A Global Conference of the UN to discuss racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance was held from 31st August to 7 September 2001. While it was brave enough for the United Nations to attempt to hold such a meeting, it proved to be a heated challenge. While all nations are good at being critical of others (and often very accurately, although often not!), when it comes to one's own criticisms, most would be uncomfortable to say the least. As an example: United States and Europe were against effective discussions of slavery reparations (and sent in only low-level delegates - a possible sign on how they really feel about this conference, and what it is about).

Israel and United States were against discussing the possibility that Zionism is racist against Palestinians, causing both to walk out of the conference altogether; India was against including discussions about caste-based discrimination; Some Arab nations were against discussions on oppression of Kurds or Arab slave trade.

Discrimination is defined as “the practice of treating one particular group in society in an unfair way”, and probably stems from an inborn human intolerance towards something unusual. A possible theory as to why humans cannot tolerate difference is that they are too adverse to change - since they develop a certain mentality after being put in the same kind of environment, and keep their codes. That code is broken when they encounter something that does not match with their idea of what is normal. Then, they get resentful because their secure code has been broken. Therefore, discrimination sets in. It is an especially worrying problem for the world because discrimination may lead to civil wars which would in turn cripple a country's social and political stability.

This is proven in the fact that more harmonious countries such as Singapore and Switzerland develop quickly while divided societies like that of Northern Ireland and Indonesia are still very technologically backdated.

Discrimination would also cause an extreme violation of human rights. People would be too busy labeling each other to realize they are not treating each other like fellow human beings. Since discrimination is a result of deeply ingrained prejudice, it is difficult to find an appropriate solution to this problem.

Nelson Mandela, for example, was valiant in his fight against the unfair political system of apartheid in Africa. Mother Teresa of Calcutta also fought against stereotypes and associated herself with the social outcasts of India. Even though she was prone to the human flaw of discrimination, she chose to fight against it. A mother and a child also share a magnificent and unconditional bond, in the sense that the mother will still love her child if her child goes to jail. As such, discrimination can definitely be fought against.

Unfortunately, there exist stereotypical images in the entertainment media.

Popular culture (songs, theater) for European American audiences in the 19th century created and perpetuated negative stereotypes of African Americans. One key symbol of racism against African Americans was the use of blackface. Directly related to this was the institution of minstrelsy. Other stereotypes of African Americans included the fat, dark-skinned “mammy” and the irrational, hypersexual male "buck". Other stereotypes include the portrayal of East Asians as very small people with huge front teeth and the portrayal of Native Americans as dangerous savages.

The family members were talking about the guy who made a lot of money, this was as stereotype. It was the stereotype that a black person should be poor and not have made a lot of money. Although they themselves are black, they apply a negative stereotype against themselves; such as by believing they should all be poor because they are black.

It is indeed disappointing to realize the lack of empathy there is in our world, such that even if a disabled person had extremely pleasant mannerisms, “normal" people would still look upon them with fake, hypocritical pity, or worse, disgust. It is clear that such judgemental actions taken against a physically different person are already commonplace, as one often opens the newspaper to read of how AIDS-stricken patients are denied jobs even though they have educational qualifications higher than of a person without any illness or disability.

The movie “I Am Sam" also depicted a situation whereby a mentally retarded man is not given the right to raise his child just because her intellect has surpassed his. This is unfair considering how much he loves the child, and love should be enough to ensure the child's growth.

Even though this is just a movie, movies are often introspective reflections of human nature, which plainly proves how rampant discrimination is in our world today. One has also probably disliked someone else because she is fat, or has indulged in racist jokes. All the above examples serve to emphasize how discrimination, be it against people of another race, people of different facial features, or people of different physical abilities, is very real in our world today.

Today, our mass media perpetuates certain themes that reinforce the problem of racism in our society. There are certain messages that our media projects that portray visible minorities in a negative light. From this perspective, it is clear that there continues to be a problem in our society in connection to race.

