final reflection

By choosing a different lens from what I’d normally would do, opened my mind up more in realizing that I don’t have to analyze things always in such a complex way(psychoanalytic) because doing too much can be an overkill, and looking at it simply might be the right way at times. The representation of the lens were similar for this book in that both focused on race and their controversial problems such as segregation, civil rights, and equality, but also differed in many ways. For example, Huck was written by Mark Twain, a white man, giving a lens through a white little boy in the 1860s in the south. Twain depicts African-Americans as they were during the time, slaves, but gave them the characteristics of being dimwitted and naive, almost being child-like. In Song of Solomon, it was written by Toni Morrison, an african american woman, omnisciently telling the life of an african american man in the times of the 1960’s. She illustrates them as being rich and educated, for his grandfather was a doctor. I believe if I didn’t look at the novel through this lens, I wouldn’t come to a consense that although it was satirically written, Twain presented Jim and the rest of the slaves in a very grotesque manner that is very racist. As for in Song of Solomon, I saw how ignorant Milkman was being about him being black and that thinking that just because he has money, it excluded him of the racial discrimination. Something I felt that I missed out on from focusing on this lens was how gender played. The benefit and the downside of using this lens is that I tended to combine race and economic status; if the person was white then they had to have some kind of money, but that isn’t the case. Ultimately, your race doesn’t classify how much money you have. My beliefs changed about this lens by thinking I am limited of what I’m going to write, but actually there’s many extensive things I can cover in this case. It doesn’t have to be only about that lens, but be integrated in something else and see how race integrates with that issue.