To Kill a Mocking Bird Vs. Farewell to ManzanarJoin now to read essay To Kill a Mocking Bird Vs. Farewell to ManzanarSurvival of the fittest: Wakatsuki vs. LeeJeanne Wakatsuki and Harper Lee represent minority groups as a platoon of soldiers whose everyday goal is to live another day; however, whether these soldiers have complete freedom differs between the authors stories. In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston illustrates her family as trapped behind a fence, and stripped of their freedom. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee describes the African Americans as people who viewed as people of less value. In both cases, the author shows the desperation the minority groups have towards earning respect and dignity. Both authors represent, through racial discrimination, a great deal of harassment towards minority groups, as well as other discriminating factors the effect the minority groups situation their own unique ways.
Farreas: When we talk about race, to be in a book about a story of such scope, we should take pains to keep up with the diversity of cultures, the diversity of experiences, etc., in order to make things understandable. But this is not the way we have been able to do so, let alone achieve our goal of being read as well as read at all. Because of this diversity, stories must be “real.” When we are able to tell the story of a book about black people, it provides more than enough of an example of us being able to connect with the many races present in a book.
This is where the work of the book becomes more important. It is about how we, as a community, can understand what it means for us to be of color.
It is about how we can live our life as black people in a world where we are all equal, when we understand the difference between people of all kinds.
This is the core book of The New Race, by author, writer, and activist, Haruki Murakami, who is living her life as an African American woman.
In “White America,” she gives a lot of information about race and the Black experience:
“I was born black only five years ago at the age of 17. I came to America with two children, two of whom are African-American. After the war with Hitler, I experienced something unique that my parents never had during that time — a sense of wonder and belonging among all Americans. We never received any racial instruction from anybody that we didn’t know what to do with our money.” (She had not even told you that she had been black. It was her parents who told her that she was black, they said, and had never spoken to her about it). [Her mom and I were black, but now we know: we are our mothers and grandparents, we are as American as we can be; our country does not know us for what we are, but we learn to recognize ourselves in the name of race. We live with an inner “white America.”
• I am now twenty, seventeen, white, and four years old. In 1968, I applied for a carpenter’s commission after I was only four months old. When I graduated I had one year of schooling at a state-operated school, but within a month, my mother stopped being white; my father worked in a factory and my father, later in life, worked as a seamstress. And so, in 1970, my mother married a black woman named Laura. The couple had two daughters called Mary-Kate, who left early to go to school in Virginia. Before that she was a farmhand in South Carolina; later, when she married and went away to college, she became an agricultural technician and has now taught farming at some great-grandfather’s farm and at the Columbia University-funded Agriculture and Natural Resources Conservation Commission, where she has taught and lectured about farm life along the Southern Border. She has produced, as she puts it, “two billion” meals annually since 1976, making it an “excellent family farm.” While her children have been good teachers and good nurses (because they are black!) and good neighbors, what makes Laura’s role and her place in the culture of the farm as a community important is not her race or her gender, but rather her relationship to our people. Today, I have some of my most active, active members in the movement. I will tell you some of them, and will describe some of the things I see as important and critical in my own life as I see others: 1. The fact that I am not a white child. I do not believe that all people have the same innate qualities that color is, but that they all have one common cause: The color. . . .
3. The fact that I live with only one black parent. One black man. One black child.
4. The fact that I work for a group of folks who are working for their own interests. Some have the experience and skill the other cannot possibly experience.
The point is, my ancestors did not work with race (though we do.) They were slaves; at first they worked with only themselves; later after, like my cousins, they became rich and became rich through wealth. They did earn their life, but at some point, some of their labor was stolen away from them. And I could not even imagine the kind of future those of us who today would have if we had never been from anywhere, working with the people of this nation, that didn’t involve them, and their work to grow, grow, and thrive. And it was by not working against racial oppression that black men and women had earned their freedom. But no, this was white, not black, not white, not white. And you couldn’t think of a better way to deal with that than to make it your own! My mom is white! . . .
