MARGINALISATION AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOUR- THE CLARION CALL BY GLORIA NAYLOR IN BAILEY’S CAFÉ

Abstract

Marginalisation is the process of not allowing a group of people to participate in the society. They play their roles and find their identity with denied freedom. Black women's experiences in America regarding work,family, and community, their grounding in traditional Afro- American culture suggest that Afro-American women, as a group, experience a world different from that of those who are not black and female. Even long after the abolition of slavery, the complex issues of color, race, and gender remain the deciding factor in the treatment of black people. The color difference remains a singularly significant rationale for discrimination between the „lighter races and the darker races‟ of humanity all over the world. W.E.B. Dubois has observed in his work The Souls of Black Folk , “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line, - the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (14). For black women, the colour line further becomes an edged weapon with gender bias and class for their oppression. Black women have always suffered because of being black, women, and poor within and outside black society. White man's exploitative attitude toward them and black man's belief in the concept of Anglo –Saxon beauty has forced black women to lead a life of deprivation and oppression. It results in a life full of miseries and humiliation. Factors like poverty, economic dependence, and racial discrimination have contributed toward low self-esteem and inferiority complex in black women. There is discrimination against them in education institutions, in jobs and in wages. They are the lowest at the economic and social ladder. Black women are depicted as what they are not, but appropriated by various groups of society in their own ways. There are physical, moral, and spiritual pressures on them. However, some of them show courage and fight back with all their might to resist all kinds of exploitation. Despite being partly defeated, these women never feel totally crushed. With self- respect and courage, they try to save themselves from their tormentors and develop self-consciousness.