Answer:
Because knowing too much is to much for the mind to handle sometimes ignorance is bliss
The tablecloths were all black and drooped gloomily over the edges of the tables. The streamers looked more like cobwebs than party decorations. It looked more like a funeral than a birthday party.
Answer:
To Diana George, poverty is represented by non-profit organizations such Habitat for Humanity in a way of despair, or something that can be easily seen or recognized. Or in the case of this organization and many others, it tries as to find an surfire way to make others empathise with poverty. The problems George identifies as a result of this tactic is that poverty is not always easily recognized, and on even questions that “If it doesn’t look like poverty, then how do we adress it?” (p. 450) The largest, most pressing issue is that seeing poverty in one way instead limits our understanding on how to deal with poverty.
At the very beginning of the article, George creates an anecdote of how she encounters charities. It details her going through her mail and looking over many other poverty organization’s mail. This shows their tactic, of presenting poverty as grim and ragged, while a quote from bell hooks before that states that seeing poverty in one way challenges how people look and deal with it. Providing these two largely contrasting viewpoints, in a way, makes them appeal to different audiences by expressing both her issue and a counterclaim to structure the remainder of textual analysis.
The purpose of George’s textual analysis is to ultimately show that representing poverty as weak and depraving only hinders the fight against it instead of resolving it. Everyday, it’s a question of who is poor and who is not, but that itself is becoming increasingly difficult to tell. This rudimentary mindset eventually leads George to state that “There are certainly many cultural and political reasons for these problems…but I would suggest that the way the way poverty countinues to be represented in this country and on tapes limits our understanding.” So if people continue to see poverty in this sight, the ones that are poor but still have a home or job will challenge this belief. People will not know how to deal with them, and this essentially why George criticizes non-profit organizations such as Health for Habitat
Answer:
In her essay, Jesmyn Ward describes racism in Mississippi telling real situations that she, her family and friends lived there. She is very critical of the systemic racism in the south of the country: "Sometimes the aggression is deeper, systemic. It is black children in my family enrolling in free preschool programs where their teachers barely tolerate them, ignore them, do a terrible job of leading them to learning."However, she also relates how the people she knows and love try to fight back the racism by staying alert when they see a situation where someone is in danger or is being discriminated:"I remember that Mississippi is not only its ugliness, its treachery, its willful ignorance (...). Here is one of my best friends from high school, a white woman with two toddlers, who stops her car when she sees black people pulled over by the police, pulling out her phone and filming in an attempt to belay disaster, to hold authority accountable."
Jesmyn Ward also uses figurative language throughout the essay to strengthen her claim, to give more meaning to the situations she is describing and to properly describe what she goes through when she is there, to emphasize and transmit the way she feels: "We stand at the edge of a gulf, looking out on a surging, endless expanse of time and violence, constant and immense, and like water, it wishes to swallow us. We resist.