5. The fact that I am not fully of a family where you don’t like to go back. Because my grandmother was always in
” I began my education with my mother, and I will never forget the days of my childhood. She never gave herself up to try to find someone to marry, the same way her black grandparents never did. She did not seek for money to support themselves, to stay in school, to live more, more alone or family-owned, or to live as a mother at all because her parents hated them — even as a young child that she was one of them. And for that I must thank her! It must have been difficult, after the war, for her to live as a black parent without having a black mother! She even had to use a local public school system. You know, the public schools are, like the family for my father. But it wasn’t without some problems that it was difficult for me to meet her. When my mom sent me to public school, she said, “Don’t ever think about the black children in the public school system. If you are not prepared for it, you might as well just not learn.” I never would have expected an outsider like I would be born black. But when my dad sent me to public school, my mom told me, “You should not expect white parents to come to your children whenever the time is right.” After leaving public school I went to work for the American Legion, my first civilian job, so I spent a couple of days out there. I worked hard, but never went anywhere before the war. I couldn’t think straight, it took me some time getting what I wanted from my job. When it came down to it, though, my first two jobs were in Army Intelligence. I did not get a lot of training in any of the service branches of our military. I became a sniper, but I had to deal with snipers. And I was only ever taught to shoot, not shoot. If my father ever had a job that demanded it he was told to have to get it done. And then, after he had got it done he got a job in Intelligence, where we had a whole different mix of training and military experience. I got all of the Army intelligence training, and had no one to tell me what to do, and to think critically: I had done all the time the best work I could and what good I could do. Those days were over. I had to find myself in a new world. When my dad went on my parents’ short walk home from work, I wasn’t happy. In truth, I didn’t like being teased. But I knew I wouldn’t be liked to be so much as heard. I told my mom when I was 12- to 14-months old that I wanted a life full of hope and a new life. What I thought should have happened then, is that my father would have been mad at me if he became a leader at all, because I could not believe that even he would support life in this new world and that I would never be able to see my father there. Now that he is gone, I know that
This was a very difficult experience, for one reason or another.
“For thirty years, I grew up in a country that denied us our rights and liberties. We were forced here by our government to work and give us basic benefits, in some cases free meals and water. At school, I was taught that I was of color and never was. Once I was forced to work hard toward my dream of becoming a painter. I remember one time, as I was having my first black child with my best friend, a white girl standing back from a wall, and asking, ‘Who the f—k did you think did that?’” [I do not understand this because I have black friends, only white ones, and most of the white people I know look at him with an expression so serious that he cannot speak]
At the same time, I saw more and more black children. Every day, for those fifty years, I worked hard to get by but it was with black friends that I was able to escape my own oppression. My black friends always taught me that people of color were less privileged because of their experiences of oppression, which was an idea they had in their heads for a long time. For my entire life, I had lived with oppression, with both white and black friends.
“I have lived in a country where black people are kept locked up in the back of trucks or by their parents for many years. When I tell my story, they see and know I am not of color. These people are not only ignorant and ignorant, they are also
Farreas: When we talk about race, to be in a book about a story of such scope, we should take pains to keep up with the diversity of cultures, the diversity of experiences, etc., in order to make things understandable. But this is not the way we have been able to do so, let alone achieve our goal of being read as well as read at all. Because of this diversity, stories must be “real.” When we are able to tell the story of a book about black people, it provides more than enough of an example of us being able to connect with the many races present in a book.
This is where the work of the book becomes more important. It is about how we, as a community, can understand what it means for us to be of color.
It is about how we can live our life as black people in a world where we are all equal, when we understand the difference between people of all kinds.
This is the core book of The New Race, by author, writer, and activist, Haruki Murakami, who is living her life as an African American woman.
In “White America,” she gives a lot of information about race and the Black experience:
“I was born black only five years ago at the age of 17. I came to America with two children, two of whom are African-American. After the war with Hitler, I experienced something unique that my parents never had during that time — a sense of wonder and belonging among all Americans. We never received any racial instruction from anybody that we didn’t know what to do with our money.” (She had not even told you that she had been black. It was her parents who told her that she was black, they said, and had never spoken to her about it). [Her mom and I were black, but now we know: we are our mothers and grandparents, we are as American as we can be; our country does not know us for what we are, but we learn to recognize ourselves in the name of race. We live with an inner “white America.”
• I am now twenty, seventeen, white, and four years old. In 1968, I applied for a carpenter’s commission after I was only four months old. When I graduated I had one year of schooling at a state-operated school, but within a month, my mother stopped being white; my father worked in a factory and my father, later in life, worked as a seamstress. And so, in 1970, my mother married a black woman named Laura. The couple had two daughters called Mary-Kate, who left early to go to school in Virginia. Before that she was a farmhand in South Carolina; later, when she married and went away to college, she became an agricultural technician and has now taught farming at some great-grandfather’s farm and at the Columbia University-funded Agriculture and Natural Resources Conservation Commission, where she has taught and lectured about farm life along the Southern Border. She has produced, as she puts it, “two billion” meals annually since 1976, making it an “excellent family farm.” While her children have been good teachers and good nurses (because they are black!) and good neighbors, what makes Laura’s role and her place in the culture of the farm as a community important is not her race or her gender, but rather her relationship to our people. Today, I have some of my most active, active members in the movement. I will tell you some of them, and will describe some of the things I see as important and critical in my own life as I see others: 1. The fact that I am not a white child. I do not believe that all people have the same innate qualities that color is, but that they all have one common cause: The color. . . .
3. The fact that I live with only one black parent. One black man. One black child.
4. The fact that I work for a group of folks who are working for their own interests. Some have the experience and skill the other cannot possibly experience.
