Jim Crow] Party at the Term Paper

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Most Americans would be horrified to think that anyone would laugh and joke about another person's agony and suffering as Jed did in the story. A politician who would make the kind of remarks that Jed made could never get elected to office today: "Sorry, but ain't no Christians around tonight. Ain't no Jew-boys neither. We're just one hundred percent Americans" (p. 383). He would be roundly condemned by the entire television-watching nation. The brutality of the story -- the idea of burning a human being alive (and calling it a "party") would be totally obnoxious and impossible to pardon, let alone encourage. The white people in the story have no conscience and are socialized into a system that denies black people their basic humanity. It just couldn't happen today. In general, white people today recognize African-Americans as human beings, not all alike, but each different from the other with faults and virtues like everyone else.

Because this story depicts a specific time and place in our history, it may be misleading for young people to read it today. It gives the impression that the story is about something that is happening in society today. Moreover, the man who was murdered had no name, but neither did the white people that attended "the party." The story makes it seem that all white people are like that, thus, promoting a destructive stereotypical image of what white people are like. Even in 1930, the era when the story was written, there were plenty of white people who did not do such things and did not approve of that kind of racist behavior. People who lived up north -- although admittedly they, too, had racist attitudes towards blacks -- never lynched a black person.

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The great jazz singer Billie Holiday recorded a song called "Strange Fruit" about trees down South with black men hanged in them like fruit from the boughs. The song raised the awareness of white people living up north about what was happening and was an early indication of the civil rights era soon to come. Likewise, the airplane that crashes down near the scene of the fire is a metaphor for God's "wrath." The plane crashes down like an angel of justice, and the storm that ensues for three days reflects the profound wrongness of lynching -- that lynching goes against all the laws of the universe.

No reason is ever given for doing it, which shows that nothing justifies its occurrence.

Most people today -- both black and white -- know what happened to African-Americans before the civil rights era. Nobody really needs to be reminded. The story doesn't lift anybody up. Other than the narrator, the white people in the story have only one characteristic -- they are utterly evil -- and completely hardened to the evil they are doing and the pain they are causing. When the main character is so sickened by the whole thing, he can't get up the next day, his uncle laughs at him and reassures him: "He said you get used to it in time" (p. 384). At this point in time, to see people portrayed this way encourages hostility between the races and gives black people reasons to hate white people. For this reason, it is counter-productive because it rehashes the old, ugly issues and opens old wounds that might heal someday, if….....

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