Humanities Homework Help

This assignment addresses the first two body paragraphs of the prompt

Now that you have read and processed the two letters present one of the claims (in either letter) and discuss why it stands out to you. Remember, we did this with “The Perils of Indifference” and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” You will be asked to do the same with the first two paragraphs of essay one (identify and analyze the use of rhetoric)

Please post this assignment in paragraph form

Claim: Put the claim in your own words (topic sentence)

Quote: (from the letter that the author uses in support of your chosen claim) (in MLA format)

Discussion: 5- 7 sentences about why this claim is of interest and why you may want to explore it in a paper.

I chose this letter because it stood out to me as opposed to the other one because it contained more emotion and was addressed to a family member like his sister as opposed to the other one who seemed like it was addressed to specific population. The letter is An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis by James Baldwin

This is the information before the two letters:

They Will Be Coming for Us Tonight: Letters
by James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis, with
an introduction by Laura Preston
Angela Y. Davis awaiting the arrival of a judge in Marin County Court, San Rafael, California,
December 23, 1970
Angela Y. Davis, the African-American activist, feminist, academic, and writer, was born in 1944 in the southern city of Birmingham, Alabama. A student of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University, she also studied in Paris and Frankfurt
before earning a master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego, and a doctorate in philosophy from
Humboldt University in East Berlin. In 1969, Davis became an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), but was soon fired due to her membership in the Communist Party USA and
her association with the Black Panthers. It was because of her relationship with the latter that she would quickly find herself
a political prisoner. In 1970, an attempt at a California courthouse by a young man, Jonathan Jackson, to free the
Soledad Brothers (three African-American inmates at Soledad State Prison in California accused of killing a prison guard)
resulted in three men and a judge being shot dead. Davis was prosecuted for conspiracy and jailed for some eighteen
months before being acquitted in a federal trial. During her time in prison, Davis wrote. She wrote of political
injustice in the United States and of the structural racism of the American judicial system, which typecasts blackness and
renders the political act “criminal.” Her critical resistance is addressed in an open letter from the Marin County Jail in May
1971, reprinted here. The prison letter is a marginalized genre of literature that is both document and personal memoir, and
a means of keeping politicized while institutionalized. Fueled by necessity (raw ink to paper), the prison letter speaks to the
painful truth of an embodied state of captivity and, beyond, to the systemic and oppressive factors that lead one to be
imprisoned. It may be penned with uncompromising honesty—for what else is there to lose?
It also encourages public exchange. Davis’s address is introduced here by James Baldwin’s open letter to her of 1970,
at a time when “one glance at the American leaders (or figureheads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute
chaos”; an observation that could also have been written today. Baldwin, the inimitable writer and activist, was twenty
years older than Davis. His relentless, brilliant wit charted the way for a revolution in black consciousness in America. Yet he
found it necessary to do so at a distance, living most of his adult life outside the United States, writing from Paris and
Istanbul, spending time in the U.K. and Germany. His letter to Davis in prison was sent in solidarity and in respect for her
actions as well as her assessment and absorption of civil rights histories. It was intended for others to read, as were the “one
million roses,” a youth-led campaign of postcards sent to Davis from East Germany, from behind another wall, which
mobilized support for those that make up the “other America.”In the late 1990s, Davis cofounded Critical Resistance, an
organization that works to focus social awareness on the prison-industrial complex. She argues, persuasively, that the
prison system in the United States is a form of slavery, where “criminality and deviance are racialized. Surveillance is thus
focused on communities of color, immigrants, the unemployed, the undereducated, the homeless, and in general
on those who have a diminishing claim to social resources. Their claim to social resources continues to diminish in large
part because law enforcement and penal measures increasingly devour these resources.”* In the United States, as elsewhere, prisons have become big business, following the trend of privatizing state-owned enterprise. Today more than
two million people are imprisoned in the United States, with African-Americans incarcerated at a rate five times that of
whites; in five states, mostly southern, the disparity is more than ten to one. The statistics are stark, and so is the
knowledge that a capitalist economy requires social inequality—the prison extends beyond the penitentiary.
As Davis writes, “The prison is a key component of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overriding function of which is to
ensure social control.” And this control is dictated by profit, the control of criticality, language too. She writes from
example, using historical events and case studies to determine a lucid prose that confronts the realities of racism as
institutional, and not simply as individual acts of attitudinal bias. Nor is her letter narrowly focused on her own
circumstances or bound to its time. Indeed, her words of 1971 seem not far removed from our situation today. Davis wrote
then of the severe social crisis taking place and the need to identify the incipient phases of the fascist, economically
driven network of oppression. Contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter and its loose confederation inside and
outside the United States, and the words and deeds of political prisoners worldwide, reveal, once again, this urgency. Her
letter, Baldwin’s too, reminds us of lessons left unlearned, offering cross-generational affirmation that the pivotal
struggle, the place to begin, is in an “open, unreserved battle against entrenched racism.” —Laura Preston