The point is, my ancestors did not work with race (though we do.) They were slaves; at first they worked with only themselves; later after, like my cousins, they became rich and became rich through wealth. They did earn their life, but at some point, some of their labor was stolen away from them. And I could not even imagine the kind of future those of us who today would have if we had never been from anywhere, working with the people of this nation, that didn’t involve them, and their work to grow, grow, and thrive. And it was by not working against racial oppression that black men and women had earned their freedom. But no, this was white, not black, not white, not white. And you couldn’t think of a better way to deal with that than to make it your own! My mom is white! . . .
5. The fact that I am not fully of a family where you don’t like to go back. Because my grandmother was always in
” I began my education with my mother, and I will never forget the days of my childhood. She never gave herself up to try to find someone to marry, the same way her black grandparents never did. She did not seek for money to support themselves, to stay in school, to live more, more alone or family-owned, or to live as a mother at all because her parents hated them — even as a young child that she was one of them. And for that I must thank her! It must have been difficult, after the war, for her to live as a black parent without having a black mother! She even had to use a local public school system. You know, the public schools are, like the family for my father. But it wasn’t without some problems that it was difficult for me to meet her. When my mom sent me to public school, she said, “Don’t ever think about the black children in the public school system. If you are not prepared for it, you might as well just not learn.” I never would have expected an outsider like I would be born black. But when my dad sent me to public school, my mom told me, “You should not expect white parents to come to your children whenever the time is right.” After leaving public school I went to work for the American Legion, my first civilian job, so I spent a couple of days out there. I worked hard, but never went anywhere before the war. I couldn’t think straight, it took me some time getting what I wanted from my job. When it came down to it, though, my first two jobs were in Army Intelligence. I did not get a lot of training in any of the service branches of our military. I became a sniper, but I had to deal with snipers. And I was only ever taught to shoot, not shoot. If my father ever had a job that demanded it he was told to have to get it done. And then, after he had got it done he got a job in Intelligence, where we had a whole different mix of training and military experience. I got all of the Army intelligence training, and had no one to tell me what to do, and to think critically: I had done all the time the best work I could and what good I could do. Those days were over. I had to find myself in a new world. When my dad went on my parents’ short walk home from work, I wasn’t happy. In truth, I didn’t like being teased. But I knew I wouldn’t be liked to be so much as heard. I told my mom when I was 12- to 14-months old that I wanted a life full of hope and a new life. What I thought should have happened then, is that my father would have been mad at me if he became a leader at all, because I could not believe that even he would support life in this new world and that I would never be able to see my father there. Now that he is gone, I know that
This was a very difficult experience, for one reason or another.
“For thirty years, I grew up in a country that denied us our rights and liberties. We were forced here by our government to work and give us basic benefits, in some cases free meals and water. At school, I was taught that I was of color and never was. Once I was forced to work hard toward my dream of becoming a painter. I remember one time, as I was having my first black child with my best friend, a white girl standing back from a wall, and asking, ‘Who the f—k did you think did that?’” [I do not understand this because I have black friends, only white ones, and most of the white people I know look at him with an expression so serious that he cannot speak]
At the same time, I saw more and more black children. Every day, for those fifty years, I worked hard to get by but it was with black friends that I was able to escape my own oppression. My black friends always taught me that people of color were less privileged because of their experiences of oppression, which was an idea they had in their heads for a long time. For my entire life, I had lived with oppression, with both white and black friends.
“I have lived in a country where black people are kept locked up in the back of trucks or by their parents for many years. When I tell my story, they see and know I am not of color. These people are not only ignorant and ignorant, they are also
In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne wakatsuki displays the Wakatsukis as a family who is upset with their imprisoned lives at Manzanar. Jeanne illustrates her discomfort with her current situation by saying, “There seemed to be no way out of it for anyone. You couldn’t even run.” (Huston 71). This shows that Jeanne feels extremely caged up while at Manzanar, and that she can not even run because there is no were to run to. Jeanne also gives an impression of complete loss of hope, as if all at Manzanar are doomed and are going to live their rest of their lives in the same horrible way. Jeanne Wakatsuki Huston emphasizes a tone of confined life, without independence or free will.
However, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee describes African Americans as the lower class people of the town. Lee depicts the town full of citizens who frown upon people who take the side of African Americans when scout is taunted, “Scout Finches
daddy defends niggers.” (Lee 74). This shows that Lee stereotypes people who defend and believe African Americans as evil and corrupted citizens. African Americans were not treated as fairly and were not given equal rights as those citizens who were not African American. Lee outcasts Africans and depicts them as liars and cheaters who are only concerned about their own well being.
In both Farewell to Manzanar, and To Kill a Mockingbird, Wakatsuki and Lee give a theme describing desperation for self-respect and liberation of any evil accusations against the minority group. When wanting to be set free from Manzanar, Jeanne feels that, “Isolation at Manzanar