Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”
The central clue of the story is the experience of an 11-year-old black girl named Pekra Bridlav, whose family is burdened with a heavy burden: when you see them, you will be surprised how they look like this Ugly, you may not find the reason, and then you will realize that it is because of what sin they committed and God’s punishment for them. It seemed that the Almighty God gave each of them an “ugly cloak”, and they reluctantly accepted…They took the cloak in their hands and wore it around the world. There is nothing in the world uglier than their looks, and poor little Pekra belongs to such an alien. She was ridiculed, beaten and scolded, and finally raped by her father and became pregnant. Because of this, Pecola’s mother beat her brutally, and the “Savior of Faith” at the Supuheide Church also betrayed her. Since then, Pecola has gone crazy, and she is convinced that she has blue eyes that have gone both ways.
In the novel, Toni Morrison pictured the stories about Pecola’s mother and father. From their stories, we learned that they all suffered a lot in their lives. Toni Morrison seems to tell us they are also victims of the society, of the racial discrimination. Victims are also offenders. They are the offenders to their daughter. While in the novel, what we do not see is Pecola’s complaints, Pecola’s crying for her miserable life. Pecola is silent. Silence is a kind power more than crying. Her silence touched me a lot and made me want to cry for her. She was silent and she told much. Her crying was so loud and so penetrating that daunted around my ears for days. The power of silence reminded me of 80 thousand people in Hongkong demonstrating for 8 persons who were killed in Philippines in 2010. They were silent, instead of crying. 80 thousand people’s silence has more power than 80 thousand people’s crying.
Toni Morrison is merciless, so merciless to Pecola. At the end of the novel, she made Pecola’s dream for the bluest eye come true at the cost of her clear mind. Pecola finally had the bluest eye, but sadly, she found that people still did not love her. She wondered the reason why the situation did not change as she thought, as she learned, as she was told. She wondered that maybe the color was still not the bluest. She still believed the bluest eye is the root of her misery. “No, Pecola, no,” I desire to cry to her, “It is not your problem. It is the problem of the racism, of the society, of the country, of the world.” While she could not hear me, even if she could hear me, she would not listen to me. Her mind had been polluted by the wrong awareness of beauty. She and many black people like her had been brainwashed by the White.
Tony Morrison is like a magician, combining different voices and organizing them into different characters, instead of bluntly squeezing his opinions to readers. She wants readers to truly walk into the novel during the reading process, and taste the joys and pains of the protagonist’s life and the mystery of the inner world with her. It was a black girl’s dream of a beautiful life in a world full of ugliness, discrimination, and bullying, under the temptation of “blue eyes” from another world.
Author: qu.310
Week 13: Contextual Research Presentation
Jamaican Kincaid was born on the island of Antigua in the British West Indies. She lives with her mother and stepfather. Her stepfather is a carpenter. At first she was the only child of her mother, and she had a close relationship with her mother, but when she was 9 years old, her mother began to give birth to three sons, and her relationship with her mother changed forever. She began to be despised by her mother, and even treated roughly. As the eldest daughter, she was of course arranged to take care of the three younger brothers below. This was a life she did not intend to want, but she had no choice. Doing her job for her family did not make her feel resistant. Her resistance came from her mother’s total neglect of her life and crude interference. The situation is as she wrote in her article: “My mother and stepfather have envisioned an excellent life for their children. All three of my brothers will be successful in the future. One will be the prime minister, a doctor, and a minister or something. I haven’t heard anyone think about my future. My future is nothing but a nurse. I don’t have a great future. In fact, my education was halted indifferently, and my life can be indifferent. Anything to interfere and destroy, this can be to get me out of school or something. If I don’t build my life or lift myself out of this muddy water, I can be assigned to do anything.”
Her mother’s neglect of her is reflected in the following incident. Since childhood, Qin Kaide has been extremely fond of reading and reading novels, and she wants to get all the books she has read. She finds books by all means, buys them with pocket money, and even steals them. Through various channels, she gradually accumulated some books, for a girl from a poor family, that is her darling. However, once her mother went out and asked her to look after her two-year-old brother. She was completely fascinated by the novel while she was taking care of her, and did not change the diaper for her brother. When her mother came back, she saw a bag of shit in her brother’s diaper. Her punishment for her daughter was to find all her books to burn.
Kincaid has always been a good student with the highest grades in the school, but her mother didn’t care about it at all. When Chin Kade was 15 years old, her mother asked her to suspend her studies suddenly and go home to take care of the family. When she was 17, she was sent to New York by her mother to work as a nanny, hoping that she could earn money to support the family. In her mother’s heart, Jinkaid has no own needs and no future. She can only tie her life to the crumbling ship of the family. (At that time, her stepfather was sick and could no longer support the family, and the family’s population increased.)
