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Model Final Exam answers 2018 Essay 1: Revise & Extend Minority Identification & Analysis (Add African America) Index to Sample Essay 1 Answers |
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Kristin Mizell
5/3/2018
One Person’s Dream is Another
Person’s Nightmare
Before attending college, I felt my
worldview was well rounded and that I had an understanding of what “minority”
meant. I recognized my privilege as a white woman, or a member of the dominant
culture, and thought that was enough. I have since learned that simply
recognizing my privilege is not enough and I must also recognize the experience
of minority cultures. I had made the mistake in making my learning all about me
and my experience when in reality I needed to sit back and listen to the
experiences of others. Because I am a white person, it would have been easy to
simply count the experiences of minorities as “other.” This is not a fair or
accurate assessment. Last semester I read about the experiences of other women
in a women’s studies class, and in that experience I was introduced to the
appalling fact that one in three Native American women are sexually assaulted in
their lifetime (NPR). Reading The Round
House gave a name and a story to those numbers. Through reading Reyna
Grande’s story in The Distance Between
Us, I was given a first-hand look at a broken, dysfunctional family that
came to America in search of something more. In reading Harriet Jacob’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
I was given insight into one of the darkest periods of American history through
a woman directly impacted by it. These works use symbols to employ mimesis and
syncretism and generate meaning. Through the course materials I have learned
more about Native American, Mexican American, and African American minority
identity and how the dominant culture has attempted to destroy and erase this
identity. I have also learned how these minority identities have fought back
against this destruction.
“How the White Race came to America” is
a great reminder that Native American’s were here first. To ignore their history
here would be to deny the fact that the dominant culture came to them and made
them a minority. Native Americans did not choose to immigrate here; they had
their land taken from them. The “White Race” voluntarily came here on a promise
of riches and power, and Native Americans were involuntarily forced to
participate in a new American dream, a dream that was designed without them and
depended upon them having their land stolen from them. We get a heartbreaking
and sympathetic insight into how Native Americans view the dominant culture with
the last few lines of this work, “Now all this was done and when afterward he
saw the havoc and the misery his work had done he
said, ‘I think I have made an enormous mistake for I did not dream that these
people would suffer so.’ Then did even the devil himself lament that his evil
had been so great.” The dominant culture is seen as bringing such evil with them
that the devil himself was ashamed. We can see this “evil” reflected in
instances like the Trail of Tears, the “forced
relocation of Cherokee & other Southeast American Indians
to Oklahoma
territory” (Trail of Tears). This event “set
the Indians involved into a separate
and unequal assimilation track” (Trail of Tears).
The dominant culture also brought disease to the Native American population, an
“evil” that lead to many deaths. This work and these events really helped me
learn how the dominant culture is viewed by the minority culture.
Racism in
The Round House also helps shed a
light on how the dominant culture is seen by Native Americans. When Joe is at
the hospital the night of his mother’s attack, white women in the waiting room
treat him poorly. Rather than see a young boy in distress, they see a Native
American, an “other,” and their racism prevents them from showing empathy for
Joe and his family. One of the women questions their very presence in the
hospital, “Don’t you Indians have your own hospital over there? (10).” She
sneers and makes it know that Joe’s family is “other” and doesn’t belong. We
also see racism through the character of Linden. The character of Linden treats
all Native Americans with hatred and disrespect. He is a personification of the
hatred that Native Americans have felt from the dominant culture since they
arrived and began to take what did not belong to them.
Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories
also gives insight into Native American minority culture’s relationship with the
dominant culture. In “The School Days of an Indian Girl” we are told the story
of her attempt to resist and not assimilate by cutting off her long hair. Her
hair is a symbol of strength. Only “unskilled warriors” had their hair cut, so
she struggled and fought to keep it. It was cut anyway, though she fought, and
she says, “Then I lost my spirit. Since the day I was taken from my mother I
had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed
about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a
coward's!” Her hair was a symbol for all that had been taken from her, and it
can be read as a symbol for the indignities Native Americans were forced to
face. Zitkala-Sa’s work shows many instances where the “palefaces” disregard
what the Native Americans want and assert their dominance by forcing them to
comply. Zitkala-Sa’s story is also one of loss and survival, for that narrative
is interwoven in Native American minority culture as a whole. This firsthand
account really helps the reader understand on a personal level what the dominant
culture has done to this culture.
