Name :
CIPTO PRASETIO SUTIKNO
Student-ID : 18611407
Class : 4SA05
Subject : Computer-aided Learning
English
The writer tries to analyze direct and
indirect speech from the article below. The article below has become a material
or object which will to be analyze, the writer found some sentences which
include in direct and indirect speech. The article retrieved on:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/mixed-race-baby-black-one-drop-rule
My baby will be mixed
race. So why did I automatically think of him as 'black'?
My 87-year-old grandmother has a very specific way of saying the
wordblack: she drags out the a and makes the k extra
hard for an effect that drowns the c. “Blaaaak” out of my
grandmother’s mouth is an admonishment, not a color. “Blaaaak” out of my
grandmother’s mouth travels a step beyond being a pejorative to having the
hair-raising resonance of a word that damns as well as describes damnation
itself.
“Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth is a
curse.
But the freckled, fair-skinned black woman who helped raise me
doesn’t use “Blaaaak” to refer to people’s skin tones. Though
such attitudes are often mistaken for a bias against darker skinned people of
our race, the assumed colorism of
older African Americans is more often a reaction to the humiliating and
degrading representation of dark skin in images used to depict
and reinforce black people’s sub-human status in the late 19th and first half
of the 20th century.
But it wasn’t until a month ago, and seven
months pregnant, that her own granddaughter came to understand that
distinction.
My mother and I had gone to pick out a cake
design for my baby shower, and the one I liked had a pile of leaves in the
middle where a plastic portrait of a lily white baby’s face blossomed. I asked
if they had a black baby face, and my mother even asked if they had a “tan” baby
(since my husband is white and our child will be biracial), but the sales woman
told me that their babies only came in black and white. So I chose another
design – one that included a black baby.
I didn’t ponder this particular bakery’s limited
selection, the persistence of that fictional racial dichotomy, or even kick
myself for not taking our business elsewhere. That is, I didn’t question it
until later in the day when my grandmother asked about the cake and I explained
that it would have a black baby.
“Did you choose a Sambo-blaaaak baby?” she asked. The
plastic figurine’s dark blue-black skin and light pink lips flashed in my mind.
“Well, kind of,” I answered.
My grandmother lost it:
“Are you crazy? Oh, you must be! Do you think
I’m going to eat a cake with a creature from the blaaaak lagoon on it?! Didn’t
they have brown skinned babies? Didn’t they have Puerto Rican babies? Didn’t
they have anything other than Sambo-blaaaak babies?”
The word “sambo”, and the caricature attached to it, has a
multinational history – from its use in Latin American Spanish to refer to a
person of Native American and African heritage, to the overseer in Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to the children’s book The Story of
Little Black Sambo in which a South Indian boy tricks a gang of
hungry tigers. But my grandmother wasn’t thinking of India or how the geography
of the slave trade shaped racial terms. For her, “Sambo” recalls the
blubber-lipped, blue-black caricatures of African American children known aspiccaninnies, perched on
dilapidated porches, half-clothed and dusty, and as happy in squalor and
ignorance as they can be.
Depictions of black
people, like Sambo, the piccaninny and many others, were
manufactured and sold to the public – often to sell consumer
products – as foils for whiteness. The scholar Henry Louis
Gates Jr even calls what he terms “the everyday
racism of American popular culture “Sambo Art”. Everything these
imaginary “mascots” of blackness were scripted to be – slow-witted, indolent,
greedy, grotesque – white people and white children were supposedly not.
So when I chose a black baby for the cake, my
grandmother justifiably wondered who the hell I thought I was and who exactly I
was setting up my child to be. The truth is my grandmother’s response prompted
me to ask myself these same questions. And the answers surprised me.
In one regard, my ideas about race are more retro than my
grandmother’s. I picked a black baby to represent my mixed-race unborn child
because of my automatic adherence to the “one-drop rule”
– meaning that, because I am black, my child will be too, as was the case
during slavery and Jim Crow. But my grandmother’s irate questions about why the
bakery didn’t have babies of many colors acknowledged the truth that runs in
all of our veins: race is a spectrum, not dichotomy.
According to the 2010
Census, the multiracial
American population grew by 32% since 2000. And though 2000 was the
first year people could check multiple race boxes on the census, between 2000
and 2010 the number of Americans who identify as both black and white increased
134% to 1.8m. The 2010 Census also reported that racial and ethnic
minorities made up nearly half of the under-5 age group and
were soon going to be the majority.
The biracial baby boy I am carrying will be a
part of this multiracial wave entering America’s schools and more broadly
American life. Yet, despite my child’s mixed-race heritage, I found it
unthinkable to put a white figurine on my baby shower cake. But just as
“blackness” has come to mean something different over the generations since my
grandmother was young, so whiteness will also come to be less definitive – and
ultimately less proscribed, given the census numbers and the heterogenous
reality they reflect.
In the end, despite the
fact that I am not having twins, I chose one black baby and one white baby to
preside over my cake. Just as, with each coming decade, more people will check
more than one box to describe their own racial identity – including quite
possibly my child – I decided it was more emotionally accurate to identify my
baby as both, rather than one or the other.
A. Statement
1. Direct Speech
The sales woman told, “The
babies only come in black and white.”
Indirect Speech
The sales woman told me that their babies only
came in black and white.
The sentence above
includes direct speech in term of the direct speech statement. It expresses a
directly statement, so it must be changed into the form of statement which
is also currently convert it to Indirect Speech. If the tense in direct speech
is simple present tense, so in indirect speech has to simple past.
2. Direct
Speech
I explained, “I will have a black baby.”
Indirect Speech
I explained that I would have a black baby.
Those sentence above
include direct and indirect speech in term of the direct and indirect speech
statement because it has no question mark and express a complete thought. Then
direct speech is used when we quote a speaker’s word and we use quotation mark.
Besides, it has common verb that introduce quotation like “explain”.
B. Question
1. Direct Speech
“Did you choose a Sambo-blaaaak baby?”
she asked.
Indirect Speech
She want to know if I
had chosen a Sambo-blaaaak baby.
Those sentences include
direct and indirect speech in type of the direct and indirect speech question
or interrogative. If a direct speech changes into indirect speech, the
quotation mark doesn’t use again. Interrogative sentence in direct speech
changes become question mark(?) doesn’t use again. Moreover, when the question
is yes/no question, it has to use if or whether. Then the tense in indirect
speech has to be changed. If the tense in direct speech is simple past tense,
so it has to change into past perfect in indirect speech.
2. Direct Speech
“Didn’t they have brown
skinned babies?” my grandmother asked.
Indirect Speech
My grandmother asked
whether they had had brown skinned babies.
The sentences above
include direct and indirect speech too. In direct speech has question mark (?).
therefore, it has to be deleted and do not use again in indirect speech. Then,
the tense in indirect speech become past perfect because the tense in direct
speech is past tense.
C. Imperative
1. Direct Speech
He said, “Lie down on the bed.”
Indirect Speech
He told me to lie down on the bed.
To change into indirect
speech command, usually used the words will, order, beg, ask, etc and advise
the reporting verb followed by to infinitive and object like the sentence
above.
2. Direct Speech
He said, “Remember to
mail the letter.”
Indirect Speech
He reminded me to post
the letter.
An imperative to
change into indirect speech used the verb ask, remind, tell, advise and others
followed by to infinitive. The tense doesn’t need to change.
Source:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/mixed-race-baby-black-one-drop-rule
