Ethics

Throughout my childhood the main ethic that I have been taught was that you get more from honey than you do with vinegar. This just means if you are nice to people, you will get more in the long run than if you were mean to people. From a very early age my parents started teaching me this. I can see this not only from my parents, who taught me the idea and who try and instill that idea in the things they do, but also from my peers around me. I witness cases of both honey and vinegar throughout a regular day at University High School. There are students that are known to be really nice kids. In general, they are the students that are given the most respect from students and teachers alike. There are also students at the school that have a bad reputation for being mean and rude jerks. This image radiates off of them, and even new people are able to tell this fact about them. Whenever they get into trouble, everyone is quick to say that it was probably their fault, even if they didn’t here the whole story. When asking for a favor, people are less inclined to do it for them, based on the fact that they know the student isn’t very nice. If you just take the time and notice things happening around you, you are able to see this idea be carried out all of the time throughout the day. There are many other ethics of my life, for example, do not steal, respect your elders, and always say please and thank you, but out of all of the ethics of my life, this is the one that is most important.

Langston Hughes and McKay

There are many things that are different between the two poets. The first is that Claude McKay has a specific style of writing that he uses in a majority of the poems we read. This style is a sonnet. He does this because it makes the people see that these African Americans aren’t all uneducated like the whites thought they were, but instead they are writing poems in the same style as the famous Shakespeare. Langston Hughes incorporates many different styles of writing in his poems. They are similar in the topics they discuss. Both Langston and McKay make connections between the white and black race. They both have a sort of bitterness about them when it comes to the white race. For example, in “To My White Friends,” McKay talks about how black people can be just as awful to white people as whites are to black people, but they are choosing to be better people than that, and not succumb to the savagery that the whites have become. In Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B,” Hughes writes about how he wants to be a separate person from the whites. He realizes that he doesn’t want to be a part of the whites, and the whites don’t want to be a part of a black man, but Hughes realizes that that is a part of being in America. Also, both poets write about Africa. Langston Hughes mentions it in his poem, “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and McKay speaks of it in “Africa.” They also each have a poem discussing individuals and the actions they are doing because of the opportunities they are given, or I guess not given.