Kaffir Boy

Chapter 30 of Kaffir Boy shows a black African boy realizing what is going on in his society. He is starting to realize that the black Africans work for the white Africans. He also starts to realize that the white Africans think that they are better than the black Africans. This story presents some of the most common stereotypes of black Africans. For example, black people are stupid and black people are poor while white people are rich. There are some countries today that are still like this. Although the United States of American is not segregated anymore, in the past the blacks and other minorities were enslaved to the white people. People like Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln, the United States of America became an integrated country. Rosa Parks is well known for standing up for the black population. One night Rosa Parks was on the bus coming home from work where she stands on her feet all day. A white person came into the bus and Rosa Parks was forced to give up her seat because there were no more available seats in the white section of the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and was arrested for it. Another woman famous for helping integrate the United States is Harriet Tubman. She is well known for the “Underground Railroad.” She created the “Underground Railroad” to help slaves escape and become free. A few years after this was created, Abraham Lincoln was elected president and has passed the law saying that all slaves be free and for there to be no more slavery. Because of these events, the United States of America is not like Africa in the book Kaffir Boy. 

Girl

The short story "Girl" is a story of a mother talking to her daughter. The conversation that is taking place within the story is throughout the daughter’s life. The mother begins the talk with her daughter as how to do chores and then ends it with how to get a man that will treat you good and would marry you. Learning how to do chores is something that a little kid would learn how to do and learning how to get a man that would treat her right is something that a woman in her 20s would do. When you first hear the story, you would think that the mother is angry with her daughter and is yelling at her, but as the story continues, you realize that she is just trying to give her daughter advice using the common stereotypes of women. She is listing all the ways of how to be a real but fake woman at the same time. She lectures her daughter how to get what she wants from a guy without having a bad reputation after it. The mother used objects in place of what she actually meant when she was talking to her daughter. I feel like this connects to how society used to be before women received the rights that they have today. Before women had these rights, their jobs were to stay at home, clean the house, cook, and take care of their families while the men went out and worked. So in order for them to get what they needed, but couldn't afford, or to get money, they had to cheat on their husbands and sleep with other men. Now that women have these rights, they can go get a job, earn money, although they still make less than men do, and still be able to take care of their family. Today they are not forced to stay at home like they did in the past and they have equal rights as men do. 

Danger of a Single Story

       

The speech “Danger of a Single Story” is based off of how society judges each other. What the speaker was trying to say in that speech is that society creates a single story about them too quickly and without even getting to know them. When you create a single story about someone that you get so focused on that single story to remember that they are human too. For example, in the speech the speaker says “I come from a conventional,middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who was often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor.” (“Danger of a Single Story”) That was the single story that she made about him. So later on in the speech she say, “All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.” (“Danger of a Single Story”) Because of her single story about Fide and his family, she forgot that even though they were poor, they could still create beautiful, expensive looking things. Although we usually see single stories being created in the “real world”, we also watch them all the times in movies. For example, the movie Zootopia is about a female bunny who wanted to be a cop. Everyone told her that she couldn’t do it because she was a bunny. Their single story of her was that bunnies are too small and weak to ever be able to do something like be a cop. Another kind of single story that appears in the movie is that her partner in crime was a fox and no one would believe him because they think that all fox are sly, sneaky, and liars. That was their single story of him.  We have to realize that if we create a single story about somebody without getting to know them, we could possibly falsely accuse them and miss out on a great friendship because we created that single story about them. 

Trailer to Zootopia: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WWFB-zrxn7o