Monday, 26 February: begin Donald Goines, Black Girl Lost

Web highlight (midterms): Jaime McBride

Introduction: I went onto the course website and found answers to short answer “identification” questions on the fall 2002 midterm exam.  I chose to use short answers that explained quotes from Black Girl Lost by Donald Goines.

“And as they led her out of the school the teachers stood around helplessly and watched. Not one asked what the problem was. The rough handling of the girl meant nothing to them, as long as they weren’t involved. The black teachers who watched shook in their shoes because they knew what the white police thought of them all. . . .

“To the white officers who rushed at her, she was not a young black girl anymore—a schoolgirl at that. She was just someone black who had found the nerve to strike back at them. . . .

“As the detectives tossed her unconscious body into the car beside Chink, one of the white detectives muttered, ‘They ain’t no better than a couple of damn animals, the way they act.’

“’No better,” one of his friends commented. “That’s all they are is animals.”

“The black officer who had been responsible for the arrest glanced at the two white officers who were speaking. . . . For the first time he was ashamed that he was responsible for the arrest of the young couple. . . . He wondered idly if the white cops who called them animals could have come from such hardships as children and survived as well as this young could had.”

This passage comes from Donald Goines, Black Girl Lost.  With vivid and descriptive word choices, Goines successfully captures the soul crushing conditions of ghetto life as experienced by the two protagonists, Sandra and Chink.  Readers can easily vicariously share the minority experience in all its violence and struggles (Obj. 5A).  In these passages, Sandra and Chink find themselves being arrested for selling drugs.  The teachers at the school she attends witness Sandra’s arrest and rough handling by the officers.  Though they watch, not one of them asks what she has done or seeks to offer her any type of support.  They simply did not want to get involved.  To some, this way of thinking sounds callous and cold hearted.  To a minority, however, especially an African-American minority, not getting involved is a manifestation of one’s distrust of dominant institutions.  Sandra, Chink, nor the African-American teachers have any real confidence or trust in the legal system as it pertains to minorities.  Objective 2C relates to this idea of distrust of dominant institutions and minorities’ relationship to the law.  The minority teachers “knew what the white police thought of all of them.  Knowing “they could and would be handled the same way if they so much as opened their mouths” kept the teachers from offering their help to Sandra. [VB]

 This quote from Black Girl Lost first shows the power struggle between the black teachers and the white police.  The teachers just know they are “helpless” in the situation.  They as Goines states “knew what the white police thought of them all…”  In other words, the teacher knew that the white police saw them as lower than them because of the color of their skin and nothing else.  Even though teachers are seen as a group with authority, in this their power is stripped because of their ethnicity.  And Sandra who is a young black schoolgirl is seen as “someone black who had found the nerve to strike back at them…”  So the fact that she was a young girl didn’t factor in to the police because they felt she broke the law and fought in direct defiance of them the white cops.  Sandra and Chink were paralleled to “animals” by the cop’s further showing that they felt they were better than them because of the color of their skin.  In this Objective 2b is shown in that race is being used as a class.  The teachers, Sandra and Chink, and even their black fellow officer were lower than them in class only because they were black.  This fear of the law shown by the teachers and the kids also shows Objective 2c and the idea that “the law” makes things worse for them.  The black officer is upset that he is responsible for the arrest because he knows that the kids were merely trying to live out the “Dream” in the best way that they knew how. [CM]

The officer in Black Girl Lost by Donald Goines faced the situation spelled out in objective 4 on whether to assimilate or resist. By joining the dominant culture’s police force, he assimilated but with regrets when he was the arresting officer of Chink and Sandra. He felt remorse for the two members of his race but was compelled by duty as a participant in the structure of the dominant culture. The response of the white officers was ambivalent as they stood next to their fellow officer while disparaging his race as animals. This displays a number of feelings on both parts as the white officers felt comfortable enough to make the statements in his presence AND ignore that he was there at all. His “blackness” had made him invisible and part of their structure at the same time – the same blackness that made Sandra no longer a schoolgirl but an animal. Surely the officer felt anger and shame at the same time: anger for the prejudice against his race in general and shame for his participation in the culture that perpetuated the prejudice. [JU]

Conclusion: By reviewing these short answers explaining quotes from Black Girl Lost I was able to gain a better perspective of our course objectives. These answers clearly outlined the “Quick check” on minority status objective and made it evident to me. I think that having the ability to read previous students' intake as well as our own class's models of the works we are reading allows us to have a better understanding of them.