When the individual can't afford to nourish themselves, they tend to hallucinate what certain food looks/tastes like; or they pretend they're eating something delectable to distract from the reality that they're doing what they can to survive.

people who live like animals, typically fighting to survive wen there's not enough to go around.

living in poverty can lead people to doing drastically life-altering things.

The man came in, probably proud of his outfit and he wants to show it off... maybe to provide a sense of hope, but instead he gets discriminated against by his own community thus discriminated by both the white and Black communities, which is the issue. The crowd hated on the dancing man instead of dancing with him.

The narrator is saying that the crowd would appreciate him if he wasn't dressed like a white man because the way that they seem him now, they believe he may think he's equal to the white people and that he must think he's better than them, when his skin tone juxtaposes that, so the crowd thinks he's a fool.

They laughed because he was "dressed like a white man." A lot of Black people in Harlem didn't like a lot of the clubs, bars, designated places for entertainment because a lot of white people would exploit Black entertainers in Harlem.

Black children are taught at a young age the white society isn't going to give them a chance and they're generally hated. It's a very subtle lesson, but we get those lessons to be submissive for our own protection. And because we're so young when we get those lessons, we aren't aware of how cruel and wrong it is that we're taught that. We think that's the right thing to do without realizing that that doesn't make us equal to the individuals in the white communities.

The narrator may be speaking of the fear that bringing a child into the world is only going to hurt them as an individual, so in order to protect that child, it would be best not to have them at all.

The common stereotype for a Black man was that they were always smiling, laughing, and genuinely happy despite how they were being laughed at and the hardships they had to face. Black women were always the comedic caregiver. Overall, white society displayed that it was "okay" to discriminate against Black people because they didn't care when, in reality, it actually hurts the community.

This resonated with me because white people have seen themselves as the superior race since the U.S. was "founded" beginning with indigenous people who were slaughtered over land that they shouldn't have had to give up. And Black people who were lynched for just existing who have had to fear death on their way to school or work while a white person has never known that kind of fear.

African people were enslaved and literally forced to do all the work white people didn't want to do, they were even forced to go to war. Then, when enslavement ended, they still weren't allowed to get the same jobs white people had, they didn't receive the same pay, schools were segregated, so what was it really for?

During the time frame, after enslavement ended, a lot of Black women could only get jobs as seamstresses whether that's what they wanted to do or not.

As an individual who is half-Black and very present in the Black community as well as very open with how I identify, there's still this level of confusion because mixed kids receive discrimination on both sides of the spectrum as if our struggle being Black isn't as harsh, which makes it difficult to unify the community when realistically, that unity is what's going to benefit us in the future.

Despite the thematic concern around isolation, there's this uprising theme of solidarity because the Black community continues to suffer the injustices that society brings to the table, but are working together to try to bring change.

Enslaved African people who worked in fields sang hymns that were normally coded so that white people wouldn't hear that they were singing of freedom, and those songs still exist in Black churches.

White men brought African men to the U.S. to do all the work they didn't want to do and women were raped because the white men saw them as attractive due to their "child-bearing hips," which also began the stereotype the Black women are promiscuous. The same goes for men as well because white women often fantasized about having sex with a "strong Black man" and the white men were jealous.

Ma Rainey's words were like home to a lot of people. She was a touring artist who made it big, as a Black woman, and she "got out" and a lot of Black people saw this as inspiration; though, whether Ma Rainey really "got out" is debatable because she lived beneath a contract and wasn't actually free to do anything.

This reminds me of how white people have historically promised something to a non-white person, or groups of people, in words that were meant to have a double meaning so that the white person could take full advantage of the other individual.

Rivers are ancient meaning they've existed before people began to walk the Earth. "My soul has grown deep like the rivers," the narrator has experienced as much as the rivers despite them being far younger. Trauma and mistreatment ages a person both physically and mentally.

This imagery suggests something decaying, which is what a racist society that fears change may want. They don't want to see equal rights because they're so used to getting everything handed to them.

It's interesting to see Hughes play on the word "lazy," because that's one of the depictions white society has created for Black people in order to belittle their work ethic.

AKA the arts, which allows Black individuals to communicate their feelings, and someone is bound to listen and come together to help advocate for a safer environment for non-white people.

This feels like a call to action for people in the Black community to take a stand for equality. African people were dragged to the U.S. and used as objects/machinery to do the work that white people didn't want to do, and to this day there's this metaphor that Black people are still chained up because the wages aren't the same as white people, innocent lives are taken by police officers because the first thing they see is skin color, and the list goes on.

People tend focus more on stereotypes that have been depicted of Black people throughout the course of history, which hurts the individual and the community because it belittles them to that stereotype. It's like they forget that everyone bleeds the same.

U.S. history has embedded this self-hatred in the minds of Black individuals, which is learned from a very young age, for example, when I was growing up, I was taught that for a job interview, I'd need to straighten my hair because that Eurocentric standard is what defines "acceptable."

