Essays on Matriarch

“Poor single mother on welfare tell me how you did it?” rings the famous lyric of the late Rapper-Activist Tupac Amaru Shakur. The son of a former Black Panther, this ode to his mother provides a glimpse into the conundrum of surviving in the wake of being poor and black on public assistance. What Shakur unknowingly reveals is the image of welfare in a more empathetic and realistic way that illuminates instead of ignoring the lived realities of its recipients. While Shakur’s lyric is compassionate in it’s depiction, conservative lawmakers are less considerate in their elucidation of ...

“A Raisin in the Sun” is a play written by Lorraine Hansberry. It tells the story of a 1950’s African-American family, the Youngers, living on the South Side of Chicago. As the play begins, many themes could arguably be considered the most important. Each one speaks to an important part of sociology, and even American history. Dreams are coming to fruition for many members of the play, and the characters show how important it can be, throughout their discourse, to follow those dreams. The importance of family is also evident throughout Hansberry’s play, as we see Walter Younger struggle ...

In the American cultural memory, the idea of a “cult” conjures up an image of a group of weak-willed adherents following the every move of one individual with some crazy ideas. The concept is often linked with wanton violence, excessive drug use, and manipulative sexual activity; people with no experience with cults often assume that individuals that get sucked into cults are weak or unintelligent. However, cults are complex social groups, formed by the same social bonds and social imperative that drives people to form clans and communities. Cults, clans, and communities are all driven by the same human need: the ...

During the antebellum era, Americans vigorously debated the limits of freedom for poor whites, Indians, immigrants, women, and slaves. Discuss these controversies and how they erupted from the social, political, and demographic changes of this era.

Introduction:

Although most of the Negro population was enslaved in the antebellum era this did not mean that there wasn’t any form of debate regarding their freedom which was a great preoccupation for many whites of the upper classes. Naturally enough the plantation class did not want their slaves to be freed so there was an intense debate on this score with the result ...

In her first sentence of her very powerful story, Linda Brent writes: "I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away." What did she mean by this statement, and explain how this could possibly be true for anyone born into the world of slavery?

Slavery was a most despicable institution in the United States and as everyone seemed to accept it until it boiled down to a Civil War, the Deep South lorded it over millions of black Africans who suffered greatly and terribly due to their exposure to slavery. In this ...

The House of Spirits by Isabella Allende

1. Introduction. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende is the first novel that she published. The book became highly popular and the style of “magical realism” was used to describe the novel. Rogers (2002) explains that “magical realist writers write the ordinary as miraculous and the miraculous as ordinary. The miraculous, on the other hand, is described with a precision that fits it into the ordinariness of daily life.” That is exactly what this novel does until gradually it cycles through about seventy five years of one family and ends in a place that is more real than magical. ...