One of the most notable parts of chapter one from James Wheldon Johnsons’ The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was the passage when the narrator is told not to stand when the white kids are called and he takes a closer look at himself and his mother to see if the words from the other kids of not being white could be true. He sees his mother in a new light and finally realizes his beauty and hers came from a race so looked down upon by the country. The narrator examines his mother saying he had “thought of her in a childish way only as the most beautiful woman in the world; now [he] looked at her searching for defects,” as if being a person of color was a disease or a mistake. Saying it is childish to look and only see beauty shows that from