The Round House uses mimesis to imitate
real life experiences like Zitkala-Sa’s and shows how assimilation and the
dominant culture can affect the lives of Native Americans. The term mimesis is
used to describe “the representation or imitation of the real world in
literature” (course site). Gertrude’s attack is unfortunately something that
happens to Native American women all too often. It also shows how the dominant
culture continues to take things away from Native Americans. By making it so
that Native Americans cannot prosecute non-Natives for crimes committed on
tribal land, the dominant culture instituted yet another system that put the
minority culture at a significant disadvantage. This also shows the narrative of
loss and survival, they lost most of their land and now have to survive even
though they have lost the right to properly police the land they have been left
with.
The Round House also uses syncretism to
symbolize the blending of cultures with the Catholicism and the Chippewa
religion seen in the novel. Syncretism is “the blending of two or more religious
traditions, especially through symbols and narratives (course site).” The
syncretism in The Round House can be
read as an example of how rather than completely erase their culture and defer
to the dominant culture, minority cultures can blend them together. This
blending can be seen in characters in The
Round House, some of them embrace Catholicism while other like Mooshum
completely disregard it. In both of these instances, the minority identity is
not completely erased. This blending is another example of loss and survival;
the Chippewa religion is surviving through blending with the dominant culture.
Much
like Native Americans and African Americans, Mexican Americans cannot be wholly
classified as immigrants. Considering parts of the United States were once
Mexico, the white man come to them as with Native Americans. However, some
Mexican Americans did make their way to America on their own and therefore are
immigrants. We see this in stories like Reyna Grande’s, where her family was
born in Mexico but moved to America for better opportunities. It is important to
note that as a whole it would be wrong to classify Mexican Americans as
immigrants, but some individual Mexican Americans can be considered immigrants.
Gloria Anzaldua writes about the “Borderlands” in reference to the Mexican
American cultural experience, while also relating it to other cultures that
meet. Anzaldua writes, “ the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or
more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same
territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space
between two individuals shrinks with intimacy."
In
The Distance Between Us, Reyna Grande
tells the reader about her experience as a young girl in Mexico and later an
immigrant in the United States. We are able to see the compelling perspective of
how Grande viewed the United States as a young impoverished child in Mexico and
as an immigrant living in the United States. Grande’s story is one the reader
can sympathize with. We are able to both empathize and sympathize with her
plight as a child of poverty in Mexico. Grande describes her and her siblings as
having distended, worm filled bellies from starvation. She describes the scenery
in Iguala and it is a bleak one. It is not hard to understand why her parents
would seek to have a better life when reading about the impoverished conditions
they lived in. We are able to step into their shoes and see what their life is
like, and therefore we are able to understand them and the choices they made.
Grande’s work uses mimesis like The Round
House, but this art is actually representing her real life. The
conversations in the novel imitate real conversations because they are based on
real conversations that Reyna had. Grande’s writing style is full of emotion. We
can sympathize with how Reyna felt because she explains how she felt in a
simple, yet emotional, way. The dialogue between characters mixes in Spanish
words because those were the words they would have used. The blending of Spanish
and English can be seen as a symbol for the blending of cultures. This blending
can also be seen as a representation of the “New World Immigrant” identity.
Grande’s family immigrated here, but their culture has had involuntary contact
with the dominant culture. “New World Immigrants” also experience “dividing
loyalties,” which we see throughout the novel.
Reyna
has a difficult time fitting in when she comes to America, a common experience
with both immigrants and minority cultures. It is hard coming to a new place and
fitting in, whether you came to that place voluntarily or not. We see this in
the Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin
as well. Seguin fought on the side of Texas, and yet he was not accepted and
considered an outsider. Seguin writes, “I had to leave Texas, abandon all, for
which I had fought and spent my fortune, to become a wanderer. The ingratitude
of those who had assumed to themselves the right of convicting me; their
credulity in declaring me a traitor on mere rumors when I had [evidence] to
plead in my favor the loyal patriotism with which I had always served Texas,
wounded me deeply.” Seguin was made voiceless in that he was not given a chance
to defend himself. He was found guilty simply because of rumors. He was not
given a choice much like many minority cultures in the United States.
As
with works like “How the White Race Came to America,”
The Distance Between Us gives an
insight into how the minority culture can view the dominant culture. We are able
to get this insight through Reyna’s first person narrative. As a small child,
Reyna did not really have a developed understanding of America. To her it was
“El Otro Lado,” or the other side. She saw America as a place that took away her
parents (3). After coming to America Reyna states, “We were already living some
kind of Hell in this strange place of broken beauty “(262). Once here, it was
hard for Reyna to adjust. She struggled with assimilating, she writes “in my
writing, you couldn’t hear my accent” (242). She had a hard time learning
English and felt overlooked by her English-speaking teacher. Reyna also deals
with the pitfalls of assimilation in regards to others in her minority culture,
“I was no longer considered Mexican enough,” she writes, “I was no longer one of
them” (281). Reyna’s experience shows how the dominant culture can seek to
diminish the minority culture, but we can see through her work that Reyna has
not allowed this to force her to let go of her minority culture.
