I need an outline and final draft for an evaluation essay. I will attach details of the instructions along with what to write about.
Choose ONE of the assigned articles to evaluate from your textbook. You will find this list of articles in the link titled "Evaluation Reading Assignments."
Paper Length: about 4 double spaced typed pages plus a Works Cited page.
NOTE: For this paper you only have to cite the article you are evaluating.
The outline should follow outline format.
When you read, consider the logical fallacies, the speaker, the time, and the validity of what you read along with the sources used to sell the thesis. Writers evaluate by careful consideration and by learning to speak back to the writing - going against the grain helps discover fallacies, omissions, bias, faulty ideas, etc.
This assignment offers practice in evaluating an article for its value, validity, and contribution to written communication. Select one of the assigned articles for the evaluation composition. Use one of the prewriting notes files to prepare for the outline.
Finally, this assignment is not a summary. If you summarize the article then you will fail this assignment.
Outline instructions
Use your outline as an opportunity to organize and develop ideas.
I do not want to see any complete sentences or paragraphs throughout your outline.
What my professor said about our essay:
Evaluation Essay
The ultimate goal of all literary study is evaluation. Evaluation, as applied to literature, means the act of deciding what is good, bad, or mediocre. Too often a good student will avoid making any judgments or commitments at all, though he or she feels comfortable describing the literary work he or she is writing about. Evaluation frequently requires taking a debatable position. This position must be obvious. Evaluation of articles in other genres can also contribute to understanding trends and societal norms. The value of popular topics can also be questioned since these often diminish with time. Also remember to use prewriting notes or reader response from the files in Unit 3 lecture.
Begin this essay using the same basic outline for all literary compositions. Include the name of the article, the writer, the time period, and a thesis focusing on the components for evaluation (listed below) to be explored in the essay. In evaluation, general response to how effective patterns are used with special attention to omissions, fallacies, and faulty reasoning will 'drive' the essay. Avoid summarizing until perhaps the closing of the essay after the evaluation has established and meshed why the article has value in written communication. For a relatively short composition of a minimum of three pages, a couple of components will suffice. However, tone and intended audience in the second paragraph should be an intregal part of any composition so choose at least two additional components for development.
Some components and standards used for evaluation are as follows. Begin the essay with the information for exposition followed by a thesis for evaluation.
1. Tone - discuss the tone and how it contributes to the overall piece. Does the article seem primarily to entertain, to enlighten, to convince, to preach, to twist, etc.
2. Intended Audience - Include some discussion of the probable intended audience and how that serves to expand general knowledge or limits the article.
3. Truth: Truth in writing means realism--consider if the thesis is logical and what approach (p. 43-44) it uses to appeal to the intended audience.
4. Unity: The joint force and full result of all the elements of the work would be taken into consideration. Each word and incident in the work contribute to the insight the reader has of the central ideas of the work. Consider if the article provides value to the reader’s body of knowledge.
5. Vitality: A good work of written communication has a life of its own.Vitality is also measured by the validity of the thesis, and how well it develops. Validity of the thesis, bias, and omissions contribute or detract from the value.
6. Style: The way in which a writer employs his or her words, phrases, and sentences to achieve his or her desired effects is style. Words that reflect style fit the situation created in the work: simple words, polysyllable words, technical words, particular parts of speech, sounds, rhythm. For phrases: type of phrases in sentences, number of phrases in sentences, variety of the phrases in sentences. For sentences: simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, fragments, declarative, questions, exclamations. Style helps explain how a writer uses writing techniques. The style can help explain why character is memorable, how setting contributes, etc. Use of dialogue also contributes to style.
7. Structure: The organization and arrangement of the work as a whole is structure. Use of setting, patterns, tone, evidence contribute to value. The setting component of an article also offers a specific link to evaluation since time and place often provide insight about the trends in vogue at that time and place. Writers often cannot write or think objectively out of their time.
8. Point of view: The narrator writes so readers will read. Writers have an agenda, a purpose, a message. How well the article meets those goals often relies on the credibility of the narrator. If the narrator seems unreliable because of bias, omissions, or logical fallacies, the value of the article diminishes.
9. Logic: The ideas and events(as developed using the patterns of development) of the article work to develop a logical sequence.
10. Diction: Style of speaking or writing as dependent upon word choice. An author's word choice is the foundation of his or her writing. What are some unique word choices from the piece? Focus on a term's denotative, (dictionary definition) and its connotative, (contextual definition) term. Words are not accidentally used. Everything is intentional!
11. Ethos: A speaker's/writer's credibility. What experiences or expertise qualifies the author to write about this topic?
12. Pathos: A speaker's writer's use of emotional appeals. How does the author use emotional appeals to enhance the message/argument? How do the emotional appeals connect to a potential audience?
13: Setting: Consider when and where the author wrote their text. What was the context when they wrote the article you are analyzing?
14: Argument Effectiveness: Ultimately, how effective was the author in presenting their argument?
Your evaluation will follow the basic format for beginning essays, and direct the thesis to specifically state evaluation.
DEVELOPMENTAL PARAGRAPHS
Following the basic format for body paragraphs, the topics of the internal paragraphs will be the qualities of the literary work that the student feels establish the worth of the article using the list above --select the details from the article that apply to the paragraph topics. Avoid summarizing the work until the concluding paragraphs.
CONCLUSION
The conclusion can encourage or alert readers to include the article for its specific contribution to the body of written communication as detailed in the essay.
SAMPLE THESIS STATEMENT (follows exposition information)
Dave Barry's style offers an entertaining and truthful article that lends itelf to evaluation of patterns used to restate the age old thesis that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
RESEARCH REQUIREMENTS:
Your final draft must be correctly formatted according to MLA standards. Your final draft must also include a Works Cited page that is correctly formatted, too.
The following list of criteria and focus questions may be useful for reading the text and for preparing the critical review. Remember to check your assignment instructions for more specific criteria and focus questions that should form the basis of your review. The length of the review/assignment will determine how many criteria you will address in your critique.
Criteria Possible focus questions
Significance and contribution to the field
What is the author's aim?
To what extent has this aim been achieved?
What does this text add to the body of knowledge? This could be in terms of theory, data and/or practical application
What relationship does it bear to other works in the field?
What is missing/not stated?
Is this a problem?
Methodology or approach (this usually applies to more formal, research-based texts)
What approach was used for the research? For example, quantitative or qualitative, analysis/review of theory or current practice, comparative, case study, personal reflection, etc..
How objective/biased is the approach?
Are the results valid and reliable?
What analytical framework is used to discuss the results?
Argument and use of evidence
Is there a clear problem, statement or hypothesis?
What claims are made?
Is the argument consistent?
What kinds of evidence does the text rely on?
How valid and reliable is the evidence?
How effective is the evidence in supporting the argument?
What conclusions are drawn?
Are these conclusions justified?
