The Summer I Left Childhood I Was White (1882)

1. The Summer I Left Childhood I Was White (1882) Katie Blanchard

2. The Definition of Racism • Racism or racialism is a form of discrimination based on race, especially the belief that one race is superior to another. Racism may be expressed individually and consciously, through explicit thoughts, feelings, or acts, or socially and unconsciously, through institutions that promote inequality between races.

3. Historical Racial Politics In The USA • Racism in the United States has been a major issue since the colonial era and the slave era • a heavy burden on Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latin Americans. • in the South, lynching's were a public event, often advertised in the daily newspapers. Photos from the time show mobs of jubilant crowds, including children, posing around the lynching victim. These photos were then converted to postcards and sent around the country. • After a hanging, it was common practice to desecrate the victim's body even further by burning, dismembering or tarring and feathering. Participants would then collect bits of the tree, rope, or the body as souvenirs. • Between the 1860s and 1960s, the official number of lynching's in the U.S. was around 75,000 people, though the actual number is probably many times higher. While lynching predominated in the South, no state was immune to the terrorism of the lynch mob. • Until 1952, not a single year passed without a recorded lynching. As one unidentified Black Mississippian said, "Back in those days, to kill a Negro wasn't nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake." • This exhibit also shows that while the majority of lynching victims were African American, this method of repression was used on other minority groups, including Native Americans, Mexicans and Asian Americans. Beginning in the early part of the last century, labour organizers--usually communists and socialists--attempting to organize sharecroppers in the South also became victims of lynch mobs.

4. The Racial Discrimination Act Of The 1950’s

5. The Racial Discrimination Act Of The 1950’s continued

6. The Style Of Writing • The style of writing that Audre Lorde (1934 – 92) is formal because of some of the language Lorde uses ‘rosewater and glycerine’. But then Lorde also uses informal language to represent who she is writing about for example ‘ the fuzz on them’, Lorde uses colloquial language to express her feelings and her family. Lorde uses standard punctuation, there is no exclamatory or questions, Lorde knows what she is writing.

7. What features contribute to the sense of personal experience and an adult looking back at childhood? • The features that make it look like Lorde is looking back over her childhood is that Lorde callers her parents mother and farther. The use of past tenses are also a hint that Lorde is looking back over her past, ‘I had read all’. Even the title of the piece is past tense ; ‘The summer I left childhood white’.

8. Re-casting task(What information would you allow the students to use?) • Imagine that you are a white person looking at the treatment of this black family, you decide to write a letter to the manager and to the waitress that has refused to serve that family. Using information from ‘Late the Washington afternoon my family……’ to ‘it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all’. • Imagine that you are an American news paper reporter and that you have to write a column for your daily paper on how racism in the USA has affected daily life in the eyes of an American