Ali

**Race in America**


"I am **invisible**, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." -//Invisible Man,// an Ralph Ellison media type="youtube" key="PbUtL_0vAJk&hl=en" height="355" width="425"

 

"I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it." -Margaret Atwood   **__ [|Click here to learn about the Harlem Renaissance] __**               

[[image:harlem_hayden_nousquatre_lg.jpg width="395" height="477" align="left" caption="Nous Quarte a Paris (We Four in Paris), Palmer Hayden"]]
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind, And did He stoop to quibble could tell why The little buried mole continues blind, Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,     Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus To struggle up a never-ending stair. Inscrutable His ways are, and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels His awful hand. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing! -Countee Cullen
 * Yet I do Marvel**

"An American, a Negro . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." //W.E.B. Du Bois//

"Of all the races and varieties of men which have suffered from this feeling, the colored people of this country have endured most. They are negroes -- and that is enough, in the eye of this unreasoning prejudice, to justify indignity and violence."

//The Color Line,// Fredrick Douglass


 * Click the picture to learn more about Julia Alvarez ** [[image:0452268060.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpeg align="right" link="http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/chh/bio/alvarez_j.htm"]] 


 * "I saw what a cold, lonely life awaited me in this country. I would never find someone who would understand my peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic American styles," (p. 99). **

Reflection American idea of beauty