It goes to show that there is that little spark of hope for humanity to be able to keep that discrimination to a minimum. If we are willing, we can cease the abyss of discrimination that has undoubtedly blinded our eyes to the real beauty of the world. Since humans have such a strong will to hate, they will also have a tenacity to love wholeheartedly and unconditionally. Ultimately, humans are creatures who want to love and be loved.

While race is one reason for inequality and gender is another, they are not mutually exclusive forms of discrimination. Indeed, too often they intersect, giving rise to compounded or double discrimination.

For many women factors relating to their social identity such as race, color, ethnicity and national origin become "differences that make a difference." These factors can create problems that are unique to particular groups of women or that disproportionately affect some women relative to others.

A discrimination claim may be based upon:

Disparate Treatment - where the employee has been subject to discrimination because of race, ethnicity, skin color, or a similar characteristic.

Disparate Impact - where the employer may not intend to discriminate, but the employer's policies adversely affect employees on the basis of race, ethnicity, skin color, or a similar characteristic.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects individuals against employment discrimination on the basis of race and color as well as national origin, sex, or religion. Even though race and color clearly overlap, they are not synonymous. Thus, color discrimination can occur between persons of different races or ethnicities, or between persons of the same race or ethnicity. Although Title VII does not define “color," the courts and the Commission read “color” to have its commonly understood meaning - pigmentation, complexion, or skin shade or tone. Thus, color discrimination occurs when a person is discriminated against based on the lightness, darkness, or other color characteristic of the person. Title VII prohibits race/color discrimination against all persons, including Caucasians.

Title VII is violated where minority employees are segregated by physically isolating them from other employees or from customer contact. Title VII also prohibits assigning primarily minorities to predominantly minority establishments or geographic areas. It is also illegal to exclude minorities from certain positions or to group or categorize employees or jobs so that certain jobs are generally held by minorities. Title VII also does not permit racially motivated decisions driven by business concerns - for example, concerns about the effect on employee relations, or the negative reaction of clients or customers. Nor may race or color ever be a bona fide occupational qualification under Title VII.

So like a saying “Don't judge the book by color”.

Chapter II. Racism reflections in literary works

II.1 African American writers about racism

One of the impacts in promoting change in society was literature. Abolitionary literary works were emotionally strained and influenced much on the minds of the Americans. Antislavery literature represents the origins of multicultural literature in the United States. It is the first body of American literature produced by writers of diverse racial origins.

Race was a subject potentially implicated all American writers, it was African Americans whose contributions most signally differentiated American modernism movement. Zora Neal Hurston drew on her childhood memories of the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, for much of her best-known fiction, including her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. W. Faulkner depicted a South at once specific to his native state of Mississippi and expanded into a mythic region anguished by racial and historical conflict.

The numerous writers associated with the Harlem renaissance made it impossible ever to think of a national literature without the work of black Americans, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neal Hurston attained particular prominence at the time: but others including Claude McKay and Nella Larsen were also well known.

Hughes wrote a number of powerful anti-lynching and anti-capitalist poems; but in general the movement was deliberately upbeat, taking the line that racial justice was about to become reality in the United states, or like Hurston, focusing more on the vitality of black culture than on the burdens of racism. At least part of this approach was strategic-the bulk of the readership for Harlem authors was white. Some women writers found social causes like labor and racism more important than women's rights; others focused their energies on struggles less amenable to public, legal remedies.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895). It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. He was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was fond of saying, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. "

Harriet A. Jacobs (Linda Brent) (1813-1897) ran away from slavery to make a new life for herself in the North; the story of her life under slavery, her protracted flight towards freedom, and the conditions she found once she got there, make up the structure of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Today, it is regarded as the most in-depth and textured pre-Civil War slave narrative written by a black woman in America.

