tate Prison. His poem, “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” reflects the system punishing those that don’t adapt to the rules. Battle-scarred “Hard Rock was ‘known not to take no *censored* from nobody’” (714). His rebellious acts against the system, such as smacking “the captain with his dinner tray”, surviving a record time in the Hole, and biting “a screw on the thumb and…[poisoning] him with syphilitic spit” (715), were deemed intolerable. Hard Rock returned to prison lobotomized and shock-treated. Remember that, in order to avoid punishment in oppressive countries, many authors use allegorical stories to criticize their oppressors.If you need more evidence of the system at work in America, simply compare the ratio of academic and athletic scholarships awarded to black youths to the ratio of scholarships awarded to white youths. The comparison implies that blacks are intellectually inferior; it is wrong and morally unacceptable.Blacks are not the only minority subjected to racist oppression in America. Chinese-American Wing Tek Lum, a well-educated individual and winner of the Creative Literature Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, expresses his feelings in “Minority Poem”. He feels that dominant Anglo culture only tolerates minorities as Americans, but considers them “the leftover peelings” of the American apple pie (879). The key to realizing the severity of the problem is to understand that Lum’s experience extends beyond what most minority individuals experience: low-class housing, prison time, and no education beyond high school (if not less than that).The system isn’t unique to Anglo-dominated countries. Rigoberta Menchu’s “The Torture and Death of Her Little Brother” is a sad example of this. Rigoberta’s people, the Quiche, are subjected to un...
