Gerald Early
Pre-reading
Gerald Early (1952- ) is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies, Director of the Center for Humanities, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is an American essayist and American culture critic. His research interests include American literature, African-American culture (1940-1960), Afro-American autobiography, non-fiction prose, etc. His father, a baker, died when Early was nine months old, leaving his mother, a preschool teacher, to raise him and his two sisters on her own. Living in a poor area of the city, Early grew up befriending members of the Fifth and the South Street gangs, though he never became a member himself.
Gerald Early is not one to shy away from controversy, using the power of the pen to write about American culture and issues of race. After the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, in August 2014 in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Early wrote an essay for Time magazine about the city’s racial divisions and concluded that there “remains in St. Louis a sense that African-Americans are strangers in a strange land”.
Prompts for Your Reading
1.What is the real reason for the author’s daughters’ interest in beauty contests?
2.What is the white-culture stereotype of a black woman like?
3.What does the author mean by “royalty” in Paragraph 2?
4.How has beauty contest changed in recent years?
5.What is the attitude of Gerald Early’s daughters towards beauty?
6.What was Linnet’s attitude about her hairstyle and her own appearance?
7.Have you ever experienced a “conjunction of oppression and exhibitionistic desire: self-consciousness”? Describe it.
8.How did the mother respond to the problems in school caused by the girls’hairstyle?
9.Why is the mother against the idea of having the girl’s ears pierced?
10.How did the author interpret his daughter’s reply “maybe” in Paragraphs 7 to 8?