Close Reading #1
The language utilized in the accounts of the murders of Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown reveal how African-American youths in America are dehumanized in order to justify their deaths. Fourteen year old Emmett Till is described as looking “like a man” (Huie), implying that his brutal death over a childish flirtation towards the white Carolyn Bryant is somehow excusable because he seemed older.
That sentiment is echoed again in Trayvon Martin’s case, in which Martin is described as a “real suspicious guy … [who] looks like he’s up to no good ” (Botelho). Like with Till, Martin is twisted from a child into an older man, someone who “deserves” whatever judgement white adults enact against them where other, whiter children would have received mercy.
The idea of black children being undeserving of the title of “child” appears in Michael Brown’s case as well , where his killer, Officer Darren Wilson, portrays Brown as mindlessly aggressive and a “demon” (Missouri v. Wilson). Wilson repeatedly stresses that he felt powerless against such a monstrous force as eighteen year old Mike Brown, though Wilson is a trained police officer who was holding a gun. The subtext is clear here, as it is in the Till and Martin cases: skin color takes precedence over everything, even childhood.
I think you are pointing to important themes that we will think about throughout this course, which is good. You seem to want to do a side by side of all three texts. I think the types of details you are focusing on could potentially work for a side by side of all three, but in general you are spending more time jumping to the next text than actually interpreting how the passage you’ve quoted is working. In your future assignments, I’d like to see you do a stronger job of articulating how you’re reading the way the narrative presents the idea. You are good at identifying the general idea and thinking about it broadly in the world but away from the texts. I want you to sta y with the texts and what the texts are trying to do. So you posit a kind of thesis statement about how all of the readings work to dehumanize African American youths, but in your reading of the passage you don’t really come back to an explicit discussion of this claim that the passages dehumanize. I point this detail out b/c your examples are a ll a a little different. In the first one they frame the youth as a man. In the second one they frame the young adult as suspicious and then in the last one they frame the young adult as demon. Only the last one seems to implicitly ((without your explanation) fit your thesis because a demon is not human. However a man and a suspicious guy are humans, so you actually need to do more work to explain how these descriptions dehumanize.