Hello, I am looking for someone to write an essay on James Johnsons The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. It needs to be at least 750 words.Download file to see previous pages... Being the child of

Hello, I am looking for someone to write an essay on James Johnsons The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. It needs to be at least 750 words.

Being the child of a light skinned African American mother and a white father, the protagonist had been thinking of himself as "white" .The early experience for him of alienation is when the school principal asks "All the white scholars "to stand up. When the protagonist also stands up, he is told by her to sit down, which gives the boy a rude shock. He had obviously believed himself to be white all along, and now, suddenly, he is identified as colored. Some of the white boys jeer him saying "You are a nigger too!"(Johnson p 8) The author describes the anguish felt by the boy when he finds out that he does not belong to the powerful white race. The boy looks at his mother with new eyes, examining her for signs of African characteristics. Johnson goes on to say, "I have never forgiven the woman who did it so cruelly. It may be that she never knew that she gave me a sword thrust that day in school, which was years in healing"(Johnson p10 ) The narrator gets over this trauma caused by the society he lived in by reading and music.

Johnson examines the relationship between the desperate blacks and the white majority of his time .In chapter five of the book, the author makes an observation about the behavior of most of the whites. ." The fact that the whites of the South despise and ill-treat the desperate class of blacks is not only explainable according to the ancient laws of human nature, but it is not nearly so serious or important as the fact that as the progressive colored people advance they constantly widen the gulf between themselves and their white neighbors" Johnson attributes this to the feeling of the whites that the well-to-do blacks are "putting on airs" to spite the whites.

Even among the Blacks themselves, the individual found it difficult to stand up against the society .According to Johnson's protagonist, the Blacks can be considered to consist of three groups. The first group, the desperate one, "cherish a sullen hatred for all white men, and they value life as cheap." (Johnson p24) Johnson's protagonist himself belongs to the privileged group of educated blacks .He learns that "the position of the advanced element of the colored race is often very trying. They are the ones among the blacks who carry the entire weight of the race question." The narrator finds that it is impossible for anyone outside the social circle to get in. Giving an example, he says," I know of one case personally in which money to the extent of thirty or forty thousand dollars and a fine house, not backed up by a good reputation, after several years of repeated effort, failed to gain entry for the possessor." (Johnson)

The Ex-Colored man accompanies his rich white patron to Europe, .where he plays ragtime music .Although his patron is a good man without any racial prejudices, the protagonist still wants to go back to his own people, which provokes his patron to try to persuade him not to go back. "This idea you have of making a Negro out of yourself is nothing more than a sentiment.