In Class June 18

In class we were assigned to read some short stories for our book clubs. One of these short stories was very disturbing for me to read. The short story was “A Party Down at the Square.” The story was written by an African-American man by the name of Ralph Ellison. He wrote the story in the prospective of a white child somewhere in the South. The story revolves around the burning of an African American man. We don’t know why he was being executed we just come into the story when the boy walks up to watch the burning. This story really shows the brutal actions of the White men that came before us, and made me embarrassed just reading the story. Even though the story is fiction, everybody knows that this kind of stuff happened frequently especially in the South where this story is set in. It just shows the savageness for a group of people to stand around and watch a man be killed in this brutal way. The African-American man even asks for someone to cut his throat so he won’t have to struggle, but the people aren’t even decent enough to grant him this wish. During the middle of the execution a loop is thrown into the story. A plane crashes in the middle of this town and starts up a panic. A white woman dies when hit with a live power line and it seems if there’s no reaction to her death. When the initial panic is over the people actually return to the man being burned, like nothing happened, and continue taunting him and watching the execution. This is all disturbing, showing the brutal nature of racist White people in the past and even today and makes me ashamed at some of my ancestry. At one point the black man asks if there aren’t any Christians there when he’s trying to get them to slit their throat. And the worst taunter of them all says, “No only Americans.” This disgusts me; because the only true Americans are Native Americans who we made flee their homelands and put them on Reservations. I think any kinds of people in America should be treated the same way. We all are from different countries and continents, but for some reason White people think they are the true Americans. This needs to change and I think it made great advancement with the election of Barack Obama, which will hopefully help change the minds of racist-backward thinking of some White people around the country and we can move on and be a stronger unified country especially in these hard times.