America. The way that the narrator experiences the chain of command in Liberty paints seems parallel to the way that he experiences hierarchies in the rest of his life. The narrator is explicitly told by Kimbro that he "just has to do what [he's] told and don't try to think about it". This is very similar to the way he was treated by Bledsoe, Norton and the white southerners. They just give him orders and he is expected to follow them without thought. However, just like in the rest o