Spiller opens up her essay with the names in which society such as, “Peaches” “Brown Sugar” “Aunty”, that she has been called throughout her life. When she says “I am a marked woman but not everybody knows my name”, she means that without knowing anything about her, people in society automatically categorize her because of the color of her skin and the associated history in which people of color have faced, therefore define her. The opening of Spiller’s essay compares to that of Fanon’s because immediately they are both judged by the color of their skin and looked at differently because of that. That others will always see them as these stereotypes because of the white dominated society that surrounds them. Another big aspect people of color face is the idea of being “un-gendered”. For example on page 72 Spillers writes, “Those African persons in “Middle Passage” were literally suspended in the “oceanic” if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet “American” either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all”. The fact that there was no name or even a gender named to these people was enough to create a narrative that these people were seen more as subjects rather than humans. Even though in this piece of literature there were apparently less women than men, they were still expected to endure and work just as hard as the males did. Recently, I read a book called “Black No More” where a machine was created to make a person “more white”. People of color in this book faced discrimination within their jobs, families and in present day situations, just like they do now. The issue was that even when they were “turned” white, their babies could come out black and therefore others would know whether they were actually white or not. Essentially, in the end the people who used the machine to make themselves white, were “too” white. Therefore, they were more easily identified as having used the machine and were then discriminated against. This ties into the idea that racism comes full circle from a past history and there will always be an objectification upon initial appearance due to societal implications.

Placing structure to concepts we give meaning to is a very Nietzschean idea. Through doing so, we grow the concepts and achieve a more likeness to the content. Jakobson from “Linguistics and Poetics” attempts to reduce the different facets of language using their inherent functions. He first gives meaning to the six factors of language first: addresser, context, message, contact, code, and the addressee. The addresser and the addressee are quite the opposites, where the addresser is where a message originates to give to the audience, who receives the message. The message is the content, text, or the idea that is being passed over, and it links the addresser and the addressee together. The code is where the message gains its meaning through rules, as it will be encoded by the addressor to be decoded be the addressee. The context is similar to the setting of the message and must be obviously communicated over through the message. Finally, the contact is what allows for the addresser and the addressee to maintain a connection together to further communications.

Each factor of language relate to what Jakobson calls a function. The poetic function of language is where the message places emphasis upon itself due to its more obscure message. It is meant for the addressee to delve into the syntagmatic and associative relationships between the words so that the core message is unlocked. However when the emphasis of the message is placed on the addressor or the addressee, the emotive and conative functions, respectively, are brought forth. The emotive function relies on the addressor to pass on their emotions and feelings to the message. In the case of the conative function, the message garners a response from the addressee, placing emphasis on them to maintain the communication channel. Similarly, the phatic function has the sole reason to maintain the contact, yet carries absolutely no substance. The referential function corresponds to the context; who and what the message is referring to. Finally, the metalingual function ties in with the code where they place emphasis on sentence structure and the specific words used. Jakobson created all factors and their underlying functions seek to build a structure of language that would help us further our relationships to each other.