Writing style and text structure
Does the writing style suit the intended audience? For example, expert/non-expert, academic/non-academic, etc.
What is the organising principle of the text? Could it be better organised?
Read the following articles from your textbook: Jensen, (22) Rodriguez, (367) Tan, (373) Adichie, (416) Johnson, (386) & Padilla, (363)
Pick one to write paper on
Robert Jensen
From The High Cost of Manliness
Robert Jensen (b. 1958) is an author and professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, first published in full on Alternet in 2006, Jensen calls for abandoning the prevailing definition of masculinity, arguing that it is “toxic” to both men and women. Note that the following is an excerpt from Jensen’s essay.
[1] Author addresses “guys” informally, with humor (“this masculinity thing”); states argument.
[2] Defines “masculinity”; states argument more forcefully.
1So, guys, I have an idea — maybe it’s time we stop trying. Maybe this masculinity thing is a bad deal, not just for women but for us.
2We need to get rid of the whole idea of masculinity. It’s time to abandon the claim that there are certain psychological or social traits that inherently come with being biologically male. If we can get past that, we have a chance to create a better world for men and women.
[3] Discusses concept of masculinity in U.S. culture (competitive, aggressive, sexist, homophobic); gives examples.
3The dominant conception of masculinity in U.S. culture is easily summarized: men are assumed to be naturally competitive and aggressive, and being a real man is therefore marked by the struggle for control, conquest, and domination. A man looks at the world, sees what he wants, and takes it. Men who don’t measure up are wimps, sissies, fags, girls. The worst insult one man can hurl at another — whether it’s boys on the playground or CEOs in the boardroom — is the accusation that a man is like a woman. Although the culture acknowledges that men can in some situations have traits traditionally associated with women (caring, compassion, tenderness), in the end it is men’s strength-expressed-as-toughness that defines us and must trump any female-like softness. Those aspects of masculinity must prevail° for a man to be a “real man.”
[4] Further supports argument. Addresses possible objections (not every man is aggressive); gives examples (business, military).
4That’s not to suggest, of course, that every man adopts that view of masculinity. But it is endorsed in key institutions and activities — most notably in business, the military, and athletics — and is reinforced through the mass media. It is particularly expressed in the way men — straight and gay alike — talk about sexuality and act sexually. And our culture’s male heroes reflect those characteristics: they most often are men who take charge rather than seek consensus,° seize power rather than look for ways to share it, and are willing to be violent to achieve their goals.
[5] Discusses “toxic” impact on women.
5That view of masculinity is dangerous for women. It leads men to seek to control “their” women and define their own pleasure in that control, which leads to epidemic levels of rape and battery. But this view of masculinity is toxic for men as well.
[6] Discusses negative impact of toxic masculinity on men’s lives.
6If masculinity is defined as conquest, it means that men will always struggle with each other for dominance. In a system premised on hierarchy° and power, there can be only one king of the hill. Every other man must in some way be subordinated° to the king, and the king has to always be nervous about who is coming up that hill to get him. A friend who once worked on Wall Street — one of the preeminent° sites of masculine competition — described coming to work as like walking into a knife fight when all the good spots along the wall were taken. Masculinity like this is life lived as endless competition and threat.
[7] More on how toxic masculinity hurts men.
7No one man created this system, and perhaps none of us, if given a choice, would choose it. But we live our lives in that system, and it deforms men, narrowing our emotional range and depth. It keeps us from the rich connections with others — not just with women and children, but other men — that make life meaningful but require vulnerability.
[8] Addresses toxic masculinity from feminist perspective.
8This doesn’t mean that the negative consequences of this toxic masculinity are equally dangerous for men and women. As feminists have long pointed out, there’s a big difference between women dealing with the possibility of being raped, beaten, and killed by the men in their lives and men not being able to cry. But we can see that the short-term material gains that men get are not adequate compensation for what we men give up in the long haul — which is to surrender part of our humanity to the project of dominance.
[9] Argues that men and women are in this together, not so different; gives examples.
9Of course there are obvious physical differences between men and women — average body size, hormones, reproductive organs. There may be other differences rooted in our biology that we don’t yet understand. Yet it’s also true that men and women are more similar than we are different, and that given the pernicious° effects of centuries of patriarchy° and its relentless devaluing of things female, we should be skeptical of the perceived differences.
[10] Argues that we don’t know enough about the relationship between genetics and human behavior; gives examples.
10What we know is simple: in any human population, there is wide individual variation. While there’s no doubt that a large part of our behavior is rooted in our DNA, there’s also no doubt that our genetic endowment is highly influenced by culture. Beyond that, it’s difficult to say much with any certainty. It’s true that only women can bear children and breastfeed. That fact likely has some bearing on aspects of men’s and women’s personalities. But we don’t know much about what the effect is, and given the limits of our tools to understand human behavior, it’s possible we may never know much.
[11] Argues that even if we find that genetics affect male and female behavior, institutional sexism blurs what we can understand.
11At the moment, the culture seems obsessed with gender differences, in the context of a recurring intellectual fad (called “evolutionary psychology” this time around, and “sociobiology” in a previous incarnation) that wants to explain all complex behaviors as simple evolutionary adaptations — if a pattern of human behavior exists, it must be because it’s adaptive in some ways. In the long run, that’s true by definition. But in the short term it’s hardly a convincing argument to say, “Look at how men and women behave so differently; it must be because men and women are fundamentally different,” when a political system has been creating differences between men and women.…
[12] Concludes with restatement of thesis/argument; gives example of what is at stake.
12I don’t think the planet can long survive if the current conception of masculinity endures. We face political and ecological challenges that can’t be met with this old model of what it means to be a man. At the more intimate level, the stakes are just as high. For those of us who are biologically male, we have a simple choice: we men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings.
° prevail: Dominate.
° consensus: Agreement.
° hierarchy: A grouping based on relative rank.
° subordinated: Lowered in rank.
° preeminent: Most important.
° pernicious: Destructive.
° patriarchy: Social organization in which the father is supreme; male control of most of the power in a society.
Olof Eriksson’s instructor asked his class to write a one-page reading response to Robert Jensen’s essay “The High Cost of Manliness” and include a summary and a personal response. Your instructor will likely ask you to respond to the articles and other texts that you read for your composition course. Whether you’re asked to keep a reading journal or to submit or post online your responses to those texts, you might be required to provide the following:
Summary: a short statement in your own words of the reading’s main points (without your opinion, evaluation, or judgment)
Paraphrase: a restatement of a passage using your own words and sentences
Quotation: a noteworthy expression or statement in the author’s exact words, presented in quotation marks and correctly cited
Personal response: a statement and explanation of your reaction to the reading
Critique: your evaluation of the strengths or weaknesses of the reading
Analysis: a close study and interpretation
Personal connection/application: a statement about the relationship between a text and your experience
Question: a point that you wish the writer had covered
As you read Olof Eriksson’s paper, pay attention to how he recaps Jensen’s argument and supports his own responses.
