Contemporary Poetry and Racial Gaze

These three readings actually tie together well with something else I've been studying as of late. That being poets of the 20th century of whom are either first or second generation immigrants. In Gates' essay he talks about how the white man discouraged and didn't believe in the writings of a black man/woman. In the 1700's Gates shows us that many theorists were throwing the idea of blacks writing out the window, never letting their work even surface. This caused black writers to learn and speak/write the way of the white man in order to even be remotely heard. How does this relate to poets in the 20th century?

Well, let's take Amiri Baraka for one example. Baraka, was a poet who devoted most of his work to showing struggle between whites and blacks/ black literature. This is something he did stupendously well. His whole life was devoted to giving people an understanding of the struggles African Americans went through so people like him could even have the freedom to write. The part that ties closely to these readings is that in order to have so much success he wrote in the language of white men. He peppered into his poetry aspects from his roots, but he was inevitably forced to write this way because of the constant discrimination of his nature and ethnic decent. Although he is telling truths of what whites have done to him and his family he still wrote in a way that shows he was conditioned. This is sort of like what we see when Gates talks about Phillis Wheatley. She had to stand in front of a panel of white men and explain that she indeed did write HER OWN poems because if she didn't, people would have not known it possible for a black woman to write such great work.

It's wild to see how barbaric we still are as a nation, because this stuff still happens. I mean, my example of Amiri Baraka is recent in the grand scheme of things, he died in 2014. This all has to do with what Hum wants us to see and that is that all of our gazes are representations of things that happened before us. It's important to remember our history, but the history we choose to remember and then implement into the ways in which we act don't seem to be the healthiest. In that I mean, our views all come from something prior, but maybe that something prior is the wrong thing to base our gaze off. Because let's be honest, we have Trump in office, we're not moving forwards. Especially in the eye of racial gaze.

Works Cited   

Cooper, Anna Julia. "Experts from A Voice From the South" (1892). Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Anne E. Boyd. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2009. 379-384

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes." Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 1-20.

Hum, Sue "Between the Eyes': Racialized Gaze as Design." College English 77.3 (2015): 191-215