Reference no: EM13130665

1.Choose??? of the articles and write a brief summary of the argument presented there. Introduce the article by its author and title, then explain the author's argument (what the author claims and for what reasons.) Include an in-text citation.
2.Quote a passage that struck you as interesting or enlightening and explain why. What does it tell us about individuality or identity? Introduce the quotation carefully with a signal phrase, such as, "Woodson explains that...", and include an in-text citation including a page number to cite your quotation.
3.One of the most interesting things about stereotypes is how they can affect the actions of those who have been stereotyped. Think of a stereotype you're familiar with. Which came first, the label or the trait? How can the things that other people say about us affect who we become?
4.At the end of your discussion post, make an impromptu references page: Type the word "References," enter a line break, and copy and paste the full APA references page entry (listed above) for your selected text.

Christmas day I pull the bow from my first present. My mother's camera flashes on me cross-legged in a flannel bathrobe underneath the tree. The robe belongs to my father and even as she flashes, I can hear my mother suck her teeth at the fact that I can't keep my seven-year-old body out of my father's clothes. I hold the box up and smile. Then shake it, knowing already, there will be a doll inside, probably one that eats and pees with the unformed body of an infant and the blond, straight hair of an offspring that could never, even by the minutest possibilities, have been brought into this world by someone as dark and kinky haired as myself. 

My older brother pulls a Lionel train set from underneath the tree. I quickly drop my box and scurry to help him put it together. 

"Open your own presents," my mother commands. But there is a weariness behind the command that is becoming more familiar to me." 

I know it's a doll." 

"What else would it be?" Then my mother and father are arguing about creative thought in gift-giving, but their voices drift off. My sister opens the box for me and pulls a brown-skinned baby doll from plastic wrapping. 

Distracted for a moment, I snatch it back from her. The doll's hair is jet black, cascading down her back like hair I've never seen on a black person. I run my fingers through it. Yellow-brown tiger eyes stare blankly up at me. I cradle the doll in my arms, and my mother's camera flashes on this. In the weeks to follow, the doll will be added to my collection of useless toys, assembled to dust on the shelf above my bed. When I am thirteen I will be punished for disassembling every doll I own and reassembling them so that black dolls have white arms, white dolls have black legs, and none of them have clothes or hair. I will run the dolls over with my brother's trains, hold them over the stove until their plastic skin melts away from itself, dripping into a smelly sizzle over the open flame. Then I will pack all of the dolls up in an old pillowcase and put them out in the trash. But for now, I rock the doll stiffly, pull a cheshire smile across my face, hold it until my mother's camera flashes, hold it while circles flicker and burn bright red before my eyes. 

"That will be such a sweet picture," my mother says. 

But long after my mother's flash, I am still standing with the doll, incarcerated into this posture, afraid to move a step in any direction out of her frame. Afraid all of a sudden, to blur this image of me.