Kincaid said: “I don’t know if it was because of the birth of other children in the family that it was the reason that changed everything-maybe this should have changed as I grew up. However, our family’s income has not changed. But it turned out that more people wanted to eat and dress, so everything became scarce, not just material shortages, but also spiritual shortages. Those good spiritual things disappeared. Then I got Things that I didn’t have in the past, such as rudeness and contempt. After the situation has passed, this is irrelevant, but when I first started young, it was extremely important to me because I didn’t know what happened… If I didn’t write, I I don’t know what will happen to me, writing becomes a kind of self-salvation.”
Kincaid’s self-salvation began when she left her family to New York. She didn’t intend to let herself be manipulated blindly. She does not reply to her mother’s letters, nor does she read letters from her mother. She lived alone in New York, while working as a nanny, while attending night school. She entered the “New College” in New York to study photography. After three years, she received a full scholarship in another college and continued her studies, but after one year of study, She left the school because she felt that she was too “old” to be a student. She returned to New York to start looking for a writing job, and changed her name from Elaine Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid (Jamaica Kincaid). This was to separate her from the past, and she wanted to start her life again.
She began to write articles for a youth magazine in New York. Her writing style was greatly appreciated by William Shawn, the senior editor of The New Yorker. Shawn’s discovery and appreciation of her became a turning point in her life. She later said in an interview that it was Shawn who let her know what her own voice is, what her own thoughts and feelings and unique methods belong to. Those are the most important, and it is those things that make up literature.
She wrote for The New Yorker for a long time from 1976 until 1995. Become an excellent writer for the “The Talk of the Town” column. She later married Shawn’s son (a musician) and had two children. The family has been living in Vermont, north of New York. Her first novel “At the Bottom of the River” was published in 1983, followed by “Anne John”, “My Brother”, “Lucy” (1990) and “My Mother’s Autobiography” (1996). She has received many awards for writing, and she is currently teaching writing at Burlington College and Harvard University while writing.
Susan Sontag said: “Among contemporary English writers. I don’t want to read many of them. Only the works of Jinkaid are what I always want to read.” I have to admit that if there is no such thing as Sontag’s In other words, I would never read this novel by Jamaican Chinchade-“The Autobiography of My Mother”. There are two reasons: 1. For an author who is completely unfamiliar, I am not sure whether her works are in line with my taste. When people reach middle age, they read more for their own liking. Books with wrong tastes no longer need to force themselves I read it for various reasons; 2. The book review of The Washington Post said that this is a novel written in “beautiful prose style”
Here’s the link about her book: https://podcast.lannan.org/tag/the-autobiography-of-my-mother/
Diary of Systemic Injustices
Last year, the daily newspaper reported that in the suicide incident of the China Flight Academy of the USAA American Aviation School, he was discriminated against by the aviation school instructor, corporal punishment, and unfairly treated Chinese students. The Chinese pilot Yan Yang was under pressure from grounding and committed suicide in the dormitory bathroom. At that time, after reports and everyone’s efforts, the matter was even submitted to the US Secretary of Transportation Zhao Xiaolan, asking for a solution. However, USAA Aviation School only suspended classes for a while and reopened its doors. And there are joint training programs with many universities in China that offer aerospace flight majors. What happened to classmate Yan is regrettable, but the school has not said anything about it for more than a year, but it makes people feel angry.
Michael Sykes, the school’s chief executive officer, has since refused to take responsibility for Yang’s death. Rejecting allegations of discrimination, he claims that Yang’s poor mental health resulted from his own poor academic performance.
“Mr. Yan was a student who did not meet the FAA safety and quality standards,” Sykes said in a statement. “We requested permission to cease Mr. Yan’s training from his airline in October 2018. They initially denied our request and we asked that they reconsider. They still denied the request and so additional training was provided. Mr. Yan continued to perform below an acceptable level and fall farther and farther behind his classmates. Now, as we look back, we all wish that the original request would have been accepted. Mr. Yan would be safely back at home in China right now.”
He added, “Becoming a pilot also requires natural talent, too… In our judgment, Mr. Yan did not possess the natural ability to become a pilot. We are deeply saddened that he was not allowed to return to China to pursue another career path.”
Under this kind of physical and mental pressure, classmate Yan survived for a year. Later, he reluctantly chose to commit suicide. As outsiders, we can all guess what painful struggle he experienced before his death. Parents claim 6.7 million, and the case still takes a lot of time to process in the United States. Yan Yuan’s parents in China were unable to go to the United States to appeal. Looking at the trial time of the previous Zhang Yingying case, we can see that if the appeal is successful in the United States, unless there is strong evidence and accusations. I hope that Yan’s tragedy will not happen to other international pilots.
link:https://nextshark.com/yan-yang-texas-flight-school-faces-lawsuit/
Yo, Is This Racist?
In June of this year, Dr. Jol Babdor, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, received an email.
The email is the marketing manager of Springer Nature Publishing Company. Springer Nature is a household name in the scientific community. It publishes Nature and thousands of other scientific journals. It has branches in London, Berlin, and New York.
In the email, the marketing manager told Barberdo that he hoped to invite him to an event to share his “personal experience in academia, especially as a black person.”
