Black People example essay topic

While reading this book, I came across issues that I had already learned about in school over the years. I knew that for a least the past sixty years there has been some sort of conflict between the perceived to be white race and the perceived to be black race. No one really remembers how it all stared but the snowball effect had taken shape and it very rapidly spun out of control. Coming of Age in Mississippi written by Anne Moody was different however because it gave us an inside look as to how the black people in the heart of it all were directly affected. I have always read a unbiased version of this story and have never been able to relate to what I was reading simply because there was no emotion on the page but I found that this time around I had no problem feeling sorry and hurting for Anne Moody and her family. This book looks at all aspects of the Civil Rights era and gives examples to almost every sub topic but the subject that struck a cord for me was appearance.

I am a woman of mixed decent and I have heard in life time people call me yellow and I never thought anything of it until I read in the book that they used that same term to describe a black person with a lighter complexion. This played a huge role in the black community back during that time and it is still relevant today. It caused a black vs. black hatred and it divided the community at a time when they needed to come together the most. This idea that the lighter young skin is, the better you are still plays a role in the black communities around the nation today. This book has many examples of when it first started the turning point for light skinned blacks. The first time that I came across the term yellow or "high yellow" in the book was when Essie Mae was describing Florence.

She was Essie father's best friends widow who he ending up leaving her mother for. "Florence was a mulatto, high yellow with straight hair. She was the envy of all the women on the plantation" (Moody, 18) This is a perfect example of the appearance issue. Just because this woman had lighter skin and straight hair, she became the envy of all the other woman. It was a way for the other men and woman around to make her stand out from the rest and make her feel even more different then she already did. In the book it makes it sound as though "dark" black people thought that being a mulatto, or of mixed breed, made you closer to the whites therefore extremely far from the blacks no matter what.

The funny thing is that the people who were of mixed breed didn't see themselves as white; rather they saw themselves as a lighter shade of brown. This idea still presents itself today and I think that if it hadn't been an issue in the past, then no one who think to even make it one. People look back and see evidence of this kind of discrimination back during this time period and see that it relevant and can still be used today to try and oust the lighter skinned blacks into a different category. Another great example of this is Raymond's mother, Miss Pearl. She is a yellow woman who can't stand the idea that her son is starting a family with someone who has darker skin then he does. In the book, Essie Mae describe her as "a slightly white woman" (Moody, 31) She was a woman who didn't want any type of mixed breeding within her family even though they themselves were black.

Being yellow, she saw herself on a different level, a much higher level, then the other blacks in the community and she wasn't about to let here guard down for a woman that her own son had children with. She wanted her son to marry the woman in his life who was yellow like her and forget the woman who had just had his babies. This is an example of the mindset of some people at the time. They thought that they truly were above other blacks, darker blacks, when it comes to everyday life. They don't want to have anything to do with them, they refuse to see eye to eye and they don't respect them.

Today, it is easy to find people who have this exact same mindset, one that just makes the gap between black people even greater. Feeling as though you are above someone based on the color of your skin isn't going to make things better for anyone. That is the reason that we have so much hate in our world toady. It started out with black on black hate and when people got the idea that that was an okay thing to do, everyone joined the hate wagon and today in 2004, we have hate crimes and peoples prejudgments on another human based on race.

Mississippi was the center of violence during the Civil rights and it there was enough hatred to go around. In Mississippi in 1955, a fourteen year old boy from Chicago named Emm it Till whistled at a white woman and later that same week was brutally murdered. In the novel it describes the feelings of hate and sadness that wash over Moody when she finds out what had happened. While all of this black vs. white was going on, there was still the underlying issue of black verses black. To me, it seems as though this is taught at a young age by the parents who constantly say that there child is not as good as a white child or yellow child and that they have to work twice as hard to stay even with the others. In the book Essie Mae wants to be play with her white friends at the movies and her mother told her that she couldn't sit with them because she was black and that wasn't allowed.

(Moody, 38) The book goes on to explain how she, at a young age, can't see any difference between here two uncles, Sam and Walter, and the white kids from down the street. She is too young to know that there are two types of blacks and she is only allowed to associate with the light blacks because they are family but she can't be friends with the white kids because they are white, no questions asked. (Moody, 39) Children don't see color; they must be made aware of it. In this situation, Essie Mae had been made aware of it her whole life, but couldn't quite grasp the idea that it was okay to talk to a light black but it wasn't okay to talk to a dark white.

This book is oozing with historical significance. There are so many examples of the Civil Rights movement and we are able to see first hand that everyone in the deep South was effected by it. We see how it changes Anne Moody from a young innocent child to a person who hates whites then to a person who works for the betterment of the black race. We see that no good came from the hate that was inflicted on so many people in Mississippi and that there were so many points in time that it all could have been stopped. We see the nice white people who help people in need and we also hear about people who have no problem burning people alive in their homes because they are black. It we had stopped this back in the 1960's we wouldn't have the problems that we struggle with today.

People like me wouldn't have to worry about dating a man darker then me in fear that someone will disapprove of it. We wouldn't have the white vs. black and the black vs. black problems that are worldwide today. If we could have stopped it at the root, it wouldn't have grown out of control. We have a problem today; we are all racist.