Poem AnalysisThis poet is going through the conflict of being black and intelligent. She feels like white people feels that she's inferior, while black people thinks she's trying to "act white" She's confused. She questions," So I cant be black and be smart because black people are dumb?".She is looked down at by whites because they feel like their advance to too much for her mind to comprehend. Her pretentious white classmates and teachers expects her not to excel and she refuses to fit the stereotype of being an illiterate black girl. Because of her vocabulary, her peers expects her principles and knowledge to be inaccurate. She relates it to slavery. She said," Like I speak slave, and you speak slave master, this isn't a plantation, it's a classroom". She apologizes for not being able to relate with her black peers either. She expresses her dilemma by stating," A 4.0 means I'm four shades lighter". Everyone surrounding her considers intelligence to be a white trait, however she detests when people relates her melanin with stupidity. Throughout the poem she is expressing how she wont change who she is or pretend to be someone else to satisfy anyone's expectation of her.
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Literary Devices AnalysisIt hard not to get caught up in this poem and just listen. However, I broke away from it's enchanting flow and found five literary devices; conflict, analogy, flashback, metaphor, and parallelism. Conflict is found throughout the poem, for instance she asked," And you expect me to cut class and get an F, just to perpetuate the stereotype that's been instilled through this b.s. curriculum?". She is expected to become a stereotype and not excel but she refuses to sell herself short to satisfy everyone else. I found analogy when she compared herself to Maya Angelou. She noticed how people perceived her to be unintelligent just because of her skin color, and related it to how people judged Maya Angelou because she's black. People labelled Maya Angelou an inferior author because she had grammatical errors, even though Mark Twain, an white author, wrote a novel full of grammatical error and people consider it to be masterpiece. Davis utilized flashback when she explained why blacks find it acceptable to be seen as dumb. She said," White people told us niggers not to read 300 years ago, and now niggas telling other niggas not to read". I found metaphor when she said," You think giving 100% means getting 100 lashes". She is comparing how blacks are holding themselves back from being all they can be because of their past oppressors of their ancestors. Moving on, parallelism involves placing sentence items in a parallel grammatical format wherein nouns are listed together, specific verb forms are listed together and the suchlike. I came across parallelism when Davis declared," So never ask that I speak for anyone but me, represent anything but what I stand for, and fight for anything but what I believe in".
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*Attention Please*
*WARNING*
I'm apologizing in advance for the words used in this poem; they're very explicit. However, I love this poem and have so much reverence for this poet. I just wanted to share this video and my analysis of it.