Monday, February 12, 2007

African American Dreams

The biggest theme we covered in our film and novel this week was identity as it relates to the American dream. We read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and watched Spike Lee's Bamboozled.

In regards to the American dream, we are all fighting for the freedom to define our own identity. We should have the power to define our own racial identity in terms of what it means to be who we are. What names can be used to define our different races and who gets to decide what they are?

Another theme was freedom and what it means. We read Langston Hughes' poem Let America Be America Again which reads, "Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true..." It is a brave dream indeed to let people be free. It means being able to give up control. Freedom is perverted by Cholly in The Bluest Eye; he thinks freedom is not being responsible to anyone or being responsible for his actions. He finds his freedom in abondoning morals and values that would have made him a better person.

Another element of the American dream we touched upon this week was love. We all want to be loved, but for the characters in Morrison's novel, things like beauty and being able to fit in stand in the way. Obtaining the dream becomes increasingly about obtaining the looks you need in order to get it. We seek approval and we seek to fit into the social web in America and beauty -- or lack of it -- is a big part of that.

I find it interesting that we finally have a strong, black candidate running for President of the United States of America in Barack Obama, yet everyone has to rip him apart because he's not "black enough." SfGate.com asks the question, "Is (Obama) African-American if his roots don't include slavery?"

The Doll Study


This video is of The Doll Study, which you may have seen before. It relates to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and how the characters Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda are always idolizing caucasian standards of beauty. The girls may mock white girl Maureen Peel in the novel, but deep down inside it's because of envy.

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