Life With Daughters

Life with daughters is a piece in which Gerald Early writes of how he views Miss America contests. It is written from the perspective of an African American man with a wife and two daughters. Early is a professor of Modern letters but also for African and African American culture. He is well renowned and writes from a perspective that is his own. 

Early utilizes the rhetorical technique of parallelism between the American Beauty Pageant and dolls in order to explain to a broader audience of how this affects people. By comparing the two, the idea is seen in a specific and general way which helps the reader to understand both the influences. His piece is extremely strong because of his ability to appeal to so many aspects of what may be deemed female culture and he manages to explain so many wisdoms of life unearthed just through a television program he doesn't even really like. 

This piece was written for anyone who may be under the influence of societal culture, meaning nearly everybody. Through his work, Early equates American Beauty pagents to the doll industry to show how it can influence young black children. He compares what it was like for his wife to see only white women on stage and feel a kind of agitation towards the tradition to how his daughters know the competition with a diverse set of "women on parade"(532) . He discusses how his wife and sister grew up with white Barbies and how it could stir race pride amongst them as well as a feeling of lessness. His wife would not allow his daughters to have white dolls because of this and he discovers that his children still felt self-conscious because of their appearances despite the ban on the dolls. 

Early's purpose is to try to give the wisdom he found his daughters had in their approach to a pageant or dolls. Rather than deciding a person couldn't win the pageant because someone of their race had won in the past years, as their mother declared, they picked who they thought was best. They did not watch with feelings of lingering animosity but because it was so meaningless it was funny. Gerald Early's daughters had their two black Barbie's have a white child because, "We're not racial...Aren't you tired of all that racial stuff?" Early uses his childrens' innocent wisdom to bring awareness to the fact that sometimes you are taught that "nothing is something" and recognizing whether something is really something is what is important. 

Innocence is Wisdom

Sometimes being blind to what hate is around you can bring betterness into your life.

three blind mice nursery rhyme: 

http://rap.genius.com/175696/Mellowhype-copkiller/Blind-mice