Every child or teenager is on a quest to find who they really are. They must reach further into their minds to find their "self-identity." Searching for the answer to this question will cause you to look past the simplest elements of yourself that make you who you are. Being white, black, Hispanic, and so on, does make up part of who you are, but it doesn’t put you in stereotypical groups. As seen in the novel The Secret Life of the Bees and How it Feels to be Colored Me, being a different color didn’t seem much of a problem to Lily and Zora until they moved to another area that is unfamiliar to themselves.
In The Secret Life of the Bees, Lily is on the hunt to find who she is and how she feels about segregation. She doesn't notice the significance of it until Rosaleen was thrown in jail and beaten by white men while a white cop, who arrested her, stands by and watches. This was all because she wanted to vote even though she was black. Zora's life was similar to Lily's. She had to move out of her community in Eatonville, Florida consisting of all blacks, to a community where she was the minority. She never thought twice about being different and treated horribly just because she was colored. She is, now, constantly reminded of her skin color. Now she is referred to as the "little colored girl." When Lily moved in with the ‘calendar sisters’ she experienced something new. She was treated as an insignificant and terrible white girl in a home full of black women by June Boatwright. She says she has never heard of discrimination against whites, only blacks. This was much different for her coming from a white community. Lily comes to an understanding that skin color doesn’t show anything about a person’s inner beauty. While these things are going on in both the young girls' lives, they learn to cope with the idea of being discriminated against due to color pigmentation. Zora says, "but i am not tragically colored," meaning she will not let the color of her skin affect her life. They will go on hoping to gain anything in this so called land of the free. She has nothing to lose, so risking it all isn't particularly terrible seeing how “being black is as low as we can get”. What we see to be colored is just an image we keep in our minds that is perceived to be a problem in the real world when realistically; it means absolutely nothing at all.
Great topic, you are right, many times when talking to people with different nationalities it is hard to notice any difference. It makes me wonder why people in the past thought it was a big deal.
ReplyDeleteIf you were a minority and were discriminated against, would you still feel that skin color means nothing?