Trethewey's "White Lies" Everyone Has Essay

PAGES
2
WORDS
595
Cite
Related Topics:

This persona is lost between two worlds and the lying is just one way of dealing with the confusion. The tone in "White Lies" is one of regret as the poet comes to terms with her own feelings about her heritage. She realizes how she wanted others to think she was someone different than she was because she did not like herself. She was not comfortable in her own skin. The soap is a symbol of purity and her mother means to clean the speaker's tongue but she knows the problem goes much farther than her mouth. When her mother washed out her mouth she swallowed the soap "thinking they'd work / from the inside out" (28). The poet realizes her shame and understands her mother's anger but she could never resist lying about herself to make herself look better...

...

At the end of the day, she is surrounded by shame on all sides.
"White Lies" captures an element of the human psyche that is confusing because it seems so simple. Yet in all its simplicity, humanity cannot seem to get a firm grip on it. Shame and pride pull at the human spirit in many ways. We see a grown woman reflecting on her youth when she took pride in the lies she told and the falsities it caused others to believe. It was easier for her to take the easy way out and let others think she was white even if that was a lie. The only people who ever knew the difference was her and her mother -- the only two people who mattered.

Work Cited

Trethewey, Natasha. "White Lies." Textbook. City Published: Publisher. Year.

Sources Used in Documents:

Work Cited

Trethewey, Natasha. "White Lies." Textbook. City Published: Publisher. Year.


Cite this Document:

"Trethewey's White Lies Everyone Has" (2010, July 01) Retrieved April 25, 2024, from
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/trethewey-white-lies-everyone-has-9950

"Trethewey's White Lies Everyone Has" 01 July 2010. Web.25 April. 2024. <
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/trethewey-white-lies-everyone-has-9950>

"Trethewey's White Lies Everyone Has", 01 July 2010, Accessed.25 April. 2024,
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/trethewey-white-lies-everyone-has-9950

Related Documents
Lies My Teacher Told Me
PAGES 4 WORDS 1376

Presenting natives as a 'doomed' race is comforting: "Feeling good is a human need, but it imposes a burden that history cannot bear without becoming simple-minded. Casting Indian history as a tragedy because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feel-good history for whites. By downplaying Indian wars, textbooks help us forget that we wrested the continent from Native Americans" (Loewen 133). More liberal textbooks portray native persons

Lie Detection
PAGES 3 WORDS 985

Lie Detection: Recent Research and Examination The study, "Early vs. Late Disclosure of Evidence: Effects on Verbal Cues to Deception, Confessions, and Lie Catchers' Accuracy" by Jordan and colleagues attempts to pinpoint the elements of coerced confessions among other aspects in subterfuge. The dilemma with this study is that all attempts to make it seem as organic and realistic as possible in order to capture genuine human responses were not well executed,

Lies My Teacher Told Me
PAGES 5 WORDS 1739

The resulting quandary becomes one, therefore, that textbooks are being written and history taught in this manner so as to show and instruct people how they should act and strive to become - a rather false vision. What this accomplishes is nothing more then to relay to the student what is deemed acceptable to everyone and what is not - a general consensus filled with errors and inadequacies. When

Lies My Teacher Told Me
PAGES 8 WORDS 2788

This is a classic example to support Loewen's thesis of biased textbooks, inaccurate textbooks, and textbooks that eschew controversy. In general, according to Loewen, textbooks avoid the problems of the recent past, must to his dismay. This will only lead to improper education of American students and thus the Vietnam War serves as a solid example of his contentions. I believe that most of Loewen's claims are substantiated, except that he does have some left wing

Lies My Teacher Told Me
PAGES 3 WORDS 1178

Lies My Teacher Told Me stresses how students can repeat the same social studies class three times and still be ignorant of American history. Today, U.S. young adults leave most history courses with the false belief that the subject is only a bunch of facts and dates, completely boring, irrelevant to their lives and out of touch with the real world. Especially if a student is Latino, African-American, Asian or

Lie With Statistics Huff, Darrell. How to lie with statistics. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. 'There is terror in numbers.' Darrell Huff was not a statistician. However, he wrote his 1954 classic How to lie with statistics to help his math-intimidated readership better "look a phony statistic in the eye and face it down; and no less important, how to recognize sound and usable data in [the] wilderness of