Booker Washington (1856-1915) between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I, no one exercised more influence over race relations in the United States than did Booker T. Washington; some contemporary historians of the African American experience in America call the period the “Era of Booker T. Washington”. His influence continues to th present day. He wanted to help African Americans enter mainstream white society with the least possible violence and thus advocated an educational program of vocational rather than intellectual or professional training. His works have been contrasted with the dynamic and militant efforts of Frederick Douglass and the intellectual and professional initiatives of the fiercely independent W. E. B. Du Bois, but Washington was able to institutionalize his power to a far greater degree than either of these two. He owed no small part of his power to extraordinary skill with written and spoken language. To his sense of calling Washington added the command of memory and the detail of living as a racial “other', all of which he expressed in an unforgettable voice.

In his brilliant autobiography, “Up from Slavery" (1901), a masterpiece of the genre that was widely praised in the United States and popular in translation around the world. The early chapters reveal the physical and psychological realities of Washington's origins, realities that were shared by so many millions of the slaves set “free" at the conclusion of the Civil War. Later chapters show Washington at the peak of his success as an African American spokesperson, particularly as a master of rhetoric that allowed him to appear both as sincerely humble and as force to be reckoned with, both as a man of selfless industry and as one of considerable political know-how.

In his works he urges African Americans to emulate the proverbial ship captain who urged his crew to “cast down your buckets where you are" even though they were still at sea, and who thus found fresh water at the mouth of a river. He argued that by seeking improvement African Americans would inevitably rise as individuals. Yet he also urged whites not to judge African American children against white children until they had had a chance to catch up in school. In short, Washington proposed a middle ground wherein African Americans would rise themselves by individual effort and white Americans would appreciate the efforts being made and judge accordingly. Up from slavery is as important as a literary production as it is a record of time, place, and person. Washington's skillful use of metaphor and symbol, his deftly masked ironies, and the art of his artlessness have been addressed by such critics as William Andrews, Houston A. Baker, and James M. Cox.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) in his major work The Philadelphia Negro, that expressed the steady stream of important studies of African American life. Dedicated to the rigorous, scholarly examination of the so-called Negro Problem, Du Bois had to face up to the violent realities of the lives he proposed to study. He first came to national attention with the publication of “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903), characterized by scholar Eric J. Sundquist as “the preeminent text of African American cultural consciousness”.

Several chapters explore the implications of this extraordinary book's dramatic and prophetic announcement in its “Forethought” that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line”. In the first chapter, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”, Du Bois introduces another concept that would inform his thinking for the rest of his career-the notion of the “twoness” of African Americans: “One ever feels his twoness”, Du Bois asserts, “an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”. This foundational observation hit on what Du Bois named “double-consciousness”. In his essay “The Negro Problem" (1903), he meant college-educated African Americans who could provide leadership for African Americans after Reconstruction. Du Bois offers a concise overview of the Negro in America cast in the highly charged rhetoric of the orator who wishes to move as well as inform his audience. Du Bois became a leader in the Niagara Movement (1905), a movement aggressively demanding for African Americans the same civil rights enjoyed by white Americans.

In 1910 Du Bois served as an editor of Crisis, the official publication of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization he helped to create. Through this publication Du Bois reached an increasingly large audience-one hundred thousand by 1919-with powerful messages that argued the need for black development and white social enlightenment. From 1920 Du Bois shifted his attention from the reform of race relations in America through research and political legislation to the search for longer-range worldwide economic solutions to the international problems of inequity among the races. He began a steady movement toward Pan-African and socialist perspectives that led to his joining the US Communist Party in 1961 and, in the year of his death, becoming a citizen of Ghana. He was extremely active as a politician, organizer, and diplomat, and he continued as a powerful writer of poetry, fiction, autobiography, essays, and scholarly works. Martin Luther King spoke of Du Bois as “one of the most remarkable men of our time”.