The Distance Between Us demonstrates many
of the socioeconomic behaviors outlined on the minority identity page. Again, we
are able to see the mimesis of Reyna’s art imitating life because she is writing
about her real life experiences. Her family is broken when she is very young,
first her father moves to America and then her mother. She is left to live with
a violent grandmother who believes in traditional gender roles to a toxic
degree. Because Reyna and her siblings are not her daughter’s children, she says
she cannot trust that they are really her grandchildren because she cannot trust
their mother who could have been sleeping around. Mago is forced to take on the
role of mother and become much more mature than a young girl should be. She is
forced to grow up and let go of her childhood much sooner than in a more
“traditional” childhood setting.
As
with Mexican Americans and Native Americans, African Americans had involuntary
contact with the dominant culture. African Americans were brought to this
country involuntarily on slave ships, and the dominant culture kept them in
bondage and sold them like livestock. This relationship set up a power imbalance
that we can still see today. With
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, we are given insight into what
slavery was like from the point of view of a woman who experienced the horrors
of slavery first hand. Much like with Reyna Grande’s work, Harriet Jacobs uses
mimesis in that her art is imitating her life. Jacobs uses mimesis and empathy
in her slave narrative in order to humanize slaves in the eyes of readers.
Jacobs writes in her introduction, “ want to add my testimony to that of abler
pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by
experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of
abominations.” Those of us who were not slaves are unable to actually experience
the “abominations” of slavery, but we are able to have a vicarious experience
through Jacobs’ writing.
Not
only was Harriet Jacobs a slave, she was also a woman. As such, she was a sort
of “double minority.” Harriet Jacobs illustrates this with the quote, “[a slave
woman] will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to
tremble when she hears her master's footfall. She will be compelled to realize
that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will
prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only
hastens the degradation of the female slave.” Slave women were forced to endure
sexual violence from their “master,” even having his children. Being a woman
contributed to Harriet Jacobs experience as a member of the minority culture
because of the sexual advances of her “master” from a young age. Jacobs writes
on her experience that “No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or
as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect
her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by
fiends who bear the shape of men.” As a woman, Jacobs was treated differently
than male slaves.
With
Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reader
is brought into the world of slavery from a different viewpoint than that of
Harriet Jacobs’ direct experience as a slave. In
Kindred, we see the experience of
slaves through the point of view of an outsider, Dana. Because Dana has traveled
from the future, the reader is able to easily relate to Dana as she experiences
the horrors of slavery around her. Dana herself is whipped for trying to run
away, which makes her not want to run away again. The reader is able to
experience this trauma vicariously through Dana. Another interesting aspect of
Kindred is the humanization and dehumanization of Rufus, the son of the
plantation owner. Rufus has the potential to do what is right and be a good
person, and the reader is ultimately disappointed in him because he becomes more
brutal and violent as he gets older in the novel. The reader, like Dana, wanted
Rufus to change but he was ultimately unable to and commits violent acts. We see
this dichotomy of human/inhuman in
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as well. Harriet feels sorry for her
mistress because of how her husband acts, and the reader feels some sympathy
towards her as well. However, because she treats Harriet so unjustly she is seen
as monstrous as well as her husband, just in a different way.
Through
this course, I have been able to identify aspects of minority culture and
identity through the relationship between the minority and dominant culture. I
have also been able to recognize the power of these minority cultures in their
ability to survive and continue on despite great odds. Being able to see the
true story of a young Mexican American and her family in
The Distance Between Us allows the
reader more insight into the Mexican American culture. The reader is able to see
how hard it can be for someone coming to this country, and how not all
immigrants or minorities see America as this wonderful place full of hope and
opportunity. For young Reyna, it was a place that took her parents away and left
her alone. Once she moved here, it was a place that mistreated her and tried to
force her into a mold she did not fit. Through her writing, however, Reyna was
able to hold on to her minority identity and share it with the world in order to
broaden our understanding of minority identity. We are also able to see the
survival through blending cultures, as with
The Round House. With
The Round House we are able to see
the ways of Native Americans survive through blending in the syncretism of the
Catholic and Chippewa religions. With
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
we see the perseverance of Harriet Jacobs and her strength in telling her story
in order to help free others in bondage. We are able to the struggle African
Americans are up against with the power imbalance in this country through slave
narratives like Harriet Jacobs’. Through
the course readings I have come to a greater understanding of the minority
identity and its relation to the dominant culture.
