Racial Identity Development Models Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Racial Identity Development Models - Essay Example It is during this stage that individuals ascertain themselves with the majority crowd. They have a habit of downplaying and having negative feelings towards their own ethnic society with little salience in their individuality (Sue et al., 1982). Dissonance is evident in experiences or encounters that are not consistent with a culture’s attitudes, values in addition to beliefs from the initial stage i.e. conformity. Take the case of an individual from a minority group who is not proud of their cultural heritage encountering another person from a different ethnicity that is proud of their ethnic background. During this stage, denial commences and there is a lot of doubt of one’s attitudes and beliefs once held in the first stage. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. brought about the rapid movement from passive conformity to dissonance stage by a large group of African Americans. As for the immersion and defiance juncture, a minority in society probably has feeling of anger, shame and guilt due to the oppression or racism that they previously had to withstand or tolerate. Ratification of the thoughts of the minority plus the rejection of society’s domineering values marks this stage (Sue et al., 1982). Individuals tend to focus more vivacity towards having a better understanding of them as minorities and the deeper meaning of this in the introspection phase. As opposed to the intense reaction against prevailing cultures in the previous point, the introspection leg appears to be more pro-active in the definition and discovery of the sense of self. The last period that is the integrative awareness stage is a time of development of the knack to be grateful for both the constructive aspects of the influential culture and theirs. It also involves the adeptness to feel secure. At this point, individuals tend to have already

Happiness in Fences, by August Wilson, and A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansbury :: Fences, A Raisin in the Sun

Imagine for a moment it is your big sister's 17th birthday. She is out with her friends celebrating, and your parents are at the mall with your little brother doing some last minute birthday shopping, leaving you home alone. You then hear a knock on the front door. When you getthere, nobody is there, just an anonymous note taped to the door that says Happy Birthday, along with a hundred dollar bill. You've been dying to get that new video game, and your sister will never know. You are faced with a tough decision, but not a very uncommon one. In both Fences, by August Wilson, and A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansbury, tough decisions have to be made about getting money from someone else's misfortune. But money's that important right? The role of money in people's day-to-day lives is quite amazing when it's put into perspective. The primary reason most Americans get up in the morning is so they can go out and make money. Money buys things; money influences people; money keeps us ali ve; money makes us happy. Or does it? In Fences, by August Wilson, the Maxtons get their money when Gabe's head is shot in the war. In A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansbury, the Younger family gets their money when Walter's father dies. But do the se things make them happy? Of course not. They are coming upon money from someone else's misfortune, someone they love. The money may have made life easier for a brief moment in time, but the novelty soon wears off and reality soon returns. The interesting thing about these two novels is that the money received by both the Maxtons and the Youngers did exactly the opposite of what everyone expected it to do. It eventually made problems for both of the families. In Fences, the Maxtons used Gabe's money to buy a house and even though it seemed like a good idea, when Gabe moved out, it caused a great deal of guilt in the family, but especially in Troy. He just couldn't get over how he 'used' someone he loved so much, and they didn't even kn ow it. In A Raisin in the Sun, the Youngers also buy a house with the money the life insurance gave them.