Olof Eriksson
Student Summary and Response
The Problems with Masculinity
[1] Summarizes the argument that author presents.
Paraphrases author’s ideas.
1Robert Jensen writes in his essay “The High Cost of Manliness” about masculinity and how our culture creates expectations of certain traits from the males in our society. He strongly opposes this view of masculinity and would prefer that sociological constructs such as masculinity and femininity were abolished. As examples of expected traits, he mentions strength and competition. Males are supposed to take what they want and avoid showing weaknesses. Then Jensen points out negative consequences of enforcing masculinity, such as men having trouble showing vulnerability and, worse, men committing rape. He counters the argument that there are differences in biology between men and women by pointing out that we do not know which or how much behavior comes from biology and how much comes from culture, but that both certainly matter and we should do what we can. He is also concerned about identifying positive attributes as features of masculinity, because doing so would imply that they only belong with men. Jensen ends by observing that we now face challenges that require us to change our current view of masculinity.
[2] States personal response to author’s argument.
Gives analysis of essay.
Connects the essay with personal experience.
Concludes by restating author’s argument; seeks to persuade readers; supports response to his own argument with examples.
2I agree with what Jensen says, and I find it a problem today that the definition of masculinity is so closely connected to competition and aggression. Even so, I find that my own definition of masculinity is not so different. I would say that to be masculine is to be strong and determined, to be always winning. Many people may share this view, even as they disagree with it, logically. That is why we need to make an effort to change our culture, just as Jensen argues. If we can either abolish our ideas about masculinity and femininity or simply change them so that they are more neutral and closely related terms, then we will be a lot closer to real equality between the genders. This change will not only help remove most of the negative impacts Jensen brought up, but will also help pave a better way for future generations, reducing their problems.
Work Cited
[3] Cites source.
Jensen, Robert. “The High Cost of Manliness.” The Bedford Guide for College Writers with Reader, Research Manual, and Handbook, edited by X. J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy, and Marcia F. Muth, 13th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2023, pp. 22–24.
Questions to Start You Thinking
Meaning
According to Eriksson, what is Jensen’s topic and Jensen’s position on this topic? Where in his essay does Eriksson present this information?
Identify the places in his essay where Eriksson summarizes parts of Jensen’s argument. How effective or ineffective are his summaries? What makes them so?
What is Eriksson’s personal response to the essay? Where does he present his views?
Writing Strategies
How does Eriksson consider his audience as he organizes and develops his summary and response?
What kinds of material from the essay does Eriksson use to develop his summary?
Richard Rodriguez
Public and Private Language
Richard Rodriguez has served as a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. He was a long-time editor for the Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to PBS’s NewsHour. Among his books, which often draw on autobiography to explore race in America, is his early and well-known memoir, Hunger of Memory. The following essay, from that memoir, recounts the origin of his complex views of bilingual education.
AS YOU READ: How did learning English change Rodriguez’s life and his relationship with his family?
1Supporters of bilingual education today imply that students like me miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language. What they seem not to recognize is that, as a socially disadvantaged child, I considered Spanish to be a private language. What I needed to learn in school was that I had the right — and the obligation — to speak the public language of los gringos.° The odd truth is that my first-grade classmates could have become bilingual, in the conventional sense of that word, more easily than I. Had they been taught (as upper-middle-class children are often taught early) a second language like Spanish or French, they could have regarded it simply as that: another public language. In my case such bilingualism could not have been so quickly achieved. What I did not believe was that I could speak a single public language.
2Without question, it would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in Spanish when I entered the classroom. I would have felt much less afraid. I would have trusted them and responded with ease. But I would have delayed — for how long postponed? — having to learn the language of public society. I would have evaded — and for how long could I have afforded to delay? — learning the great lesson of school, that I had a public identity.
3Fortunately, my teachers were unsentimental about their responsibility. What they understood was that I needed to speak a public language. So their voices would search me out, asking me questions. Each time I’d hear them, I’d look up in surprise to see a nun’s face frowning at me. I’d mumble, not really meaning to answer. The nun would persist, “Richard, stand up. Don’t look at the floor. Speak up. Speak to the entire class, not just to me!” but I couldn’t believe that the English language was mine to use. (In part, I did not want to believe it.) I continued to mumble. I resisted the teacher’s demands. (Did I somehow suspect that once I learned public language my pleasing family life would be changed?) Silent, waiting for the bell to sound, I remained dazed, diffident,° afraid.
4Because I wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically° a public language and Spanish an intrinsically private one, I easily noticed the difference between classroom language and the language of home. At school, words were directed to a general audience of listeners. (“Boys and girls.”) Words were meaningfully ordered. And the point was not self-expression alone but to make oneself understood by many others. The teacher quizzed: “Boys and girls, why do we use that word in this sentence? Could we think of a better word to use there? Would the sentence change its meaning if the words were differently arranged? And wasn’t there a better way of saying much the same thing?” (I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t try to say.)
5Three months. Five. Half a year passed. Unsmiling, ever watchful, my teachers noted my silence. They began to connect my behavior with the difficult progress my older sister and brother were making. Until one Saturday morning three nuns arrived at the house to talk to our parents. Stiffly, they sat on the blue living room sofa. From the doorway of another room, spying the visitors, I noted the incongruity° — the clash of two worlds, the faces and voices of school intruding upon the familiar setting of home. I overheard one voice gently wondering, “Do your children speak only Spanish at home, Mrs. Rodriguez?” While another voice added, “That Richard especially seems so timid and shy.”
6That Rich-heard!
7With great tact the visitors continued, “Is it possible for you and your husband to encourage your children to practice their English when they are home?” Of course, my parents complied. What would they not do for their children’s well-being? And how could they have questioned the Church’s authority which those women represented? In an instant, they agreed to give up the language (the sounds) that had revealed and accentuated our family’s closeness. The moment after the visitors left, the change was observed. “Ahora,° speak to us en inglés,”° my father and mother united to tell us.
8At first, it seemed a kind of game. After dinner each night, the family gathered to practice “our” English. (It was still then inglés, a language foreign to us, so we felt drawn as strangers to it.) Laughing, we would try to define words we could not pronounce. We played with strange English sounds, often overanglicizing our pronunciations. And we filled the smiling gaps of our sentences with familiar Spanish sounds. But that was cheating, somebody shouted. Everyone laughed. In school, meanwhile, like my brother and sister, I was required to attend a daily tutoring session. I needed a full year of special attention. I also needed my teachers to keep my attention from straying in class by calling out, Rich-heard — their English voices slowly prying loose my ties to my other name, its three notes, Ri-car-do. Most of all I needed to hear my mother and father speak to me in a moment of seriousness in broken — suddenly heartbreaking — English. The scene was inevitable: one Saturday morning I entered the kitchen where my parents were talking in Spanish. I did not realize that they were talking in Spanish however until, at the moment they saw me, I heard their voices change to speak English. Those gringo sounds they uttered startled me. Pushed me away. In that moment of trivial misunderstanding and profound insight, I felt my throat twisted by unsounded grief. I turned quickly and left the room. But I had no place to escape to with Spanish. (The spell was broken.) My brother and sisters were speaking English in another part of the house.
