the fourth of july

To make the readers concerned about the issue of discrimination which they probably know about throughout their lives, this essay gives readers a fresh view of discrimination by talking about people who are not born with the knowledge of discrimination. This lack of knowledge in discrimination, by common sense, should make those people more reactive and react in more extreme ways to discrimination. But, in fact, although “American racism was a new and crushing reality” to Lorde’s parents, who were immigrants, “they handled it as a private woe” (Lorde 568). Lorde encountered the same “new and crushing reality” in the essay because her parents “believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in America and the fact of American racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature” (Lorde 568). It is obvious that Lorde’s parents believed that it was how the new world that they have come to works. In other words, although they did not expect