Novels Depicting Marginalization of Racial Groups — Emily Wynne

Hi everyone, this (my fifth) blog post is a paper I wrote researching the function of the novel as a means for discussing race. While it doesn't deal with Morrison specifically, in future drafts I plan to include Beloved and possibly The Bluest Eye. It's a little too long to post here, so I'll link the Google doc after giving the first paragraph.

"Racial inequality has existed since the beginning of time, and continues to be an issue in American society today. An immersion experiment conducted by journalist John Howard Griffin showed this to be true, and many works of literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries —Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Invisible Man, to name a few—agree. Novels enable authors to discuss issues such as race in a format which is easily accessible and appealing  to a wide variety of readers. 

This promotes awareness of inequality, and awareness is the first step in quelling racism. Black Like Me, by Griffin, and The Intuitionist, by Colton Whitehead, are presented through documentation of encounters and through character reflection; the method of storytelling differs for each text, but adds credibility and emotion to the tales, creating strong yet different examples of marginalization of African Americans."

https://docs.google.com/a/fredonia.edu/document/d/1z1STghKa1nxVhDGfOZmFq-6B26UcNAtiBxo53sXqjvs/edit?usp=sharing