RACISM A) Read the texts and, in groups, google a bit to collect some biodata on the authors below to present in class: ① I, Too I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.
Tomorrow, I’ll sit at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.
Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed I, too, am America.
Langston Hughes (1932)
②“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation(…) But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.” (…) From the speech “I have a Dream”( 1963) by Martin Luther King
③(…) “During my tenth year, a white woman’s kitchen became my finishing school. (…) It took me a week to learn the difference between a salad plate, a bread plate and a dessert plate.(…) She [Miss Glory] explained the dishware, silverware and servants’ bells. The large round bowl in which soup was served wasn’t a soup bowl, it was a tureen. There were goblets, sherbet glasses, ice-cream glasses, wine glasses, green glass coffee cups with matching saucers, and water glasses. I had a glass to drink from, and it sat with Miss Glory’s on a separate shelf from the others.” (…) From the short story “Names” (1969) by Maya Angelou ④“Rule Number One for working for a white lady, Minnie: it is nobody’s business. You keep your nose out of your White Lady’s problems, you don’t go crying to her about yours (…) Rule Number Two: don’t you ever let that White Lady find you sitting on her toilet. Rule Number Three: when you’re cooking white people’s food, you taste it with a different spoon. Rule Number Four: You use the same cup, same fork, same plate every day. Keep it in a separate cupboard and tell that white woman that’s the one you’ll use from here on out.”(…)
From “The Help”(2009) by Kathryn Stockett
http://www.clubeinglesoure.blogspot.pt
Alexandra Duarte