Jorge Lopez

Professor Rosen

English 2001

5 May 2018

Project #2

Research Annotation:

-Race is a recurrent topic in “Quicksand” by Nella Larsen. It’s one of the many factors that drives the story and influences what happens throughout, affecting how the character feels, the thoughts that run through their mind, and their overall behavior. Helga’s behavior and decisions were heavily impacted by this and is one of the reasons she couldn’t settle down in one place and would jump from one to another. She felt she didn’t fit in and was uncomfortable with herself, her identity. It can be seen in this particular part of the text, “These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destructions.” as it highlights the topic of race, and at the time how there was an abundance of offensive racial beliefs, specifically towards blacks. When researching I found sites discussing how it was at the time, the viewpoints of whites and how it impacted blacks negatively. Blacks would be judged for the color of their skin, being called racial slurs and being seen as outcasts, not equal to everyone else as whites believed they were superior in every which way, which obviously led to many problems down the road as people were sickened by the discrimination.

Citation:

-Deshazo, Zach. “Racial Relations in the 1920s.” Prezi.com, 26 Mar. 2013, prezi.com/bc7npzsnzfhb/racial-relations-in-the-1920s/.