Racism in Life in Oklahoma City andOn Social Equality - Essay Example

This short paper studies and compares two stories in which the authors depict racism in the content of the writing by discussing the connections in terms of context, utilization of literary devices, and the personal experiences displayed in the stories.

The two stories compared are Life in Oklahoma City by Ralph Ellison and On Social Equality by Gunnar Myrdal. Both of these stories are written from the first-person point of view. Mr. Ellison in his stories provides a narrative of his personal experiences as he was growing up in Oklahoma City. He described the setting of how things were back then and provided many examples of racism against various races including Afro-Americans, Germans, poor white persons, and Indians (Ellison, 1964). In the author’s descriptions, the author himself displayed a racist mentality since his description of some events seemed biased and a bit racist. The author utilized a lot of different literary devices in his stories such as symbolism, imagination, characterization, metaphors, simile, and personification.

The On Social Equality story is different than the story written by Mr. Ellison. This story is more critical and analytical about the racism issue. The story describes a lot of the views different groups of people have on the subject and provides multiple examples of how racism manifests itself. For example, the author mentioned a perspective from the Southern that during segregation afro-Americans actually liked it because they did not have to deal with people from the Caucasian race and they rather share time with their own people (Myrdal). The author used a couple of different literary devices such as similes but he did not use a large variety of literary devices such as Mr. Ellison utilized in Life in Oklahoma. The ending of this story was a conclusion that gave a final perspective and analyzed the topic of racism. The final stage of Life in Oklahoma was a self-reflection of Mr. Ellison’s life and his opinion on the racism subject. Ralph Ellison's writing style captivates the audience and illustrates to them the actual time setting of the occurrence of the events. Gunnar Myrdal has a technical writing style that is very effective at dissecting the subject while at the same time he is able to introduce literary devices to spice up the writing remaining an unbiased communicator at all times.  

These stories brought were effective at discussing in a different manner the racism subject. Mr. Ellison described the subject by telling the audience his life experiences dealing with racism as he grew up. Mr. Myrdal analyzed different perspectives of other groups of people on racism and provided his own insight on the subject. Good writers are able to discuss a subject utilizing a mix of literary devices and writing techniques to illustrate the desired message to the audience.