Detroitism

Historical Oblivion John Patrick Leary’s essay, Detroitism  explores the most common rhetoric that Detroit as a city and a symbol often falls  victim  to the validity of ‘ruin porn’ which attempts to document but often exploits its history. Leary is an  American literature teacher  at Wayne State University in Detroit. His essay explores in-depth the shallowness of popular ruin pornographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, photographs from their book, The Ruins of Detroit,  as well as other popular photographers.He also  outlines the three â€Å"Detroit Stories,† which are typical  attitudes  regarding Detroit news and media discussion. He intends to reveal a point he thinks is of reasonable importance to readers’. His essay is one with a valid message. However it can be difficult to understand exactly what he means at times as he shifts from criticism to defence of the photographers he mentions, which can sometime confuse them in to getting to different conclusions. Nevertheless, he does eventually secure a crucial point that stands out to most readers.According to John Patrick Leary, â€Å"Detroit remains the Mecca of urban ruins. † Leary notes that ruin photography is often deemed â€Å"pornographic,† and questions how photographs of a crumbling city can really tell us why that city crumbles. Where ruin photography succeeds is â€Å"in compelling us† to ask the questions necessary to put this story together—Detroit’s story, but also the increasingly familiar story of urban America in an era of prolonged economic crisis. He adjusts his writing in an effort to unveil a different view of Detroit’s past to the readers.In Leary’s view, most people are completely blinded by the fascination conveyed in the photographs and are unaware of the events that actually took place in the city. One example of ruin-porn Leary chooses to criticize is an extract from The Britis h filmmaker Julien Temple’s   Ã¢â‚¬ËœDetroit: The Last Days’: â€Å"In their shadows, the glazed eyes of the street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the car. Our excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in the U. S. ould actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the earth. † Leary describes this style as the locally denounced â€Å"ruin porn,† as all the elements are present: the exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction; the unembarrassed rejoicing at the â€Å"excitement† of it all, hastily balanced by the liberal posturing of sympathy for a â€Å"man-made Katrina;† and most importantly, the absence of people other than those he calls, cruelly, â€Å"street zombies. † Leary’s point is that the city and its people aren’t properly mentioned for they mean nothing to Detroit authors; their only interest is to come up with something readers find fascinating.This is exactly what Leary disapproves of and is the main purpose of his essay. According to Leary, no photograph can adequately identify the origins for Detroit’s contemporary ruination; all it can represent is the spectacular wreckage left behind in the present, after decades of deindustrialization, housing discrimination, suburbanization, drug violence, municipal corruption and incompetence, highway construction, and other forms of urban renewal that have taken their terrible tolls.The point behind his writing is to, at which to some extent he succeeds, change the reader’s view of Detroit by explaining the reality of the city’s past and allowing readers to imagine themselves in the past citizens’ unpleasant positions, at the time of the city’s downfall. John mentions what is most unsettling to him—but also most troubling—in Moore’s photos is their res istance to any narrative content or explication.For example, he describes Moore’s shot of a grove of birch trees growing out of rotting books in a warehouse as being a sign of Detroit’s stubborn persistence, and that it could easily be a visual joke on the city’s supposed intellectual and physical decrepitude, a bad joke that does not need repeating. Leary seems to disapprove of every photographer he mentions but only to some extent. What he thinks makes this subgenre of urban expose particularly contemporary, though, is the historical and economic phenomenon it struggles to represent, a phenomenon the newness of which few of us can adequately comprehend.He tries to break things down to make it easier to understand his reasoning. Another issue Leary discusses is how the city fascinates as it is a condensed, emphatic example of the trials of so many American cities in an era of globalization, which has brought with it intensified economic instability and seemingl y intractable joblessness. The implied message here is that people don’t realize that they themselves are at risk of sharing Detroit’s fate caused by economic struggles we face today. It’s a clear example of how that term, these days at least, increasingly looks like an optimistic delusion.Leary thinks it may have always been this way, and shows that he’s not satisfied. In viewing  Detroit Disassembled  and  The Ruins of Detroit, according to Leary, one is conscious of nothing so much as failure of the city itself. Neither do the photographs communicate anything more than that self-evident fact. It is difficult to see through the pictures to discover the past. This is the meta-irony of these often ironic pictures: Though they trade on the peculiarity of Detroit as living ruin, these are pictures of historical oblivion.Leary emphasizes that Detroit figures as either a nightmare image of the American Dream, where equal opportunity and abundance came t o die, or as an updated image of it, where people from expansive coastal cities can have the one-hundred-dollar house and community garden of their dreams. Although not directly mentioned, it is clear that this essay was not written only for the sake of Detroit, but rather to introduce a more realistic view of the world, one that Leary thinks the most people misunderstand.Leary tries to support his personal perspective with examples of situations that seem almost identical, providing more opportunities for readers to grab his ideas. It seems he’s so determined to making sure the reader grabs the accurate idea of the events in his writing that he, although it’s not very noticeable, uses guilt to persuade the reader about what he considers to be wrong views of Detroit’s past, which does not work in every approach.This may be due to the drawn conclusion of Leary trying to change the reader, which is understandably taken in disapproval, as readers like to have their own thoughts on implied matters in a reading. Most readers like to be entertained instead of being informed, although it is those readers who need to be informed. This doesn’t mean that his writing is offensive; it just isn’t balanced in a way that makes sense to everyone. At the end of his essay, Leary lessens his criticism about the photography and actually states what they do right. He starts to show a bit of appreciation as well.At that point, he starts to explain his analysis of the photographers’ work as incomplete. He mentions how Photographers like Moore, Marchand, and Meffre succeed in compelling us to ask the questions necessary to put this story together, Detroit’s story, but also the increasingly-familiar story of urban America in an era of prolonged economic crisis. He believes that the fact that they themselves fail to do so testifies not only to the limitations of any still image, but our collective failure to imagine what Detroit’s future, our collective urban future, holds for us all.The decontextualized aesthetics of ruin make them pictures of nothing and no place in particular. Detroit in these artists’ work is a mass of unique details that fails to tell a complete story. â€Å"But it’s a bit more than that,† Leary says, as he tries to explain that their photographs aren’t necessarily wrong, but rather that they are missing an important side of Detroit’s history, one that is crucial to our understanding of its future.

Romanticism A Time Of Modification - 1120 Words

Romanticism to Victorians: A Time of Modification The Romantic period was a time of literary, artistic, and musical expression that allowed groups of academics in England to evolve into a defined movement. Romanticism is identified with ideals of love, nature, and other identities that are almost always associated with those of the Romantics. Of Romantic texts, the idea of the period is that love and nature, are able to surpass rational being and enhances the ability to deal with daily life. This idea of emotion and the glorification of nature were carried out throughout the period and most authors stuck to this way of thinking and expressing. As this was a critical time in literary history, there were many writers that exhibited the capabilities, thoughts, and feelings of what it truly means to be a Romantic author. Of all, Lord Byron is accounted as one of the most memorable author’s amongst the plethora of authors who exemplify what it truly means to be a Romantic. Modern critics, however, did not take much acclaim to Byro n during his time period. As Lord Byron is labeled as fairly influential, he was celebrated and loathed during his time, due to his acts as a civilian. This led to the exile of Byron as well as his accumulation to many debts. In accordance with Lord Byron’s works there is great belief that he has influenced authors after his time. With great works such as Don Juan, Lord Byron can be regarded as one of the most influential writers within the RomanticShow MoreRelatedAmerican Culture: Religion and the Romanticism Movement805 Words   |  3 PagesCulture: Religion and the Romanticism Movement For decades, religious aspects have constantly changed, been opposed, and have also influenced the American Culture. Much controversy is involved in religion because of the effect it has on the nation and how it reflects upon significant political figures. 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