Historical Aspects Of Racial Marginalization

Words: 599
Pages: 3

Ashley C Sykes
Professor Patricia Harris
English 152
1 November 2014

Historical Aspects of Racial Marginalization In Morrison's work "Recitatif" she discussed the main characters Roberta and Twyla were never assigned an "official defined race" during the dialog of the story. I think that the author does this on purpose to define the lines in which we stereotype both ourselves and other races automatically on the contingency of a statement that could be false or not true. During the time this story was being published in 1983 the country was not far off from the civil rights movement-- and all racial tensions still had not ceased, and emotions were still running high from racially events that had happened between minorities and whites. A lot of the statements made by Twyla, Roberta, Mary, and Roberta mother. Twyla mentioned in the story that her mother would be less than appeased knowing that the orphanage had paired her with "someone like Roberta", but then 28 days later at lunch (28.5 for Roberta) Roberta's mother snubs Mary, Twyla's mother; then brings a large lunch for her and Roberta to eat while Mary and Twyla eat jelly beans out of a basket. These events made me think that perhaps Roberta and her mother were white and Twyla and Mary were black because of the way she acted towards them and black people in that area were more predisposed to
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If you remember in the beginning of the story as previously mentioned Twyla's comment about if her mother had known she was rooming with "someone like"