Racism: African American and Henry Louis Gates Essay Example

African Americans were the norm in many communities, including those outside the South. Henry Louis like Graham, when younger, both felt discrimination was only alive through certain blacks or hate of the opposites due to the black man’s fault of isolating themselves from the whites. Gates short story “What’s in a Name? ” clearly deals with his experience of discrimination not towards himself, but toward his father.

Gates and his family were treated with an odd mixture of resentment and respect but only because of their financial security.Gates recalls being around five or six years of age, sitting down in the drug store/diner to eat with his father where no blacks were allowed, but Gate’s father. Yet, the store owner, Mr. Wilson, called his father “George”, and when Gates Jr. told him “tell him your name, daddy”, his father only responded “He knows my name, boy…He calls all colored people George. ” Both Maya Angelou and Gates have similar histories of discrimination, being called names besides the ones that were given to them at birth.

Angelou was born in 1928 in St. Louis, but spent most of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas. Finishing School” is a story of Angelou’s childhood through her own eyes. “Finishing school” was to refine social skills and artistic skills for future roles in a “polite society”, so it was called. Children of the poor, both black and white, were expected to learn practical skills that would enable them to get jobs. Angelou recalls that black women were often limited to domestic service in white households.

Ms. Angelou spent most of her “finishing school” in an “old, fat, white” lady’s kitchen

preparing tables and cooking meals for Ms. Cullinan and guests.She recalls being renamed Mary because her birth name was too long and it was just better for Ms.

Cullinan’s convenience. Both Angelou and Gates knew that it was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely insulting because of the centuries they have been called niggers, jigs, boots, spooks, etc. So for the white’s sake they just wanted to completely rename them. Yet, being called “George” or “Mary” is still considered prejudiced. All three activists know and speak out and state through literature, that racism is sill alive but well concealed.