9Again and again in the days following, increasingly angry, I was obliged to hear my mother and father: “Speak to us en inglés.” (Speak.) Only then did I determine to learn classroom English. Weeks after, it happened: one day in school I had my hand raised to volunteer an answer. I spoke out in a loud voice. And I did not think it remarkable when the entire class understood. That day, I moved very far from the disadvantaged child I had been only days earlier. The belief, that calming assurance that I belonged in public, had at last taken hold.
10Shortly after, I stopped hearing the high and loud sounds of los gringos. A more and more confident speaker of English, I didn’t trouble to listen to how strangers sounded, speaking to me. And there simply were too many English-speaking people in my day for me to hear American accents anymore. Conversations quickened. Listening to persons whose voices sounded eccentrically pitched, I usually noted their sounds for an initial few seconds before I concentrated on what they were saying. Conversations became content-full. Transparent. Hearing someone’s tone of voice — angry or questioning or sarcastic or happy or sad — I didn’t distinguish it from the words it expressed. Sound and word were thus tightly wedded. At the end of a day, I was often bemused, always relieved, to realize how “silent,” though crowded with words, my day in public had been. (This public silence measured and quickened the change in my life.)
11At last, seven years old, I came to believe what had been technically true since my birth: I was an American citizen.
12But the special feeling of closeness at home was diminished by then. Gone was the desperate, urgent, intense feeling of being at home; rare was the experience of feeling myself individualized by family intimates. We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed. No longer so close; no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness. Neither my older brother nor sister rushed home after school anymore. Nor did I. When I arrived home there would often be neighborhood kids in the house. Or the house would be empty of sounds.
13Following the dramatic Americanization of their children, even my parents grew more publicly confident. Especially my mother. She learned the names of all the people on our block. And she decided we needed to have a telephone installed in the house. My father continued to use the word gringo. But it was no longer charged with the old bitterness or distrust. (Stripped of any emotional content, the word simply became a name for those Americans not of Hispanic descent.) Hearing him, sometimes, I wasn’t sure if he was pronouncing the Spanish word gringo or saying gringo in English.
14Matching the silence I started hearing in public was a new quiet at home. The family’s quiet was partly due to the fact that, as we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents. Sentences needed to be spoken slowly when a child addressed his mother or father. (Often the parent wouldn’t understand.) The child would need to repeat himself. (Still the parent misunderstood.) The young voice, frustrated, would end up saying, “Never mind” — the subject was closed. Dinners would be noisy with the clinking of knives and forks against dishes. My mother would smile softly between her remarks; my father at the other end of the table would chew and chew at his food, while he stared over the heads of his children.
15My mother! My father! After English became my primary language, I no longer knew what words to use in addressing my parents. The old Spanish words (those tender accents of sound) I had used earlier — mamá and papá — I couldn’t use anymore. They would have been all-too-painful reminders of how much had changed in my life. On the other hand, the words I heard neighborhood kids call their parents seemed equally unsatisfactory. Mother and Father; Ma, Papa, Pa, Dad, Pop (how I hated the all-American sound of that last word especially) — all these terms I felt were unsuitable, not really terms of address for my parents. As a result, I never used them at home. Whenever I’d speak to my parents, I would try to get their attention with eye contact alone. In public conversations, I’d refer to “my parents” or “my mother and father.”
16My mother and father, for their part, responded differently, as their children spoke to them less and less. My mother grew restless, seemed troubled and anxious at the scarcity of words exchanged in the house. It was she who would question me about my day when I came home from school. She smiled at the small talk. She pried at the edges of my sentences to get me to say something more. (What?) She’d join conversations she overheard, but her intrusions often stopped her children’s talking. By contrast, my father seemed reconciled to the new quiet. Though his English improved somewhat, he retired into silence. At dinner he spoke very little. One night his children and even his wife helplessly giggled at his garbled English pronunciation of the Catholic Grace before Meals. Thereafter he made his wife recite the prayer at the start of each meal, even on formal occasions, when there were guests in the house. Hers became the public voice of the family. On official business, it was she, not my father, one would usually hear on the phone or in stores, talking to strangers. His children grew so accustomed to his silence that, years later, they would speak routinely of his shyness. (My mother would often try to explain: both his parents died when he was eight. He was raised by an uncle who treated him like little more than a menial servant. He was never encouraged to speak. He grew up alone. A man of few words.) But my father was not shy, I realized, when I’d watch him speaking Spanish with relatives. Using Spanish, he was quickly effusive.° Especially when talking with other men, his voice would spark, flicker, flare alive with sounds. In Spanish, he expressed ideas and feelings he rarely revealed in English. With firm Spanish sounds, he conveyed confidence and authority English would never allow him.
17The silence at home, however, was finally more than a literal silence. Fewer words passed between parent and child, but more profound was the silence that resulted from my inattention to sounds. At about the time I no longer bothered to listen with care to the sounds of English in public, I grew careless about listening to the sounds family members made when they spoke. Most of the time I heard someone speaking at home and didn’t distinguish his sounds from the words people uttered in public. I didn’t even pay much attention to my parents’ accented and ungrammatical speech. At least not at home. Only when I was with them in public would I grow alert to their accents. Though, even then, their sounds caused me less and less concern. For I was increasingly confident of my own public identity.
18Today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose a degree of “individuality” by becoming assimilated into public society. (Bilingual schooling was popularized in the seventies, that decade when middle-class ethnics began to resist the process of assimilation — the American melting pot.) But the bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation. They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality.
°los gringos: Spanish for “foreigners,” often used as a derogatory term for English-speaking Americans.
°diffident: Shy.
°intrinsically: Essentially; inherently.
°incongruity: Lack of harmony or appropriateness.
°Ahora: Spanish for “now.”
°en inglés: Spanish for “in English.”
°effusive: Talkative; unreserved.
Questions to Start You Thinking
Considering Meaning: What created the new “silence” in the Rodriguez household? Explain why.
Identifying Writing Strategies: How does Rodriguez use comparison and contrast to convey his experience learning English?
Reading Critically: How does Rodriguez use dialogue to make the experience he recalls more vivid for his readers? Is this strategy effective in helping him achieve his purpose? Why, or why not?
Expanding Vocabulary: Rodriguez uses the terms private and public. What do these words mean when used as adjectives to describe “language” and “identity”?