Because needless to say, the art isn't for the white community, it's to raise awareness for Black individuals to realize that how white people have treated them for years and years is not okay.

Otherwise they aren't artists, they're just followers, going with the flow and not expressing their opinions on how an environment that protects everyone and ensures everyone's safety can be established.

In a society that hates non-white people, the voices of Black artists go unheard.

It's interesting how Robert Frost began this poem as a narrative, then the tone shifts to a darker, more analytical style as the narrator questions not only the role of God, but human existence.

This line impacted me because I think about all the people that choose to follow trends, they WANT to blend in and I always thought that was stupid. Everyone is unique in beautiful in their own way and they're meant to be different because if everyone was the same, it would be an incredibly boring world.

There's this contradiction between the two characters as they're building a wall that divides their properties. The narrator disagrees with the wall because it excludes people from human interaction, and being that they reside in the same neighborhood, it's important for everyone to live harmoniously so that it's a comfortable environment for everyone. As a kid, one of the town houses I lived in didn't even have fences, so whenever we'd barbecue, the entire neighborhood was invited vice versa. Human interaction is something everyone needs just a little bit of because it's lonely living in one's mind.

The concept of time is a reoccurring theme throughout the poems from this week as it seems the Mr. Flood dwells on his past and as he gets absolutely plastered, he acquires this sudden mournfulness as he realizes that the town he lives in is uncomfortably weird since the majority of his friends died.

This could potentially represent the people he chose to surround himself without throughout his life, compared to "That no one knows what is good/Who knows not what is evil..." which could represent the opinions he heard and adapted to his own life before he started formulating his own.

I get the feeling that this poem is written on the basis of a recollection of one's life. Similar to the previous readings, the narrator has this ghostly presence, and from the grave ("Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick tick..."), they're realizing, "tragedy, comedy, valor and truth..." // "While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?" that they missed out on a more innovative way of getting their point across.

There's obviously some kind of spiritual relationship between the narrator and this house. She claims to see women creeping around the house, possibly women that have died in confinement, which is how the narrator is forced to spend her time in order to "get better." She's being forced to heal an illness that potentially doesn't exist, but the people around her are too ignorant to the narrator's beliefs.

So, I'm indigenous. This resonated with me because the individuals in my tribe is really in tune with their spirituality meaning that we can sense when an entity from another realm is present. There's either a positive/negative force that's felt; or that strangeness that's described here. Almost always the strangeness, which can be compared to the force of the dynamo that Adams described in The Dynamo and the Virgin. The force of the dynamo is intriguing to him; however, it's strange because of its unfamiliarity.

Followed by "...but one expects that in marriage," compared with the gothic genre, it's apparent that this story takes place in a time where men considered women to be the inferior sex. "He has no patience with faith," implies that he bases his knowledge primarily off of logistics and "an intense horror of superstition" could mean that he's too scared to believe that spirits exist-- not just spirits but the idea of positive and negative sources of energy that can't be explained by science and logic.

America has made it difficult for Black individuals to succeed in life. After the emancipation from enslavement, neighborhoods, schools, public buildings, churches... water fountains were segregated between white people and Black people and this remains relevant today because when a Black family moves into a new house in a white neighborhood, the pricing of the houses in that neighborhood drops and the neighborhood is classified as a "low-income" neighborhood. That's just one example of how the majority of American society don't believe that Black people can "strive." This reminded me of the line in Adams' essay where he talks about how many scientists had ideas that seemed unfathomable to people that just didn't understand the technology.

It's like Du Bois is speaking of his own life in the third-person perspective to illuminate what being oppressed feels like to someone who hasn't had to suffer through it. Racist stereotypes are ingrained in everyone's subconscious from a young age, which reminds me of the comparison Adams makes between technology and faith where one is physically there and the other is composed of an embedded knowledge.

This reminds me of the opening sentence in "The Dynamo and the Virgin," where Adams begins with"UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it," because Du Bois uses this ghostly language to describe feeling isolated from his peers throughout his childhood and how that's impacted his growth.

In a lot of cultures, women are the highest power; people look up to women, but in America women are looked down upon. Women are just there to bear children, just sexual objects and if a woman doesn't "put out," then there's an issue and she gets called all sorts of names, yet premarital sex is a sin in the Bible. Here, Adams is comparing women to this great dynamo, this powerful force...

I read this and thought about how it's talking about scientific inventions and in my mind it related to growing industries-- it's hazardous because the more money comes in, the greedier people get hence why Earth is now in such poor condition and certain people are forced to live those conditions.

comparable to the detroit race riots in '67-- accusations of police brutality against Black residents, which remains relevant; especially, with the police brutality occurring all throughout 2020.

based on some research about the riots, 43 people died and 300-something were injured.