I mentioned all the poems and their links with it. please study the poems before answering.
Contain and Control: The American Obsession with the Black Body
Click here to watch the recorded event from 11/18/20:
Walt Whitman, I Hear America Singing (1860)
Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus (1883), inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903:
These two are early examples of Black experience. “We Wear the Mask” is talking about the way in which sometimes people feel as if they have to hide what they are thinking and feeling behind the mask of an expression. You are upset, but you don’t show it. It’s not about the literal masks that we are all wearing now because of covid!
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask, (1913):
I debated about assigning this one because it includes a very bad word that no one should ever say. But it describes a powerfully upsetting or disturbing incident in the life of a Black child — one that still perhaps resonates for us to this day:
Countee Cullen, Incident, (1925):
If this link works, watch the first poem in particular: “Democracy” by Langston Hughes.
Poetry Helped My Heart Survive
Langston Hughes, I, Too, (1926)
Margaret Walker, For My People, (1942):
Audre Lorde, A Litany for Survival, (1978):
The Hill We Climb.