Making Connections with the Paired Essay: Both Rodriguez and Amy Tan (“Mother Tongue”) grew up in homes in which English was spoken as a second language. Compare and contrast how each writer’s mastery of English affected his or her parents.
Suggestions for Writing
If you speak a second language, write an essay recalling your experience learning it. What were some of your struggles? Can you relate to Rodriguez’s experience? How do you use that language today? If you do not know a second language, write an essay in which you analyze possible benefits of learning one. What language would you like to learn? Why?
According to Rodriguez, “Supporters of bilingual education today imply that students like me miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language” (paragraph 1). Rodriguez counters this assumption by showing how his immersion in English allowed him to develop a public identity that ultimately led to his success. At the same time, however, his English-only immersion hurt his family life. Write an essay in which you take a stand on the complex topic of bilingual education, using further reading and research to support your position about how it does or does not benefit students.
Amy Tan
Mother Tongue
Novelist Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, to parents who had recently immigrated to the United States from China. Her first short story became the basis for her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, which was a phenomenal bestseller and was made into a movie. The following essay, “Mother Tongue” first appeared in Threepenny Review. In it, Tan explores the effect of her mother’s “broken” English — the language Tan grew up with — on her life and writing.
AS YOU READ: Identify the difficulties Tan says exist for a child growing up in a family that speaks nonstandard English.
1I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.
2I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language — the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all — all the Englishes I grew up with.
3Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus” — a speech filled with carefully wrought° grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized° forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of Standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
4Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, and the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.” My husband was with us as well, and he didn’t notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It’s because over the twenty years we’ve been together I’ve often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.
5So you’ll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I’ll quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed.° During this conversation, my mother was talking about a political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family’s, Du, and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother’s family, and one day showed up at my mother’s wedding to pay his respects. Here’s what she said in part:
6“Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is like Du Zong — but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn’t look down on him, but didn’t take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don’t stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won’t have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn’t see, I heard it. I gone to boy’s side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen.”
7You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies° how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease — all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand fifty percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand eighty to ninety percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother’s English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.
8Lately, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” or “fractured” English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited English speaker.
9I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.
10My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, “This is Mrs. Tan.”
11And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why he don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.”
12And then I said in perfect English, “Yes, I’m getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.”
13Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, “I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in New York next week.” And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.
14We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn’t budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English — lo and behold — we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.
15I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person’s developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular,° plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B’s, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
16This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, “Even though Tom was , Mary thought he was .” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming,” with the grammatical structure “even though” limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic° opposites, so you wouldn’t get answers like, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.” Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that.
17The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship — for example, “Sunset is to nightfall as is to .” And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, “sunset is to nightfall” — and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words — red, bus, stoplight, boring — just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as saying: “A sunset precedes nightfall” is the same as “a chill precedes a fever.” The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.
18I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs. Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys — in fact, just last week — that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as “broken” or “limited.” And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.
19Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.
20But it wasn’t until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here’s an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: “That was my mental quandary in its nascent° state.” A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.
21Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind — and in fact she did read my early drafts — I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech, and the nature of her thoughts.
22Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: “So easy to read.”
°wrought: crafted.
°nominalized: Made into a noun from a verb.
°transcribed: Made a written copy of what was said.
°belies: Contradicts; creates a misleading impression.
°insular: Detached or isolated; keeping to oneself.
°semantic: Relating to the meaning of language.
°nascent: Beginning; only partly formed.
Questions to Start You Thinking
Considering Meaning: What are the Englishes that Tan grew up with? What other Englishes has she used in her life? What does each English have that gives it an advantage over the other Englishes in certain situations?
Identifying Writing Strategies: What examples does Tan use to analyze the various Englishes she uses? How has Tan been able to synthesize her Englishes successfully into her present style of writing fiction?
Reading Critically: Although Tan explains that she writes using “all the Englishes” she has known throughout her life (paragraph 21), she doesn’t do that in this essay. What are the differences between the English Tan uses in this essay and the kinds she says she uses in her fiction? How does the language she uses here fit the purpose of her essay?
Expanding Vocabulary: In paragraph 9, Tan writes that she had “plenty of empirical evidence” that her mother’s “limited” English meant that her mother’s thoughts were “imperfect” as well. Define empirical. What does Tan’s use of this word tell us about her present attitude toward the way she judged her mother when she was growing up?
Making Connections with the Paired Essay: Tan and Richard Rodriguez (“Public and Private Language”) recount learning English as they grew up in homes where English was a second language. In what way did they face similar experiences and obstacles? How did learning English affect their self-image and influence their relationship with their family?
Suggestions for Writing
In a personal essay explain an important event in your family’s history, using your family’s various Englishes or other languages.
Take note of and, if possible, transcribe a conversation you have had with a parent or other family member, with a teacher, and with a close friend. Write an essay comparing and contrasting the “languages” of the three conversations. How do the languages differ? How do you account for these differences? What might happen if someone used “teacher language” to talk to a friend or “friend language” in a class discussion or paper?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Happy Feminist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is an award-winning novelist and short story writer and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her works include the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah, as well as a short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck. Adichie’s latest book, Dear Ijeawele, or, a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, is a bestseller that argues for gender equality. The following reading is excerpted from her book-length essay, We Should All Be Feminists (2014), which was adapted from a TEDx talk that she gave in London (2012). Adichie resides in Nigeria and in the United States.
AS YOU READ: Ask yourself, do you consider yourself to be a feminist? Why, or why not?
1In 2003, I wrote a novel called Purple Hibiscus, about a man who, among other things, beats his wife, and whose story doesn’t end too well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. (Nigerians, as you might know, are very quick to give unsolicited° advice.) He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist,° and his advice to me — he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke — was that I should never call myself a feminist, since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.
2So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
3Then an academic,° a Nigerian woman, told me that feminism was not our culture, that feminism was un-African and I was only calling myself a feminist because I had been influenced by western books. (Which amused me, because much of my early reading was decidedly unfeminist: I must have read every single Mills & Boon° romance published before I was 16. And each time I try to read those books called “classic feminist texts,” I get bored, and I struggle to finish them.)
4Anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided I would now call myself a Happy African Feminist. Then a dear friend told me that calling myself a feminist meant that I hated men. So I decided I would now be a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men.
5Gender° matters everywhere in the world. But it is time we should begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves.
6Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo° is always uncomfortable.
7Some people ask, “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general — but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress° one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem should acknowledge that.
8Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished° if they are not “naturally” in charge as men.
9Other men might respond by saying, “Okay, this is interesting, but I don’t think like that. I don’t even think about gender.”
10Maybe not.
11And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender. That many men say that things might have been bad in the past but everything is fine now. And that many men do nothing to change it. If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant and the waiter greets just you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, “Why have you not greeted her?” Men need to speak out in all of these ostensibly° small situations.
12Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology° and apes, how female apes bow to male apes — that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not. Some people will say, “Well, poor men also have a hard time.” And they do.
13But that is not what this conversation is about. Gender and class are different. Poor men still have the privileges of being men, even if they do not have the privileges of being wealthy. I learned a lot about systems of oppression° and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, “Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?” This type of question is a way of silencing a person’s specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, “Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?”)
14So, no, this conversation is about gender. Some people will say, “Oh, but women have the real power: bottom power.” (This is a Nigerian expression for a woman who uses her sexuality to get things from men.) But bottom power is not power at all, because the woman with bottom power is actually not powerful; she just has a good route to tap another person’s power. And then what happens if the man is in a bad mood or sick or temporarily impotent°?
15Some people will say a woman is subordinate to men because it’s our culture. But culture is constantly changing. I have beautiful twin nieces who are 15. If they had been born a hundred years ago, they would have been taken away and killed. Because a hundred years ago, Igbo° culture considered the birth of twins to be an evil omen.° Today that practice is unimaginable to all Igbo people.
16What is the point of culture? Culture functions ultimately to ensure the preservation and continuity of a people. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in ancestral lands, in our tradition. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, because Igbo culture privileges men, and only the male members of the extended family can attend the meetings where major family decisions are taken. So although I am the one who is most interested in these things, I cannot attend the meeting. I cannot have a formal say. Because I am female.
17Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.
18My great-grandmother, from stories I’ve heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and married the man of her choice. She refused, protested, spoke up whenever she felt she was being deprived of land and access because she was female. She did not know that word feminist. But it doesn’t mean she wasn’t one. More of us should reclaim that word. My own definition of a feminist is a man or a woman who says, “Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.”
19All of us, women and men, must do better.
°unsolicited: Not asked for.
°feminist: A person who advocates for the rights of women and girls and for equality with men and boys.
°academic: A teacher or scholar who works at a college or university.
°Mills & Boon: A publisher of popular, mass-market romances.
°gender: The cultural, behavioral, and psychological traits typically associated with one’s sex.
°status quo: Latin, meaning the current state of things.
°oppress: To mistreat, to unjustly exercise authority to keep someone subservient.
°diminished: Made less of; belittled.
°ostensibly: Seemingly, supposedly.
°evolutionary biology: The scientific discipline that studies how diverse life forms on Earth, including human beings, developed over time from common ancestors.
°oppression: Tyranny; the suffering caused by the abuse of power.
°impotent: Powerless; for males, unable to maintain a state of sexual arousal.
°Igbo: An ethnic group native to south-central and southeastern Nigeria.
°omen: Something believed to signal a future event.
Questions to Start You Thinking
Considering Meaning: For Adichie, why is it important to stand up for herself as a woman, and not, as others have suggested, simply “as a human being” (paragraph 13)?
Identifying Writing Strategies: What “unsolicited advice” (paragraph 1) and specific anecdotes does Adichie share, and how do they relate to her overall argument?
Reading Critically: How does culture function, and what needs to happen to culture, according to Adichie (paragraphs 16 and 17)?
Expanding Vocabulary: When Adichie writes that “more of us should reclaim” the word feminist (paragraph 18), what does she mean?
Making Connections: Based on what you’ve learned of Adichie’s views through this essay, how would she likely respond to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (pp. 223–24) and the way that it portrays genders roles? Consider reading Autumn Oliver’s response to “Girl” (pp. 226–28) for additional insight.
Suggestions for Writing
In paragraph 14, Adichie writes that some people claim that, “women have the real power: bottom power,” referring to women who use their sexuality to get things from men. She responds that such women are not actually powerful, that they “just ha[ve] a good route to tap another person’s power.” What does she mean? What are some other scenarios in which someone appears to have power, but really does not? What is the cultural impact of that situation?
Adichie writes that “some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism” (paragraph 8). What is the reason for this, according to the author? Are there other reasons besides those named by Adichie? Write an essay in which you make an argument about why the term feminist is threatening to men and to some women. Draw on additional sources, including other readings in this book, if needed.
Jason Johnson
How Stan Lee, Creator of Black Panther, Taught a Generation of Black Nerds about Race, Art, and Activism
Jason Johnson is a professor at the School of Global Journalism and Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore. He’s an MSNBC political contributor and the politics editor at TheRoot.com, where this article was published in 2018. In addition to being a political analyst and public speaker, Johnson is the author of Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell.
AS YOU READ: What can comic books teach us about the world we live in? What in particular did Stan Lee do for comic books and the people who read them?
1When I was a kid, I didn’t live close enough to a comic book shop to get there on my bike. My parents would have to take me to Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax, Va., and I’d get my comics off the old spinner racks at Waldenbooks. As the years went on and specialty comic shops opened, my friends and I had a comic book ritual° of sorts.
2Matt, Jeff and I would borrow one of our parents’ cars, drive out to our favorite comic shop, then go to Jeff’s room and read comics until we had to go home. Stacks of X-Men, Captain America and Spider-Man comics would be spread out all over the floor.
3This is how I spent my ’90s childhood.
4And while at the time the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was still up for debate, Al Sharpton was considered controversial° and Public Enemy wasn’t played on “mainstream” radio — in a strange way all of that comic reading gave me a racial and political education that my lily-white suburban Virginia life never did. And it’s all thanks to Stan Lee, the creative and driving force behind Marvel comics for half a century, who passed away [in 2018] at the tender age of 95. He gave a black kid a place to play in the cosmos° and beyond, and the world is a little less bright after his passing.
5After his death we heard how Stan Lee is credited with creating Daredevil, Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Dr. Strange, the Wasp, the Hulk the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and, of course, Black Panther. What we didn’t hear as much is how he was screaming from the rafters about racism and discrimination while providing a curriculum for black kids like myself when public schools and all other forms of pop culture summarily shut us out.
6Stan Lee didn’t just develop the modern superhero, he brought activist° heroes and storylines to the mainstream when most other white publishers let alone newspapers were still playing footsie with Nazis, terrorists and bigots.°
7It is hard to overstate how important Lee is to black kids growing up in the 1980s and ’90s back when comic books were considered a “white” thing. I have literally teared up a few times while writing and thinking about how much joy he brought to youngsters like me, and how much his passion and excitement for comic books helped validate° this hobby and the culture that goes with the genre. More than any other golden age comic creator Lee’s characters put blackness and the black experience at the forefront.
8When Lee created the X-Men in 1963, the battle between Magneto and Professor X was meant to be a rough allegory° for the integrationist vs. nationalist philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Yes, the idea of black oppression and philosophy being played out by mostly protestant white guys like Cyclops and Ice-Man is problematic in hindsight (Magneto is Jewish), but it was a radical idea at the time. It also laid the groundwork for a comic that always spoke to racial injustice, even to kids like me who loved comics but seldom saw themselves in the stories and shows of the genre.
