RESPONSE ON “BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME”      

This poem was vey detailed and it left me with a sickening feeling in my stomach. At first I thought the poem was about nature and then once I got into it, it started to make since to me. What I got out of the poem was a black man being tarred and feathered. Back in the 50’s, when people did a crime they got put to death. When a black man did a crime he got publicly humiliated and tarred and feathered.

In the story To Kill a Monkingbird there was a black man that was tarred and feathered. This poem relates to that part. The first part of the poem it seemed as though someone was describing the event. The second part of the poem was written in the first person. This poem left disturbing images in my mind.

I thought when he said “my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from me in limp patches” was the most disturbing part. I actually felt the tar on my skin like he did. Overall the poem made me feel sad. It made me wonder why the heck people would do that to a person.

Granddaughter's Sled Response

The story “Granddaughter’s Sled” was kind of lame. It was on the reading level of an eight year old. I hope the story was better in Russian. I’m glad they put the glossary of words at the bottom with such difficult words as “sled,” “frowned,” “elderly,” and “terrible.” Those words are extremely tough for me. I also saw several issues with the story. Number 1: why didn’t they just dump the grandfather and take the sled back? They could have followed the rules and kept the nice sled. It would’ve been the “best of both worlds” as Miley Cyrus would say. Number 2: there wasn’t a food shortage before they brought the grandfather home, so it seems like it was his fault all along. Sure, he solved the problem, but he also caused it. Number 3: who would eat food from a roof? That doesn’t seem sanitary to me. I think this story is like the Native American stories where animals talk. They might be true, but it s extremely unlikely. Also, it reminds me of the movie 300, where the babies are left on the mountain to die, but instead of babies in the story, it's the reverse, the elderly (very old).

Seperate Enterances

The picture is another example of segregation in the early 1900’s, when ‘colored’ people and white people were separated. It’s really sad to think about how people couldn’t even be in the same room as each other. It’s as if people were afraid to mix back then. They’re just people, we’re all human. I think it was very extreme for them to segregate people by color because it was like slowing down the development of our country. In that group of African Americans there could have great poets, leaders, scientists, inventors, and others who could have changed the world but did not get the attention or quality of life they deserved.

The Elderly

The Old Russian story about the care of the elderly is a kind of creepy tale. It tells about the tradition of bringing the elderly, thought to be useless, out to the woods to die. In the end it changes and the elderly are respected, but the premise of taking someone out to die, to me, is sickening. It also very different to our culture yet dare I say, similar. They are different in the way that the elderly are respected in our culture, but you can almost compare it to nursing homes. I find nursing homes to be, in my opinion, terrible. I feel like people have the responsibility to care for our parents and grandparents when they become old, sick, and frail. They cared for us our entire lives, don’t we owe them the respect of caring for them in their last legs of their lives? I don’t know, I guess nursing homes just irk me.

I think the poem “Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright is about a scene where a black man was beaten. It is confusing in the beginning, because the author describes what the setting looked like and then describes what happened. The poem is creepy because he describes bones, ashes, blood and a skull. He also writes about other objects left there, but you don’t know why they are important until later. Then he imagines he is the person this happened to, and tells the rest of the poem that way. He uses descriptive words and talks about being tarred and feathered, and then set on fire. This poem was creepy but did a good job of showing how badly African American people were treated.

Seperate Entrances

At first i was suprised that the link was to a single picture, and not a poem or short story like the other links. It took me a while to understand what the picture was showing. It shows the seperate entrances that blacks and whites had in this time period. The fact that people actually took the time to build entirely seperate doors to their buisnesses was crazy. I find it hard to belive that they actually believed that something that bad would happen if they had one entrance to their buisness, other than the arguments between blacks and whites. If people had one entrance, and refused to follow everyone else, then maybe people would begin to forget about these beliefs. Even if a business owner didn't believe in segregation, he probably followed the crowd, and created these seperate entrances, just sio he was liked, and wasn't ridiculed or threatened. I can't believe even the government and the people who made laws in America, allowed blatant segregation like this to take place. This also made m realize how far we have come since then. Althoug some people still have stereotypes and opinions about other races, racial segregation like this has mainly been erased in America.

The Water Fountain

The water fountain in the picture looks, for a lack of better words, really shitty. There’s graffiti all over the wall and some terrible looking mold growing underneath the fountain. Even though the graffiti says “white” on the wall, I’m guessing it was not made for white people, but for African Americans instead. It’s really sad because no matter what color our skin is we AT LEAST all deserve clean drinking water and it’s hard to think that we as Americans could not even give that. If I were told to drink out of that fountain, I might actually vomit. That seriously can not be sanitary. Even from the Revolutionary War our country has valued qualities like freedom and liberty, but we sometimes forget that everyone is entitled to these things. Even today when we see a man in a turban walking down the street we cringe. Why? They’re just people who have done nothing wrong. Don’t blame the majority for the faults of a small group of people. Many people complain about Mexicans coming to the US and stealing American jobs. Well think about how many American college students go to Mexico for spring break, bringing their booze and drugs and crime with them. And white people have had their share of faults. The Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, enslaving people from Africa, the Salem Witch Trials, etc. This is not just a picture of an old water fountain, it’s another reminder of how backwards our country used to be, and still is.