I found a very intriguing newspaper article the other day, one penned by a woman named Deidra Parish Williams. This is what happened afterwards.
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In the United
States, there is a wondrous system of pushing our own shit into somebody else’s
face to tell ourselves we don’t have it anymore. This phenomenon is seen on a
grand scale as societal norms are used to preserve one’s own dignity by
crushing that of another, to emphasize that one is superior, whether through
use of racism or general bullying. Authors Harper Lee, William Blake, and
Deidra Parish Williams have meditated on the aforementioned with their
respective pieces, To Kill a Mockingbird,
“The Human Abstract,” and “Turn the Target on Entrenched Racism.”
The horrors of racism in American
history are filled with friction between societal norms, racism that both To Kill a Mockingbird and “Turn the
Target on Entrenched Racism” directly express.
The white, American population has historically preserved its
sense of superiority by asserting that its societal norm is better than that of
the African Americans. In To Kill a Mockingbird, child Scout
Finch is continuously faced with this conflict, what with her father’s court
case drawing her into direct contact with the Ewell family, some of the most
expressively racist people in all of Maycomb. The family thinks racial
superiority can reinforce the only small amount of dignity a severely
impoverished family can have. Bob Ewell will even falsely charge Tom Robinson
with the rape of his eldest daughter, Mayella, to be superior. Similarly,
Williams’ husband was asked as a child to leave Garden City Streets because of
his apparently inferior skin color—by police, no less. The horrors of how far
humans will travel to protect their own dignity cannot be hidden even from
innocent childhood; Williams is correct in stating how many whites of this time
infer that the educational gap between minority communities-a major part of the
African American societal norm- and W.A.S.P.-y areas of Long Island-the
Caucasian societal norm- is due to the inferiority of black minds. Overall, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and
“Turn the Target in Entrenched Racism” by Deidra Parish Williams show how
racism is an example of friction between societal norms, friction whose goal is
to maintain dignity.
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| Mr. Blake's Goodreads page. |
William Blake apparently believes
that humans can go as far as forcing
poverty on certain individuals in order to protect their dignity. Blake
addresses the issue of racism more vaguely in his poem, “The Human Abstract,”
starting with a mention of poverty and depression:
Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be.
If all were as happy as we. (1-4)
Through a
statement about the stamping on others to make ourselves superior, to make
ourselves the not-pitied individuals of society, we see how every member of the
black population can easily be thrown into the traditional norm of African
Americans—the dirty, immoral, and inferior nigger. Next, he extends beyond the
traditional tensions of the past and into what the majority of Americans feel
today: a tree of “humility [taking] its root”, a growth of conviction to ensure
that every bit of racism is erased from society. However, Williams proves in her essay that
this desire is unfulfilled. Nevertheless, we can see that William Blake’s “The
Human Abstract” depicts both how friction between societal norms is a way of
maintaining dignity as well as how people generally exemplify the
aforementioned concept.
Look in the newspaper. I’m daring
you. If you don’t find a single article that concerns one societal norm
oppressing another, one societal norm trying to hang onto its dignity by enforcing its
superiority, I’d be immensely surprised. The phenomenon is and
has always been a prevalent quality of human society, as
represented
by the human racism exemplified in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as well as Deidra Parish Williams’
“Turn the Target on Entrenched Racism.” Said phenomenon is also evident in “The
Human Abstract” by William Blake, which targets the issue and how people deal
with it more generally. Fearing this shit apparently doesn’t work, then, so
society might as well just grow a pair and face it. There’s nothing to lose
except our dignity.