A distinguished and most popular writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) captured the dominant and improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form. Eleven of his poems were published in Alain Locke's pioneering anthology, The New Negro (1925), and he also well represented in Countee Gullen's 1927 anthology, Caroling Dusk. Carl Van Vechten, one of the white patrons of African American writing, helped get The Weary Blues, Hughe's first volume of poems, published in 1926.

In this year, his important essay “The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain” appeared in the Nation, he described the immense challenges to be faced by the serious black artist “who would produce a racial art" but insisted on the need for courageous artists to make the attempt. The publication of his novel Not without Laughter in 1930 glorified his reputation and sales, enabling him to support himself. By the 1930's he was being called “the bard of Harlem”.

Hughes and other blacks were drawn by the American Communist Party, which made racial justice an important plank in its platform, promoting an image of working-class solidarity that nullified racial boundaries. He visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and produced a significant amount of radical boundaries. He visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and produced a significant amount of radical writing up to the eve of World War II. He covered the Spanish civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American in 1937.

In the 1950s and 1960s Hughes published a variety of anthologies for children and adults, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). In 1953 he was called to testify before the Senator Joseph McCarthy's committee on subversive activities in connection with his 1930 radicalism. The FBI listed him as a security risk until 1959; and during these years, when he could not travel outside the United States because he would not have been allowed to re-enter the country. Hughes worked to rehabilitate his reputation as a good American by producing patriotic poetry. From 1960 to the end of his life he was again on the international circuit.

Within the spectrum of artistic possibilities open to writers of the Harlem Renaissance-drawing on African American folk forms; on literary traditions and forms that entered the United States from Europe and Great Britain; or on the new cultural forms of blacks in American cities-Hughes chose to focus his work on modern, urban black life. He modeled his stanza forms on the improvisatory rhythms of jazz music and adapted the vocabulary of everyday black speech to poetry. He also acknowledged finding inspiration for his writing in the work of whit American poets who preceded him. Like Walt Whitman he heard America singing, he asserted his right to sing America back; he also learned from Carl Sandburg's earlier attempts to work jazz into poetry. Hughes did not confuse his pride in African American culture with complacency toward the material deprivations of black life in the United States. He was keenly aware that the modernist “vogue in things Negro" among white Americans was potentially exploitative and voyeuristic; he confronted such racial tourists with the misery as well as the jazz of Chicago's South Side. Early and late, Hughes poems demanded that African Americans be acknowledged as owners of the culture they gave to the United States and as fully enfranchised American citizens.

I, Too

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, and grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen”,

Then.

Besides,

Thy'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed-

I,too,am America. (Hughes, 2028)

Words Like Freedom

There are words like Freedom

Sweet and wonderful to say.

On my heart-strings freedom sings

All day everyday.

There are words like Liberty

That almost make me cry,

If you had known what I know

You would know why. (Hughes, 2033)

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) “If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what's expected of him, he's lost the battle before he takes the field”. His importance to American letters is partly due to this independence. He also did the unexpected, however, in not following his fine first novel with the others that were predicted. “Invisible Man" published in 1945, and won the National Book Award. The novel outlived Ellison's expectations, but not without suffering attacks from critics. The most powerful of these, Irving Howe, took the authors to task for not following R. Wright's lead and devoting his fiction to the Negro cause. Howe believed that African Americans should write social protest novels about the tragedy of black ghetto life. Invisible Man had used its protagonist's “invisibility" to entertain a much broader range of possibilities; and though by no means socially irresponsible, the novel is dedicated to the richness of life and art that becomes possible when the imagination is liberated from close realism.

We have come to understand the genre of African American literature as encompassing any piece of literature that deals specifically with issues unique to African Americans as a culture.

In the last half of the 19^th century, African-American plays began to be written. Prior to this time, African-Americans did not participate nor did they have a voice in the American theater. Because white playwrights wrote and enacted African-Americans with blackface, the true essence of the African-American struggle was not viewed by the American audience. Though African-Americans found success in Europe, they wanted to have a voice in America that portrayed what they went through and appealed to them. Several playwrights started the movement in which African-Americans wrote and acted in plays about African-Americans and their struggles with racism in America.

