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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This paper examines "On Being White, Female and Living in Bensonhurst" essay by Marianna Torgovnick and describes how her depiction of Bensonhurst could easily have led to the murder of an African-American youth and the racial conflicts that followed. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_MTtorgov.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
Daughter, the main thrust of the one essay involved both her own experiences in "crossing" Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn to marry Stu Torgovnick, a Jew from Brooklyns Sheepshead Bay, and
that of the racially-motivated murder of African-American Yusef Hawkins. In her own situation, Torgovnick no doubt felt her own "racial" tensions - as a "good" Italian girl, she no doubt
received a great deal of criticism from her family in marrying outside of the faith. By the same token, she probably received the same criticism - albeit in silent form
- from her thoroughly Jewish in-laws. Still, Torgovnick relies on the story of Hawkins murder to demonstrate her own situation, which is, at best, a somewhat tenuous connection between the
violent slaying of a black youth. Torgovnick, herself a professor of English at Duke University, was raised in Bensonhurst which was, at
the time, very heavily Italian-American, with its own cultures, traditions and biases (Review -- Crossing Ocean Parkway/Readings by an Italian American Daughter, 1994). She uses the murder of Hawkins to
demonstrate her own roots (Review -- Crossing Ocean Parkway/Readings by an Italian American Daughter, 1994). She also attempts to explain the killing of a black youth on those same streets
- almost justifying it, to an extent (Mancuso, 2002). She attempts to explain the racism as going back to the machismo of Italian-American culture: "The crudely protective men, expecting to
see a black arriving at the girls house and overreacting; the rebellious girl dating the outsider boy, the black dead as a sacrifice to the feelings of the neighborhood," as
James C. Mancuso notes in his review about her book (Mancuso, 2002). No doubt Torgovnick had related to the "girl dating the outsider boy," in fact, the girl was likely
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