The Collective v. Individual in Bronx Masquerade and Stamped

Bronx Masquerade and Stamped

Anna O'Shea

February 8, 2022

As I was reading Jason Reynold’s excerpt from Stamped I was in awe in the kind of retelling and different narration of history that he was giving. I felt like a lot of the human condition and nature of history that he was discussing resonated with the book, Bronx Masquerade. While I was reading the last portion of Bronx Masquerade, I was tying together many of the themes, one of which loomed large to me, the idea of fitting in or “being cool.” What does it even mean to be either of those things? I am not exactly sure. 

The character, Sheila particularly amazed me within these two realms, she went through such depths to fit in and be cool that she ended up being extremely offensive in her acts that fell into cultural appropriation. As she explained and attempts to justify some of these actions, she says, “Everybody around me is dark and ethnic. Which is in, by the way. Look at all the supermodels. They’re from places like Venezuela and Africa and Puerto Rico” (Grimes 133). These lines left me speechless, what does it mean for a race/ethnic group to be “in?” This use of language implies that a racial/ethnic group can be like a trend, something that was once “out of style” and then can come back to be “in style” and “cool.” I thought Sheila’s entire presence in this book was a jarring especially these lines in particular, and I am still not sure exactly what Grimes wants readers to be gathering from her character. 

However, I felt like Reynolds explanation about the human condition to exemplify why certain narratives were created in history helps me better understand Sheila. Reynold’s explains the creation of race theories saying, “Because if there’s one thing we know about humans, it’s that most of us are followers, looking for something to be a part of to make us feel better about our own selfishness” (Reynolds 7). Sheila was a follower in this book, she wanted what others had because could not appreciate what she had. In her last section of her narrative in the book, the last lines of her poem read, “Eighteen syllables. / A single poem” (Grimes 138). The eighteen syllables of course representing the eighteen students, and the single poem representing the class as a whole. I feel like this properly sums up both the discussion I had been prompting on Monday with the universal/collective aspect juxtaposed and yet interplaying at the individual level and Sheila’s role in the book. She now understands that she is a part of the collective but at that same time that no matter how much she fights it, she is also an individual with her own identity and nothing she does will be able to change that. 

I think in a paradoxical way that Reynolds uses his piece to expose, through his own account of history, that races and ethnic groups were merely treated as a collective rather than an at the individual levels and that was the problem. Like as he ends his piece saying, “No one cared what the enslaved African wanted… Enslavers weren’t interested in hearing anything about converting their slaves. Saving their crops each year was more important to them than saving souls. It was harvest over humanity” (Reynolds 13). The collective and individual is two-fold, and I noticed that it is when the individual is either forced or chooses to morph or conform to the collective that problems are arising in both of these works.