I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Themes - Racism

Racism

Stamps, Arkansas, as depicted in Caged Bird, has very little "social ambiguity": it is a racist world divided between Black and white, male and female. Als characterizes the division as "good and evil", and notes how Angelou's witness of the evil in her society, "generally directed at black women", shaped Angelou's young life and informed her views into adulthood. Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage, described in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, as a central image throughout her series of autobiographies. Like elements within a prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and oppression. The caged bird metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle". Scholar Ernece B. Kelley calls Caged Bird a "gentle indictment of white American womanhood", but Hagen disagrees, stating that the book is "a dismaying story of white dominance".

Critic Pierre A. Walker places Angelou's autobiography in the African American literature tradition of political protest. Caged Bird has been called "perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying autobiography written in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era". Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the black community of Stamps, as well as her presentation of vivid and realistic racist characters and "the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans", her developing understanding of the rules for surviving in a racist society. Angelou's autobiographies, beginning with Caged Bird, contain a sequence of lessons about resisting oppression. The sequence she describes leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest".

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives her autobiographies their thematic unity and underscores one of their central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. The structure of the book helps to illustrate this theme. Caged Bird, like most autobiographies, begins with Angelou's earliest memories, but she relates events non-chronologically. For example, the description of the "powhitetrash" girls taunting Maya's grandmother appears in chapter five when Maya was about ten years old, two years after her rape, which occurs in chapter twelve. Maya reacts to the "powhitetrash" incident with rage, indignation, humiliation, and helplessness, but Momma teaches her how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism. Walker calls Momma's way a "strategy of subtle resistance" and McPherson calls it "the dignified course of silent endurance".

In the course of her book, Angelou demonstrates that Momma's approach to coping with racism serves as a basis for actively protesting and combating racism. Momma is portrayed as a "realist" whose patience, courage, and silence ensured the survival and success of those who came after her. For example, Maya breaks the race barrier to become the first black streetcar operator in San Francisco, and responds assertively to the demeaning treatment by her white employer Mrs. Cullinan. In addition, Angelou's description of the strong and cohesive black community of Stamps demonstrates how African Americans subvert repressive institutions to withstand racism. Arensberg insists that Angelou demonstrates how she, as a black child, evolves out of her "racial hatred", common in the works of many contemporary black novelists and autobiographers. At first Maya wishes that she could become white, since growing up black in white America is dangerous; later she sheds her self-loathing and embraces a strong racial identity.