9By the ’90s, the ideas Stan Lee established had evolved, and I was spending my Saturday afternoons reading about Genosha, the apartheid state that forced mutants into labor for regular (read: white) humans. When my class wasn’t talking about apartheid, I was learning it from Stan Lee’s creations. Lee’s creations seamlessly integrated “blackness” into comics in a way that was revolutionary and organic all at the same time.
10Peter Parker was a poor, white kid who was mentored by his black editor at the Daily Bugle newspaper, Robbie Robertson. Captain America’s best friend was the Falcon (played by Anthony Mackie in the movies) who wore technologically advanced wings built by Black Panther (in the comics). Black Panther was the king of a super technologically advanced, never-conquered, African nation called Wakanda that introduced me to afro-futurism° before I even knew what afro-futurism was. Stan Lee created all of those black characters, from kings to sidekicks; from father figures to managers.
11It wasn’t until later in life, when I started studying and teaching about comics instead of just reading them, that I learned that none of this was a fluke.° Stan Lee was an activist artist, a Jewish guy born to Romanian immigrant parents in New York who hated bigotry. He was explicit about it in his Stan’s Soapbox editorials that ran across all Marvel Comics. He called bigots “Low IQ Yo-Yos,” he said that anybody who generalized about blacks, women, Italians or whoever hadn’t truly evolved as a person.
12He was doing this in comic pages when mainstream newspaper editorials were still deciding if black folks should be able to live where they wanted. When Marvel Comics were afraid that the Black Panther character would be associated with the Black Panther political movement, Stan Lee pushed for T’Challa to keep his name (at one point they wanted to call him Coal Tiger). All of this at a time when even having a black person in a comic was still considered controversial. As recently as October 2017, Lee posted a spontaneous° video on the Marvel’s YouTube page stating the foundation of Marvel Comics was to fight for equality and battle against bigotry and injustice.
13I don’t know if it was Charlottesville,° Va., or Donald Trump that inspired the video but the fact remains that Stan Lee was steadfast in his belief that superheroes should look and sound like the world around us; that they needed to reflect the best in people while tackling the worst of human instincts.
14I’m not a kid anymore, I’m not waking up to hear Stan Lee’s voice narrate Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends on Saturday mornings. I can drive myself to the movies where I see Stan Lee cameos in Marvel and DC films. I don’t look up at the ceilings in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station and imagine what it would it would be like to climb on the walls like Spider-Man (well, actually I still do but not as often).
15Yet, every week I teach a class at Morgan State University about comic book politics and history, I still go to the comic shop every Wednesday, I have interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates twice about the Black Panther comic book, I wrote about how the Falcon made the Captain America movies the blackest Marvel film ever. I’ve waxed poetic about how the X-Men are the single most progressive pop culture icons in Gen-X culture.
16All of this is thanks to Stan Lee, who showed this kid that a love of art and politics didn’t have to exist in separate universes; that blackness was as heroic as anything else; and that when you have power — even just the power to draw a few characters on a page — you have a responsibility to make those characters count for something.
17Lee would end most of his personal appearances and cameos with “Excelsior” — the Latin phrase that translates roughly as “higher.”
18Thanks for all your help, Stan Lee. I hope you’re out there somewhere exploring the cosmos, swinging from the ceilings, knowing that you made the world a better place.
19Excelsior, indeed.
°ritual: A ceremony or practice often related to religious customs.
°controversial: Subject to controversy, or the expression of opposing viewpoints.
°cosmos: The entire universe as an orderly harmonious system.
°activist: Advocate of a cause.
°bigot: A person who is intolerant of others.
°validate: To make valid; to confirm or give approval to.
°allegory: A symbolic narrative.
°afro-futurism: An idea that blends aspects of the African diaspora culture with technology.
°fluke: An accident.
°spontaneous: Arising without effort or premeditation.
°Charlottesville, VA: The site of a white supremacist rally in 2017, where a neo-Nazi sympathizer deliberately drove his car into the crowd, killing one person and injuring 40 others.
Questions to Start You Thinking
Considering Meaning: What does Jason Johnson say he learned from Stan Lee? How did Lee teach him those lessons?
Identifying Writing Strategies: In his essay, Johnson paints a picture of his childhood and of a time period (the 1990s). Is it important that this article look backward in time? What would be missing without it?
Reading Critically: Who is Johnson’s intended audience? Why do you think so? What is the purpose of writing this article? How, specifically, does Johnson reveal his audience and purpose?
Expanding Vocabulary: In paragraph 9, Johnson mentions the apartheid state. Where else might you have heard this term? Where does the word come from and what does it mean?
Making Connections with the Paired Essay: In paragraph 16, Johnson says Stan Lee taught him that “when you have power — even just the power to draw a few characters on a page — you have a responsibility to make those characters count for something.” How does that responsibility compare with the thought behind Nasim Mansuri’s “How This Year’s Movies Are Ending Cynicism in Film” (pp. 390–92)? Is conveying hope a responsibility or an artistic choice?
Suggestions for Writing
Think about people you admire from your childhood, whether they are alive or dead. Choose one and write a short homage that points out the way they affected you, what they taught you, and why you admire them.
Johnson indicates that Lee believed his characters should “reflect the best in people while tackling the worst of human instincts” (paragraph 13). Read a Marvel comic or watch a Marvel movie and write short report on how Lee’s characters embody this bel
Yesenia Padilla
What Does “Latinx” Mean? A Look at the Term That’s Challenging Gender Norms
Yesenia Padilla is an essayist, poet, founding editor of Lumen Magazine, and community organizer based in Southern California. She identifies Xicanx. The following essay first appeared on Complex, a website focusing on the convergence of American subcultures.
AS YOU READ: What is the purpose behind the creation of the term “Latinx”? What do people think of the term? How does it work in practice?
1If you’ve been online at all in the past year, you’ve probably seen the word “Latinx” and thought: What does it mean?
2Latinx (pronounced “La-TEEN-ex”) is a gender-inclusive way of referring to people of Latin American descent.° Used by activists and some academics, the term is gaining traction° among the general public, after having been featured in publications such as NPR to Latina. But where did Latinx originate,° and is everybody on board with using it?
Ungendering the Spanish Language
3Spanish is a gendered language, which means that every noun has a gender (in general, nouns that end in “a” tend to be feminine, and nouns that end in “o” tend to be masculine). While some nouns keep their gender when they become plural, others change based on the gender composition of a given group of people.
4This approach, however, always defers° to the masculine as the dominant gender. For example, if you had a room full of girlfriends, it’d be full of amigas, with the “a” denoting everyone’s gender as female. But the entire group’s gender changes as soon as one guy enters the room, making it full of amigos; the “o” denotes the presence of at least one man — no matter how many women are in the room. Some members of Latin American communities claim this gendered language reinforces patriarchal° and heterosexist° norms, so “Latin@” was later introduced as a way to push back against it.
