But sitting there with nothing on my plate but two hard tomato wedges wondering about the melting Klondikes it seemed childish remembering the slight. Joseph was on the list of kids to be transferred from the junior high school to another one at some far-out-of-the-way place and I thought it was a good thing until I heard it was a bad thing. I mean I didn't know. All the schools seemed dumps to me, and the fact that one was nicer looking didn't hold much weight.
But the papers were full of it and then the kids began to get jumpy. I'm not doing anything to you. Swiss cheese? Plot Summary. All Themes Friendship vs. Adulthood Race and Prejudice. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts.
The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Edition on Recitatif can help. Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols.
Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. Themes and Colors. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Recitatif , which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Related Themes from Other Texts. Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…. Find Related Themes. How often theme appears:. Race and Prejudice Quotes in Recitatif Below you will find the important quotes in Recitatif related to the theme of Race and Prejudice.
Recitatif Quotes. Related Characters: Twyla speaker , Roberta. Related Themes: Friendship vs. Page Number and Citation : Cite this Quote. Explanation and Analysis:. Related Characters: Twyla speaker , Maggie. Therefore, the audience is left to decide which character is black and which is white. When I read this story originally, I believed that Twyla was black from the first sentence I read. I thought it was made very clear that Twyla was African American.
However, I now can point to specific passages that support my initial reading of the story. Throughout the history of the United States, racism and segregation played a huge role in how our society functioned.
Despite the Civil Rights Movement, white privilege still exists. In another scene, Twyla finds Roberta protesting school integration. I viewed these comments as Twyla hoping for racial equality through integration, while Roberta rejects the busing due to racism.
It was not until I discussed this short story with my classmates that I realized that the race of these two characters was never mentioned. At this point, I felt an intense sense of shame and embarrassment. I pride myself in trying to be aware of my biases. However, I made a lot of assumptions by applying my own context to this story. The author of the literary critique also made generalizations, but she came up with different results. Elizabeth Abel, who is a white feminist writer, viewed Twyla as white because she focused on the social situations in which the characters find themselves.
Abel also mentions that most white readers read Twyla as white, while most black readers read Twyla as black Abel Twyla looks at the good food that Roberta receives and the luxuries of her adulthood and feels inferior despite the fact that American social structures privilege those with white skin. In order to analyze the scene about racial integration, Abel wrote to Toni Morrison who explained that Roberta may not want her upper-class children to go to school with working-class children.
Overall, Abel focuses her argument on how the two characters react to social situations. Analyzing the way the characters make decisions and address their circumstances helped her determine their races.
In her interpretation, Twyla supports integration, but does not understand the deep underworking of racism in American society. Roberta is adventurous in her life choices but still holds conservative views about integration in schools.
Fragd thus reads Roberta as racist and selfish. Abel parallels the competition between these two female characters with the tensions that arise between white and black feminist writers. Instead of pointing to guilt, Abel uses her literary analysis to open up a conversation about how our racial biases affect every text we encounter.
I found this analysis interesting because instead of being rooted in shame, Abel focused on a new learning opportunity. Instead of trying to define race, we need to view race through a new lens. When reading any literary work, it is impossible to avoid our unconscious assumptions, biases, and backgrounds. Therefore, as a critic, I need to be careful when reading race onto characters. Characters that exist in books are not real, so they do not exactly fit the mold of having human qualities. Going forward, I need to be aware of applying stereotypes towards characters that are figuratively black or white.
As a reader, my past experiences influenced my interpretations and perverted my ideas of the characters. This dominance can be the institution of racism or even sexism. By inserting my own experiences into this story, I unknowingly reinforced negative structures such as discrimination.
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