There are quite a few notable African-American playwrights that have created plays reflecting the African American experience, including some whose plays have been performed on Broadway. Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and author, wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by an African-American woman to debut in Broadway theaters. She also was the first African-American woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Langston Hughes, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, wrote a number of plays. Two of his plays, Mullato, a play about miscegenation, and Simply Heaven, were seen from Broadway stage. NtozakeShange, African-American playwright and poet, wrote For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf, appeared on Broadway and won the OBIE award. The play is about the struggles of seven African-American women that not only have to deal with being an African-American but have to deal with life issues such as rape and abortion.

The African-American struggle is one that could only be told by African-Americans. Important figures created works that reflected issues that were prevalent within the race and created a place for more African-American playwrights to follow. African American writers in the early twentieth century were using Realism in their art to tell their story.

Black writers can write about anything, they are certainly not limited to issues of race or slavery. An author's skin color should not have anything to do with what label goes on that author's writing.

The novel "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, a book that deals with the issue of skin color as it correlates to beauty and equality. Throughout her career Morrison has been dedicated to constructing a practical cultural identity of a race and a gender whose self-images have been obscured or denied by dominating forces. This genre does not have to refer to pieces that deal only with slavery, inequality, or segregation. In “Bluest Eye" the girl's need to be loved generates the novel's action, action that involves displaced and alienated affections (and eventually incestuous rape); the family's inability to produce a style of existence in which love can be born and thrive leads to such a devastating fate for Morrison's protagonist.

Her short story “Recitatif” directly addresses the issues of individual and family, past and present, and race and its effacements that motivate the larger sense of her work. A “recitatif” is a vocal performance in which narrative is not stated but sung. In her works Morrison's voice sings proudly of a past that in the artistic nature of its reconstruction puts all Americans in touch with a more positively usable heritage.

Another remarkable “ever vocal woman" of African American literature Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995) wrote about activists in their societies, societies that in their flux demand creative readjustment at every stage. In “Tales and Stories of Black Folks" (1971) an anthology that provides ample evidence for how African Americans not only created folk legends but adapted European and African materials to their own uniquely American ends. In this writer's fiction readers can see the same process taking place, a joyful embrace of voice as the most personal statement possible in a world dependent on self-invention for survival.

Margaret Walker's Jubilee is a semi-fictional account of "Vyry Brown," based on the life of author M. Walker's grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown.

Vyry Brown is a mixed-race slave--the unacknowledged daughter of her master--who is born onto the Dutton plantation in Georgia. The novel follows her experiences from early childhood to adult life. The story of Vyry's life in the novel spans three major periods of American history: Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Jubilee draws on both history and folk traditions. The final section of Jubilee thus shifts its focus to the education of blacks during and after Reconstruction.

The ending of Jubilee suggests a connection between the events the novel has described during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The narrative ends on a train bound for Selma. As Jim and his father board the train, the conductor announces the segregated seating order-colored up front and whites in the rear.

The authors revealed the psychological and social impact of slavery, struggle of under-appreciated individuals to find their roots. The main characters face the life hardships, reaction to the unjust treatment by the white people and seeking for self-identity, the question for selfhood for them is a motivating factor.

Writers of African American literature do not have to be black. The material needs only to have connections to black culture or history. The profession of writing entails the ability to create from many different perspectives.

The book called "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, a white author, writes from the perspectives of several different characters including two African American women working as maids in Mississippi during the 1960s. "The Help" is clearly a book that addresses issues of race and segregation.

Similarly, the classic work "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was written by another white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe. This book would also qualify as African American literature because of its subject matter. Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52) in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to assist an escaped slave. The book was quickly translated into 37 languages and sold in five years over half a million copies in the United States. Uncle Tom's Cabin was also among the most popular plays of the 19th century.