5Using “@” as a suffix° became a way to represent male and female genders. Instead of amigas or amigos, it was amig@s. But the term, which was adopted by left-leaning activists and even used in academic texts, didn’t include genderqueer° and gender-nonconforming° people. Consequently, Latin@ began to hit its limit, as those who didn’t conform to the male-female gender binary° gained more visibility.
The Rise of Latinx
6According to Google Trends data, Latinx began emerging as early as 2004, but really started popping up in online searches sometime in late 2014. During this period, the term had mostly been used in left-leaning and queer communities as a way to promote inclusivity in language. But thanks to social media users on sites like Tumblr and Twitter, Latinx gained a foothold by mid-2015, and its use began spreading beyond LGBTQIA° communities.
7“Once the term ‘Latinx’ was made more visible, it certainly aligned with what I had been learning about gender non-conformity,” said Filiberto Nolasco Gomez, founder of Latin American culture blog El Huateque. “It seemed like the right direction for my website to embrace ‘Latinx’ as a political statement and a dismantling° of binaries.”
8By dismantling some of the gendering within Spanish, Latinx helped modernize the idea of a pan-Latin American experience — or Latinidad — one that reflects what it means to be of Latin American descent in today’s world. The term also better reflects Latin America's diversity, which is more in line with intersectionality, the study of the ways that different forms of oppression (e.g., sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism) intersect.
9“The use of the ‘x’ is really important to me,” according to Chicanx performance artist Artemisa Clark. “The ‘x’ shows a development of broader Latinx movements, one more actively concerned with issues of gender and queerness.”
Resistance in Progress
10In their takedown of an article that says “Latinx” denotes “a lack of respect for the sovereignty° of Spanish,” professors María R. Scharrón-del Río and Alan A. Aja defend the term, arguing that it should replace “Latino” when referring to people of Latin American descent.
11They say moving towards non-gendered language is a way to escape the ghost of colonialism° that still haunts Latin American culture. “Latinx” actually represents the people the term is supposed to represent, so it’s “a concerted attempt at inclusivity” that “fosters solidarity° with all of our Latinx community,” Scharrón-del Río and Aja write.
12Still, even with the gender inclusivity of a term like “Latinx,” there are still issues that arise when grouping a very diverse population — like that of Latin America — under one umbrella term.
13“I think there has been a lot of communication and travel between communities and countries within the Americas for centuries, and Latinx kind of gives that some coherence,” said Ken Eby-Gomez, a San Francisco-based activist and graduate student. “But … it would be a mistake to essentialize° any meaning or characteristics of Latinx.”
14In other words, creating a single Latin American identity can be problematic because it may lead to the erasure of marginalized identities (e.g., indigenous° people), while highlighting lighter-skinned mestizos (i.e., people of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry).
Life after Latinx
15Writer Monse Arce argues that the identifier “Latino” erases indigenous history and culture from Latin America. Indeed, using a term like “Latino/@/x” emphasizes the privileges of mestizos, reinforcing colorism amongst Latin American people. “Latino/@/x” also implies a uniformity of experience, when in reality, people of Latin American descent have wildly different lives and narratives, she adds.
16“The root of [Latinx] bothers me in that it’s colonial, and my heart rages against [it],” said Eusebio Ricardo Lopez-Aguilar, a Salvadoran activist and census worker based in Winnipeg, Canada. “I haven’t used it to describe myself, but I also haven’t found a word that works.”
17Many young people of Latin American descent are exploring their complex indigenous roots, and forging new, more personal identities. While some resist using “Latinx,” others recognize it as the most inclusive option available, for now. “I guess first-level identification is ‘Chicanx’ [a political and cultural identifier for Mexican-Americans] and second-level is ‘Latinx’,” said performance artist Clark.
18“Latinx” is not the perfect identifying term, so it shouldn’t be treated as the answer in the ongoing quest° to develop a cohesive° postcolonial° identity. Given Latin America’s turbulent° history and the continued diaspora° of its people, the process of figuring out one’s identity is both deeply personal and political. Still, using “Latinx” is a positive step towards recognizing all of nuestro gente — our people — and will hopefully challenge every Latin American to think about what it truly means to be part of this complex culture.
°descent: Ancestry.
°gaining traction: Increasing in popularity or acceptance.
°originate: Begin, arise.
°defers: Yields to, gives way to.
°patriarchal: Relating to patriarchy, a social structure in which men dominate women.
°heterosexist: Displaying prejudice by heterosexuals against those who are not heterosexual.
°suffix: A part of a word that is attached at the end.
°genderqueer: Relating to a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as male or female.
°gender-nonconforming: The degree to which a person’s appearance, behavior, and self-concept do not fit into conventional norms of masculinity or femininity.
°binary: Something having two parts.
°LGBTQIA: Acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual or allied.
°dismantling: Taking apart; disconnecting the pieces of something.
°sovereignty: Supreme power; autonomy.
°colonialism: The practice by which one country takes control of and occupies a less powerful country; colonizers take the resources of the colonized to increase their power and wealth.
°solidarity: Unity based on common interests.
°essentialize: Characterize in terms of stereotypes.
°indigenous: Native; originating in a particular place.
°quest: A long search for something.
°cohesive: Tightly unified.
°postcolonial: Occurring after colonial rule.
°turbulent: Rough, stormy.
°diaspora: A large group of people living away from their original homeland.
Questions to Start You Thinking
Considering Meaning: Why has the word “Latinx” been created? In Padilla’s view, how useful is it?
Identifying Writing Strategies: In her discussion of the term “Latinx,” Padilla brings in the perspectives of many people. Which perspectives are most interesting to you, and why? How effective is this strategy in supporting her overall argument about the word?
Reading Critically: Padilla writes that the term Latinx “shouldn't be treated as the answer in the ongoing quest to develop a cohesive postcolonial identity” (paragraph 18). What does she mean by that? How does the concept of colonialism figure into the argument she makes about language?
Expanding Vocabulary: What is “gendered language” (paragraphs 3–4), and why do people consider it to be a problem? What are some ways to “ungender” words?
Making Connections: Re-read Padilla’s essay in the context of Richard Rodriguez’s discussion of public and private language (pp. 367–72). How does the term “Latinx” function as public and/or private language?
Suggestions for Writing
How do words function as political statements? How do words reflect who does and does not have power? Write an essay in which you explore this question, drawing on the Padilla essay for examples.
Padilla writes that Latinx “represents the people the term is supposed to represent,” and quotes two professors who say that Latinx is “‘a concerted attempt at inclusivity’ that ‘fosters solidarity with all of our Latinx community’” (paragraph 11). Is it important for language to be inclusive? Why, or why not? Support your argument with examples from Padilla, other texts, and/or everyday life in America.
