If He Hollers, Let Him Go Essay Example

visiting Alabama in the 1950s when she was young. As a child, she did not understand why blacks were excepted to step off the sidewalk and into the street when a white person was on the sidewalk.

Bob Jones did not understand either, but he knew that the reality for him was that he could be killed, legally or illegally at any moment because of his color. Bob Jones knew that he could be charged with the crime of being black in the wrong neighborhood. Though Hollywood has since gone on to make movies joking about this “crime”, the reality is that racial profiling is still alive and well in America in 2008. For proof, one need only look at the random selection of people who are stopped in any major city or in the suburbs or at airport checkpoints.

Somehow, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it became okay for people to discriminate against people so long as their skin was brown and not black. Sadly though, Bob Jones who dreams about being free of the curse of racism, practices it himself, talking with his friend about “a cracker chick” (p. 102). With the language among the men as they work in the rail yard, the author attempts to show that word “Nigger” when used among blacks to describe themselves can be a term of endearment and that racism is just as prevalent among blacks.

What it demonstrates though is that black society had tried to take back the word that others used to inflict pain. Years later, in writing “The Vagina Monologues”, Eve Ensler would do likewise with

the word “cunt”, saying that women should take back the word and defuse it to erase the hatred that comes with the use of the word as defamation. In “If He Hollers Let Him Go”, the author was demonstrating the same attitude toward the word “Nigger”. If the black community could take back the word and redefine it themselves, they could take away the pain.