A Lesson Before Dying

Feminine Portrayals of O’Pioneers! Throughout American history, there have been countless instances of extreme discrimination and abuse towards people who aren’t Anglo-Saxon. As Europeans colonized the continent, the Native Americans found themselves literally and figuratively being “pushed away”. Then, with the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, which saw millions of Africans forced to come to America, the abuse that ethnicities other than Anglo-Saxons faced continued to worsen. Until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment in 1865, the majority of Black people living in America lived under slavery. Despite the ratification of the thirteenth amendment, the majority of previously enslaved Black people found themselves continuing …show more content…
Gaines, this cycle is described by main character Grant, a young Black man who managed to leave his home town in rural Louisiana, but came back to teach. Grant finds himself constantly living in a town filled with racism and inequality, yet cannot bring himself to leave due to his familial commitments. He also doesn’t want to leave because he has a slight hope that the children he teaches can leave the South because of the education and manners he taught them. Similar themes of racial injustice are present in the short story “Lullaby" by Leslie Marmon Silko, in which a Navajo woman living on a Native reservation has her two young children taken by the government because she could not understand a paper they had her sign. Throughout the two stories A Lesson Before Dying and “Lullaby”, both the main characters experience and witness firsthand extreme systemic racism and injustice, which have been apparent throughout history, and occur even to this day. In A Lesson Before Dying, Grant finds himself being asked by his Aunt Lou and close, family friend Miss Emma to help Jefferson “become a man” before his …show more content…
In the novel, “the word “man” obviously speaks to the human condition as such. At the same time, “man” is also to be understood in its gender-specific sense. Certain of the issues raised in the novel touch on what is specifically expected of a male human being” (Kenny, W. P.). A major emphasis is placed on these expectations for Black men, as it is very different than expectations for white men, as seen in the book. Grant talks about the vicious cycle he, and every Black man born before him, is stuck in, and how they fail to leave where they’ve grown up in, which in his case is the quarter. He describes the want the women in his life have for him, or any man in their life, to be the one who breaks this cycle, yet no one has. “...each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle—which he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind.” (Gaines 167). This cycle has been brought on from over 300 years of slavery and racism, and has major effects on the Black

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Lesson Before Dying

Lesson Before Dying