This is the letter I chose:

An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis
by James Baldwin
Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so
intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up
and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure
their safety in chains and corpses. And so, Newsweek, civilized defender of the indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of
crocodile tears (“it remained to be seen what sort of personal liberation she had achieved”) and puts you on its cover,
chained.You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land. Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an
exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.I am something like twenty years older than you, of that
generation, therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that “there are no healthy brothers—none at all.” I am in no way
equipped to dispute this speculation (not, anyway, without descending into what, at the moment, would be irrelevant
subtleties) for I know too well what he means.My own state of health is certainly precarious enough. In considering you, and Huey, and George and (especially) Jonathan Jackson, I began to apprehend what you may have had in mind when you spoke of the uses to which we could put the experience of the slave. What has happened, it seems to me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole new generation of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will never be victims again. This may seem an odd, indefensibly impertinent and insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison, battling for her life—for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say it, for I think that you will perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do not say it, after all, from the position of a spectator.I am trying to suggest that you—for example—do not
appear to be your father’s daughter in the same way that I am my father’s son. At bottom, my father’s expectations and mine
were the same, the expectations of his generation and mine were the same; and neither the immense difference in our ages
nor the move from the South to the North could alter these expectations or make our lives more viable. For, in fact, to use
the brutal parlance of that hour, the interior language of that despair, he was just a nigger—a nigger laborer preacher, and
so was I. I jumped the track but that’s of no more importance here, in itself, than the fact that some poor Spaniards become
rich bull fighters, or that some poor Black boys become rich—boxers, for example. That’s rarely, if ever, afforded the people
more than a great emotional catharsis, though I don’t mean to be condescending about that, either. But when Cassius Clay
became Muhammad Ali and refused to put on that uniform (and sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was
made on the people and a very different kind of instruction had begun.The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make Black people despise themselves. When I was little I despised myself; I did not know any better. And this meant, albeit unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I also despised my father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my sisters. Black people were killing each other every Saturday night out on
Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that
they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they should consider themselves no better than animals.
Everything supported this sense of reality, nothing denied it: and so one was ready, when it came time to go to work, to be
treated as a slave. So one was ready, when human terrors came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus for salvation—
this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in
time to help you save your child! There is always, of course, more to any picture than can speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and moaning, watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some tremendous strength was nevertheless being forged, which is part of our legacy today. But that particular
aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret is out: we are men! But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has frightened the nation to death. I wish I could say, “to life,” but that is much to demand of a disparate collection of displaced
people still cowering in their wagon trains and singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The nation, if America is a nation, is not in the least prepared for this day. It is a day which the Americans never expected or desired to see, however piously they may declare their belief in progress and democracy. Those words, now, on American lips, have become a kind of universal obscenity: for this most unhappy people, strong believers in arithmetic, never expected to be confronted with the algebra of their history. One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it. One glance at the American leaders (or figureheads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear
willing to consign the Blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of our (nominal)
countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of
the Kings’ Row basket case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to carry out what they insist is the
will of the people. But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for the above-named, are the people? The people, whoever they may be, know as much about the forces which have placed the above-named gentlemen in power as they do about the forces responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of the
people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and
Blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger
for the Blacks and tragedy for the nation.Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow
millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will
think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between
themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently
worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will
perish (as we once put it in our Black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to
say, already, all around us. Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own
children, we, the Blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at their hands; which, after
all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is
not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites
are all their brothers. So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to
contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the
world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water
belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be
the instrument of someone else’s profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—
and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the Blacks, and not only we, the Blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is
greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know
that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for
the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about
ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.
The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the
beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into
existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are
worse than the murderers hired in our name.If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it
were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in
the morning, they will be coming for us that night.Therefore: peace.
Brother James
November 19, 1970

Street scene with billboard in support of Angela Y. Davis, Cuba, early 1970s
* Angela Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex” Colorlines,
September 10, 1998. Online: www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racism-reflections-prison-
industrial-complex.
1 Herbert Aptheker quoted in William Z. Foster, The Negro People in American History (New
York: International Publishers, 1954), pp. 169–70.
2 Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The History of Class Violence in America (Gloucester, MA: Peter
Smith, 1963), p. 312.
3 Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 45.
According to Aptheker these are not Nat Turner’s exact words.
4 W. E. B. Du Bois, Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: International
Publishers,1968), p. 390.
5 Karl Marx, “The Class Struggle in France,” in A Handbook of Marxism (New York:
International Publishers, 1935), p. 109.