Please note, several of the questions below ask you to consider your own feelings and responsesbut they also ask you to carefully look at the material we read and to be specific about how that material affected your feelings and responses. This will mean that, in order to successfully complete this paper, you will need to take some time to look back over and/or re-read portions of the course materials.
Write in response to each of the following four questions. Think of each of the first three as a “mini-essay” of 1.5-2 double-spaced pages and .5-1 page for the final question, for a total of 5-6 (or more) pages.
In this course we have been exploring how the cultural association of beauty and self-worth moves from harmful to oppressive. In other words, we want to take an idea that can seem “personal” and see how it is also “political,” or caught up with larger systems of power and privilege.
Choose one of the characters from The Bluest Eye and write an essay in which you show how this dynamic works. First, explore how or why that character experiences personal feelings of inadequacy or “ugliness” that are connected to internalized racism. Then, show how those feelings can lead to larger harmful oppressions and consequencesfor this character and others.
You may certainly in this essay reference other materials and ideas that we discussed: stereotypes from the Ethnic Notions video; the Clark Doll experiment; the Black is Beautiful movement; or the Dick and Jane readers.
Think back over everything we read and discussed in this unit of the course: Ethnic Notions, the Clark Doll experiment, The Bluest Eye, “Recitatif,” sections from Biased on school integration and policing, and Get Out.
Each of these texts shares content or ideas with the viewer/reader, but they are also trying to create strong responses and/or changes in our understandings of race. Choose the text that you believe had the biggest impact on you and explain 1) the specific impact it had on you and 2) how or why it was so effective. What feelings does it create in viewers/readers? Why did it move you either emotionally and/or intellectually? Making sure that you discuss particular scenes or images will help you narrow down and be specific in your answer.
Remember, for this question you are not summarizing or explaining what the text saysinstead, you are exploring how it works on or effects readers and viewers.
Write a second mini-essay, following along with the questions in #2but this time choose the text that you think had the second biggest impact on you.
Once you have completed all three essays, read back over what you have written. What do you want to highlight as important issues/ideas from this unit? What do you most want to remember from your reading in this unit of the course? What do you want to shape your own thinking as you move forward?
–I uploaded the class materials the professor gave us–
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