All Men Are Created Equal Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

All Men Are Created Equal - Essay Example The gamut of characters she delves in: from the LAPD Police Chief Daryl Gates to a gang member, from Korean store owners to a white juror, from a Panamanian immigrant mother to a teenaged black gang member, from beaten truck driver Reginald Denny to Congresswoman Maxine Waters along with other black, white, Asian and Latino characters: aptly portrays the myriads and pressures of a fractious age. It is interesting to note how Anna Deavere Smith resonates the theme of equality in her text with the issues of race, racial prejudice, anger, and hatred. Through characters such as Rudy Salas, Sr., the Mexican artist, she elucidates the consuming hatred of the "Other"1 in the Saidian sense of the term. In Sally's hatred against the "gringos," especially the white police officers, he is not only shown like the other inner-city blacks and Latinos who resent the treatment afforded to them by the LAPD but is made a prototype of a race which has borne the brunt of neo-colonization.   'I felt like "oh, my goodness" because it was really like he was in danger there. It was such an oppressive atmosphere (66).' That Anna Deavere Smith is more of a sociologist than a satirist is elucidated in her treatment of the issue of ethnicity in the personage of Paul Parker, the Chairman of the LA Four Plus Defense Committee. Parker's statement: ' they basically feel that if it's black-on-black crime, if it's a nigger killin' a nigger, they don't have any problem with that. But let it be a white victim, they gonna go to any extremes necessary to basically convict some black people (171).'  She points out the fallacies of a system where the abuser-abused relationship is based upon the norms of inequality. In its depiction of the anguished soul of a city and a nation in crisis, the text offers an etymological explanation of the problems of racism as it presents the discourse of race struggle in the perspectives of ethnocentricism and xenophobia.