Alivia Shattuck
April 5, 2019
ENG 123
In this paper, I am going to examine different people’s view on race in order to understand though people use to think and talk about race relate to reality. Black millennials interviewed by Korey Green in the Blackness Project talk about their view on race and how it affects them.
In Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, he describes covering as “to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.” (Covering, Preface) People use covering as a way to hide who they really are and what they have gone through. To go along with covering, Hochschild’s article I Spent 5 Years with Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans, she uses a similar concept of covering and calls it a deep story. She describes a deep story as “is a feel-as-if story—it’s the story feelings tell”. When Green interviewed the black millennials, he got the inside of their deep stories. In the interview, Merkel states “Some might start addressing me as black, negro or African American. Let’s just say I have a nationality. So, the first thing is, you denationalized, dehumanized for being black or African American.” He told his deep story to Green about how he felt growing up and things people would say to him. Everyone has a deep story. It might be something they were hiding, or it might be how they were treated and how it affected them mentally.
The interviewees from the Blackness Project explain what they have gone through while being black. There are many challenged that white people and black people have to face. One of these challenges is their privileges. As we know from recent social media, black people tend to get targeted by the police. Maxwell states “police brutally it doesn’t just happen in New York it happens all over the world as you can see once it went to social media and people had cameras and stuff, we were able to see it and not just hear about it”. Those who are black feel as if they apt more in getting in trouble by the police. When it comes to school, black people feel as if they just get stuck in their race and not who they really are.
The blackness project was created because of the Whiteness project. The Whiteness Project was white millennials from Dallas, Texas that talked about how they are faced with racial challenges. Those in the blackness project did not understand how they are faced with these challenges when they were white but people who are black get mentally and physically tortured every day because of their skin color. As I view both projects, I felt sympathy for both. However, I agree more with the blackness project. That is because as we know from history people who were black has been mistreated since they came to this country.
