A Different Mirror Literary Elements

Sociological non-fiction/American history

Various points throughout the history of America

Following a short introductory section written in the first-person from the biographical perspective of the author, the text settles into conventional third-person non-fiction point of view.

Reportorial objectivity for the most part, but with a definite emotional investment in the struggles of minority cultures in America.

Protagonist: multicultural awareness and respect. Antagonist: white societal monocultural racism and prejudice.

The conflict at the center of the book is the actual contributions of minority cultures to American history and the erasure or diminution of those contributions in the written record known as the historical record.

The book climaxes with the author being invited to the White House by Pres. Bill Clinton in 1997 to help draft a major speech on the issue of race titled “One America in the Twenty-First Century: The President’s Initiative on Race.”

“What I find is that most people don’t know the fact that they don’t know, because of the complete lack of information” foreshadowed back in 1993 the coming embrace of ignorance and suspicion of learning which became a fundamental ideological element of American conservatism in the post-truth political sphere following the 2016 election.

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Shakespeare’s The Tempest is alluded to throughout as a metaphor for the founding of America by white men who stole control over its natural resources from darker-skinned native inhabitants whom it proceeded to demonize.

The mirror of the title is history and the distortion between what really happened and the reflected image gazing back at one. The imagery of how history distorted by those who have written its account is metaphorically framed within verse: “It is a waste of time hating a mirror / or its reflection / instead of stopping the hand / that makes glass with distortions.”

Thomas Jefferson: the man who wrote all men are created equal yet considered blacks inferior. The man who rebelled against the authoritarianism of kings, yet was fine with keeping the institution of slavery going as a fundamental part of the economy of a brand new country.

For the purpose of dehumanization in order to make genocidal palatable as a national course of action, parallels have historically been drawn by white Europeans between darker-skinned indigenous tribes and the Devil: “The Devil decoyed those miserable savages [to New England] in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb His absolute empire over them.”

“Indians” is used in a complicated way as synecdoche to refer both broadly to all indigenous tribes in North America as well as to dehumanize those belonging to those tribes by associating them with the Christian concept of the Devil.

In reference to the revolution of the steam-powered locomotive changing the paradigm of American economics: “The march of empire no longer proceeds with stately, measured strides, but has the wings of morning, and flies with the speed of lightning.”