The novel was so popular that it was made into a traveling melodrama and played to audiences throughout the North. Southern journals denounced the novel declaring that its portrayal of slavery was pure fabrication, an invention of the author's imagination.

Like most white writers of her day, H. B. Stowe could not escape the racism of the time. Because of this, her work has some serious flaws, which in turn have helped perpetuate damaging images of African Americans. However, the book, within its genre of romance, was enormously complex in character and in its plots. The book outraged the South, and in the long run, that is its significance.

Another issue on the subject is that the whites were most successful in spreading their racism among their own offspring. "The whites practiced widespread sexual trafficking in African slaves which produced Mulatto babies who, due to the resentment instilled by their fathers, grew up to resent the race of their mothers" [Williams 50]. This quote is significant because it reveals one of the main methods through which whites were able to spread their prejudice among people who shared an African lineage and once more showing the purity of the white race. (Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987)

Kate Chopin (1851-1904) emerged as one of the greatest as well as most admired American short story writers, novelists, poets, and essayists. In many of Chopin's stories she has transcended simple regionalism and portrayed women who seek spiritual and sexual freedom amidst the restrictive mores of nineteenth-century Southern society. She brought attention to the racial issues that existed during the times of slavery through her short story “Désirée's Baby” which introduces the two main characters in the story, Désirée and Armand, and creates many symbolisms, ironies, and themes seen throughout the story.

It is a tragic tale of race and gender in antebellum Louisiana. Desiree is deeply in love with her husband Armand, and he is a loving husband and proud father until he notices their infant's dark skin. Because Desiree was abandoned as a child, her ancestry is unknown. Armand concludes that she is not white and tells her to leave. His rejection drives Desiree to take her own life and that of the baby. A few weeks later, Armand discovers that he is of mixed ancestry.

The following extracts will clearly describe the content of the story concerning the race problems of that time.

1. “Oh, Armand is the proudest father in the parish, I believe, chiefly because it is a boy, to bear his name… he hasn't punished one of them - not one of them - since baby is born… Oh, mamma, I'm so happy; it frightens me. ”

2. “When the baby was about three months old … a strange, an awful change in her husband's manner, which she dared not ask him to explain…. The old love-light seemed to have gone out…. Spirit of Satan seemed suddenly to take hold of him in his dealings with the slaves. ”

3. Desiree's eyes had been fixed absently and sadly upon the baby… Ah! It was a cry that she couldn't help… The blood turned like ice in her veins…”

“Tell me what it means! ”

“It means,” he answered lightly, “that the child is not white, it means that you are not white. ”

4. My mother, they tell me I'm not white. Armand has told me I am not white. For God's sake tell them it is not true… I shall die. I must die…”

The answer that came was brief: “My own Desiree: Come home to Valmonde: back to your mother who loves you.come with your child. ”

5. Desiree has to bear the heaviest burden, being driven away from love and safety, left bereft. She has nothing but despair, and so drowns herself and her baby in the bayou.

Once Desiree and baby died, Armand found a letter of his mother written to his father. In the last words of the story, the tragic irony of it all occurs:

“… night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery. ”

The story doesn't only confront the racial issues that took place during the time of slavery but also draws upon the reader's emotions to experience how people thought during that time period.

The word "stereotype" comes with negative connotations because it is generally used to describe an off-putting generalization. It becomes necessary though when talking about facets of something like a certain group of people or culture. The other problem with stereotypes is the way they vary from person to person. One person might assume one thing about a certain group of people while another might assume the opposite, making universal stereotyping difficult. It is up to both the author and the reader to determine whether or not a work falls under the category of African American literature.

In recent decades, scholars and readers have criticized the book “Uncle Tom's Cabin" for what are seen as condescending racist descriptions of the book's black characters, especially with regard to the characters' appearances, speech, and behavior, as well as the passive nature of Uncle Tom in accepting his fate. The novel's creation and use of common stereotypes about African Americans is important because Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel in the world during the 19th century. As a result, the book (along with images illustrating the book and associated stage productions) had a major role in permanently ingraining these stereotypes into the American psyche.

