Sunday, September 30, 2012
The Ethics of Living Jim Crowe
The Ethics of Living Jim Crowe starts off strong with the reader seeing the image of a race gang war, and the main character getting a milk bottle thrown at his head and gashing it by a rival gang. He is then scolded by his mother to hide when he is under attack, and to never get into something as foolish as a gang skirmish again. The short essay is about the "Jim Crow" rules of working he went by. He is faced with a lot of racism and mistreatment in his working experiences. The first time, he was working at a factory at a job he got by saying all the right things to the boss, being polite. But one slip up, he asked one of the workers to learn about the mechanics of grinding lenses. Then came the mistreatment. One day while he was working, "Morrie came over, blocking the narrow passage between the benches. He folded his arms, staring at me solemnly. I looked from one to the other, sensing that something was coming. 'Yes sir,' I said for the third time. Pease looked up and spoke very slowly. 'Richard, Mr. Morrie here tells me you called me Pease.' I stiffened. A void seemed to open up in me. I knew this was the show-down". This stuck out to me because it shows the amount of racism in this story. They ended up making him leave after beating him, but all he did was call one of the people that he worked with by their last name with no title in front of it, and basically they all ganged up on him and hazed him until he was forced to leave for his own safety. And it was all because he was black. This essay basically shows that the issues of racism in the work place made it absolutely miserable for them to say the least and something needed to change.
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I think that "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" really demonstrates the inadequacy of the Jim Crow laws. While the laws were supposed to represent African Americans being "separate but equal", there was clearly no equality, especially in the South. Instead, the laws promoted extreme segregation. African American's inferior status during this time is shown in this essay through the challenges they faced in the workforce.
ReplyDeleteThis website does not touch much on the workforce, but it does a nice job giving the history of the Jim Crow laws.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/jim-crow.html
-Amanda
I agree with what Amanda said above me, this piece shows not only how inadequate the laws were but ultimatley uneffective like Nick showed in his post. Jim Crowe laws were just another way for segregation to be legal as well as the mistreatment of blacks in mainly southern states. It also shows how hard it was to be an African American growing up in these days, you would get beat by your own mother for getting cut open by a white kid. You were lucky to still be alive after a skirmish with white kids during this time period.
ReplyDelete__ Shane
That part of the story stuck out to me as well. This is the point when the main character really realizes that he must learn the way to behave for his own safety. There is a part when he says the boss looks him over like "a poodle." This makes a comparison of the black people of this time and dogs. They were forced to live under a strict set of rules and obey the white people the way that a dog must obey it's owner.
ReplyDelete-Jordan
I also agree with the above comments about the Jim Crow laws just another way for segregation to be legal. also, to this day it surprises me for how long it took for the Jim Crow laws to be taken away or for people to realize how unjust they were. I think that the author shows how some of the lessons African Americans were taught as kid about how to adress and deal with white people was still the way they were expected to threat white people when they became adults.
ReplyDelete-Alex L