Black Boy Essays - Black Boy, Richard Wright, Racism, Free Essays

Black Boy Essays - Black Boy, Richard Wright, Racism, Free Essays Black Boy 3. Black Boy, Richard Wright Black Boy, is both an indictment of American racism and a narrative of the artist's development. As a child growing up in the Jim Crow South, Richard faced constant pressure to submit to white authority. However, even from an early age, Richard had a fierce spirit of rebellion. Had he lacked the resilience to be different despite the pressure to conform to social expectations, he would probably never have become an internationally renowned writer. The entire system of institutional racism was designed to prevent the American black's development of aspirations beyond menial labor. Racist whites were extremely hostile to black literacy and even more so to black Americans who wanted to make writing a career. However, Richard did not only face opposition to his dreams from racist whites. In many ways, his own family and the black community fiercely opposed his aspirations. His grandmother, a strict, illiterate Seventh Day Adventist, considered reading and writing about anything other than God sinful. Richard's peers considered him silly and unrealistic and maybe dangerous. Throughout his childhood, Richard suffered violence at the hands of his family for daring to rebel against his assigned role of humble silence. In Black Boy, he often charges the black community with perpetuating the agenda of white racism. Throughout his childhood and adulthood, Richard reacted with bitter contempt toward what he saw as the submission of other black people to white authority. Wright has often been criticized for failing to acknowledge or appreciate the richness of the American black community. However, his personal experiences clearly affected his relationship with it. Just as he suffered abuse and hostility from his own family, so did he receive little comfort from the larger black community. Wright constantly clashed with what he saw as Black American submission, and, for personal reasons, clashed with all religious dogmatism. The black community reacted to his rebellion in kind, and Richard suffered intense isolation and loneliness during the formative years of his life. He did not understand until later that his family and the black community discouraged his rebellion because pragmatic submission to the expectations of racist whites was a means to ensure the collective survival of the community. A rebellious act of one individual not only represented a threat to his or her life but also to the lives of his or her family and the black community as a whole. This tension, between the need to conform for survival and the need to rebel in order to achieve individual and community dreams, is one that animated Wright's life and his autobiography. In the book, Richard lays bare the paranoia and difficulty of being a black man in America, even the supposedly non-racist America of the North. When he fled from the south to Chicago, Wright suddenly entered a new environment: The culture was more tolerant, but lingering beneath was a latent racism. Richard found that the fear of uncertainty engendered by this racism, by the constant subconscious knowledge that blacks in America were second class citizens, could drive many American blacks to submit to white authority simply because it offered the security of knowing what to expect. In the North, Richard could sit next to white man on public transportation, and he could even accuse a white co-worker of spitting in the food at a restaurant where he worked. However, for a long while, Richard did not know how to act. He, like many blacks, feared committing an offense that might lead to the revocation of the meager rights they had finally achieved. Richard's search for belonging eventually brought him to Communism. But just as Wright found insufficient the dictates of the black community and of religion, he soon came to find the paranoia, fear, pettiness, and dogmatism of the communist party to be too much. He agreed with Communist political philosophy but not with its practice. Wright's search for self, a theme that runs throughout his life of rebellion

Oxbow Lakes - Information and Examples

Oxbow Lakes s Rivers flow across wide, river valleys and snake across flat plains, creating curves called meanders. When a river carves itself a new channel, some of these meanders get cut off, thus creating oxbow lakes that remain unconnected but adjacent to their parent river. How Does a River Make a Loop? Interestingly, once a river begins to curve, the stream begins to move more rapidly on the outside of the curve and more slowly on the inside of the curve. This then causes the water to cut and erode the outside of the curve and deposit the sediment on the inside of the curve. As the erosion and deposition continue, the curve becomes larger and more circular. The outer bank of the river where erosion takes place is known as the concave bank.   The name for the bank of the river on the inside of the curve, where sediment deposition takes place, is called the convex bank. Cutting off the Loop Eventually, the loop of the meander reaches a diameter of approximately five times the width of the stream and the river begins to cut the loop off by eroding the neck of the loop. Eventually, the river breaks through at a cutoff and forms a new, more efficient path. Sediment is then deposited on the loop side of the stream, cutting off the loop from the stream entirely. This results in a horseshoe-shaped lake that looks exactly like an abandoned river meander. Such lakes are called oxbow lakes because they look like the bow part of the yoke formerly used with teams of oxen. An Oxbow Lake Is Formed Oxbow lakes are still lakes, generally, no water flows in or out of oxbow lakes. They rely on local rainfall and, over time, can turn into swamps. Often, they ultimately evaporate in just a few years after having been cut off from the main river.   In Australia, oxbow lakes are called billabongs. Other names for oxbow lakes include  horseshoe lake, a loop lake, or cutoff lake.   The Meandering Mississippi River The Mississippi River is an excellent example of a meandering river that curves and winds as it flows across the Midwest United States toward the Gulf of Mexico. Take a look at a Google Map of Eagle Lake on the Mississippi-Louisiana border. It was once part of the Mississippi River and was known as Eagle Bend. Eventually, Eagle Bend became Eagle Lake when the oxbow lake was formed. Notice that the border between the two states used to follow the curve of the meander. Once the oxbow lake was formed, the meander in the state line was no longer needed; however, it remains as it was originally created, only now there is a piece of Louisiana on the east side of the Mississippi River. The length of the Mississippi River is actually shorter now than in the early nineteenth century because the U.S. government created their own cutoffs and oxbow lakes in order to improve navigation along the river. Carter Lake, Iowa Theres an interesting meander and oxbow lake situation for the city of Carter Lake, Iowa. This Google Map shows how the city of Carter Lake was cut off from the rest of Iowa when the channel of the Missouri River formed a new channel during a flood in March 1877, creating Carter Lake. Thus, the city of Carter Lake became the only city in Iowa west of the Missouri River. The case of Carter Lake made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Nebraska v. Iowa, 143 U.S. 359. The court ruled  in 1892 that while state boundaries along a river should generally follow the natural gradual changes of the river when a river makes an abrupt change, the original border remains.