The other party also emphasized that he does not need his self-introduction, “because you have published an article with us before.” Three years ago, Barberdo’s immunology paper was published in the journal Nature Immunology. He was First author.
Barberto’s black identity was learned in advance purely by accident. As far as Springer Nature’s thousands of other journals are concerned, they don’t know how many authors are white, how many authors are black or other races. However, this is a very serious problem in academic journals.
On October 30, an article published in the New York Times stated that many journals in the field of life sciences do not have a database that tracks the ethnic diversity of authors. According to research, maintaining ethnic diversity is an important factor in ensuring the quality of academic results.
Journal of Nature
When he received the email on June 16 this year, Barberdo was both excited and happy, but then he said, “My mood has become very bad.”
Barberdo is worried about becoming a “freak”. He wants to know how many black researchers the company has contacted, but the publishing company does not have such a database.
Barberdo has been working in the field of immunology for nearly ten years, but now it is still impossible to name some other black immunologists, which shows that black scientists have not received enough attention in the academic world. He felt that he had even become an abnormal character.
Barberdo’s experience has exposed the long-term neglect of ethnic diversity in academic journals.
Some researchers have estimated that there are about 30,000 academic journals worldwide and nearly 2 million articles are published every year.
Among them, Springer Nature is a relatively well-known scientific journal publishing group. Its predecessor, Springer, Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Press can all be traced back to the 19th century, and now this company’s publications lead the world academic trends.
Its publication “Nature” is one of the earliest scientific journals in the world. It was first published on November 4, 1869. Its founder, Joseph Norman Lockyer (Joseph Norman Lockyer), was one of the discoverers of helium.
Today, Nature is one of the few journals that still publishes first-hand research papers in the scientific field. However, there are no exact statistics on whether the author of the article is white, black or Latino.
In the media survey, like Springer Nature, institutions that did not track the author’s ethnic diversity include the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Public Library of Science, and the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences. , Cell Press, eLife, JAMA Network and PNAS.
Some other publishers stated that they are in the early stages of collecting these data or have begun to discuss this possibility, but cannot disclose more details at this time.
Some studies have repeatedly proved that diversity in multiple dimensions can improve the performance level and output quality of academic achievements from an interdisciplinary perspective. Experts say that only by diversifying researchers can people accurately capture the rich changes in nature and make innovations on top of them.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science publishes “Science” magazine. Image: Martin Shields/Alamy
Of course, there are also journal publishers that partially record data on the ethnicity of authors.
For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society, these two organizations provide data on authors and reviewers. It’s just that these two sets of data are collected through voluntary surveys by respondents, and they only account for 10% to 20% of the people who recently contributed to these journals.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science stated that two-thirds of authors and reviewers reporting their race to the association are white, while blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans add up to less than 10%. Pacific Islanders Together with Asians, it can account for about a quarter.
The Royal Society, headquartered in London, publishes a report on ethnic diversity every year. Among the authors and reviewers surveyed, about 75% to 80% are considered white, and the rest are classified as “blacks and minorities.”
Regarding the racial diversity of employees in the organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society and the American Public Library of Science provided their own data. Approximately 80% of the executives, editors, and consultants of the American Association for the Advancement of Science are white. Nearly 90% of the editorial board members of the Royal Society are white. Of the editors employed by the American Public Library of Science in the United States, 74% are white, and none are black.
Nowadays, scholars still value referrals if they want to publish academic results in top journals. Obviously, whites have more advantages in this regard. Blacks and Latinos may have a harder time entering the academic circle, and their achievements are harder to notice-such as Barberdo’s achievements, which will make the academic community not diverse enough.
“This is very worrying.” Columbia University neurologist Bianca Jones Marlin (Bianca Jones Marlin) said, “This does not involve outstanding results that should be respected.”
“It’s time to start this topic”
Three weeks before Barberto received the email, George Floyd, a black American man, was killed on his knees by a white policeman, causing protests from all over the United States.
After that, the anti-racism movement that swept the world also entered the academic world. Some journals published many articles promising to fight racism in the scientific field, but now it seems that they are not very aware of their own problems.
Dr. Camas of the University of California at Berkeley said that editors and reviewers need to create a level playing field. “People think this is just a superficial effort,” she said. “But in fact, if you take diversity, fairness, and inclusiveness seriously, the nature of the bonuses you offer will change.”
At present, academic journals may have just begun to respect diversity.
Alison Mudditt, CEO of the American Public Library of Science, said that they are currently prioritizing collecting more demographic data from authors. But she added that privacy regulations will inevitably hinder this process. These regulations will affect the way data is collected and stored, and the regulations in different countries are different.
However, some scientists are trying to encourage publishers to get involved and speed up the process. For example, Dr. Barberdo is leading the “Black Immunology Week”, which is a celebration of black immunologists and will be held at the end of November. In the early stages of the event, the team will contact journals and publishers and ask them to start collecting and reporting more diverse data.
Cited resource:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/science/diversity-science-journals.html