Among the stereotypes of blacks in Uncle Tom's Cabin are: The "happy darky" (in the lazy, carefree character of Sam);

The light-skinned tragic mulatto as a sex object (in the characters of Eliza, Cassy, and Emmeline);

The affectionate, dark-skinned female mammy (through several characters, including Mammy, a cook at the St. Clare plantation).

The Pickaninny stereotype of black children (in the character of Topsy);

The Uncle Tom, or African American who is too eager to please white people (in the character of Uncle Tom).

Stowe intended Tom to be a "noble hero." The stereotype of him as a "subservient fool who bows down to the white man" evidently resulted from staged "Tom Shows," over which Stowe had no control.

However, scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. have begun to reexamine Uncle Tom's Cabin, stating that the book is a "central document in American race relations and a significant moral and political exploration of the character of those relations. "

There are many modern subjects that can be explored through literature besides these. For example, a piece of African American literature might touch on the use of the "N" word in today's popular culture.

It can be anything that either the reader or the writer deems a legitimate African American issue to be as long as there is evidence that one can make a claim for and defend successfully. Critics have argued that this genre no longer exists because American culture no longer has to deal with difficulties such as slavery or the Jim Crow laws. It is true that these things no longer exist, but racism and problems concerning race are still rampant in our society even if they now manifest themselves in slightly different ways.

African American literature includes any piece of literature that deals in particular with issues that are related to African Americans as a people. This does not mean the author needs to be black though, writers of any skin tone can fashion characters with many different perspectives and cultures. The common misconception that this genre includes many works or biography and autobiography is false. Many pieces of African American literature are fictional. Topics that are included in this genre can include slavery and the like, but they can also be more modern. African American literature is a growing category just like any other type of literature.

II.2 Comparative analysis of the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird" Harper Lee and story “Going to Meet The Man" by James Baldwin

Harper Lee's place in American letters was secured in 1960 with the publication of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the story of a young girl's encounter with fear, ignorance, and courage in a small Southern town.

After graduating from the University of Alabama in 1948 and spending a year studying law at Oxford University, Lee headed north to New York City. She took a job as n airline reservation clerk and in her spare time wrote fictitious accounts of he childhood experiences. In 1957 she submitted the manuscript to a New York publisher; one of the editors felt it had potential but was too episodic and suggested she quit her job and work full time on her book. After “a long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over again" the book was finally published.

Although some critics found the novel too melodramatic and objected to having an eight-year old narrator with a mature woman's ability to recall the past, Lee's first and only novel became an immediate best-seller.

The recipient of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, To Kill a Mockingbird was adapted into film, which in 1962 won two Academy Awards. Subsequently, critics reevaluated the novel's author, this time acclaiming her as a “remarkable story-teller” who possessed “wit and compassion”. By 1975 the novel had sold more than 11 million copies and had been translated into 10 languages.

The story covers a three-year period during which Scout, and eight-year old girl, and her brother, Jem, observe a trial at which their father, Atticus Finch, a town lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman Mayella Ewell. They come to admire their father for standing up to injustice and racism and to understand that to kill Tom would be a senseless as to destroy a mockingbird who, “don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy”. Atticus is intent on ensuring Tom Robinson receives a fair trial and is brought to justice. When a Negro is falsely accused of rape, the townspeople judge him guilty based on his color, creating obvious problems for the defendant and his family, and the fair-minded adults and children who are disgusted by prejudice and hypocrisy: "There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads-they couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life." (Lee, 1960, p.243) Atticus addresses the jury with a passionate speech on equality as he entreats them to come up with a "not guilty" verdict:. there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal-there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein and the ignorant man the equal of a college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. and in our courts all men are created equal. (Lee, 1960, pp.266-267)