2) Both environments played a huge role into their personalities and their stories. For both Wes’s, the streets of the Bronx and Baltimore were filled with poverty, drugs, and violence. Chinquapins population of students was 99% black. (Moore 27) and it certainly did not help that the other Wes’s brother Tony started dealing drugs since he was 10. The personality he gained from Tony made him follow in his footsteps and join others selling drugs on the streets.
Geoffrey Canada does an excellent job of bringing his readers to the streets of the South Bronx and making them understand the culture and code of growing up in a poor, New York City neighborhood in the ‘50s and ‘60s. In his book, Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, Canada details, through his own childhood experiences, the progression of violence in poverty plagued neighborhoods across America over the last 50 years. From learning to be “brave” by being forced to fight his best friend on a sidewalk at six-years-old, to staring down an enraged, knife wielding, “outsider” with nothing to defend himself but nerve, Canada explains the nightmare of fear that tens of thousands of children live through every day growing up in poor neighborhoods. The book
In Baltimore and Harlem, many people have to deal with issues like the one I stated earlier. In The Other Wes Moore, we looked into the lives of two Wes Moores who lived in the same city and just a couple blocks apart. In this book, we saw how the two boys were starting off similar getting involved in drugs and dealing with family issues, and how
The similarities in Night and Schindler’s list are very obvious but one theme comes out in particular. Many people try not to realize what's true when they don’t want to when they see how fallacious it is. In the first few pages of Night by Elie Wiesel a boy discovers the horrors that are happening in Germany to the Jews and tries to warn others what is coming, ”Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad. ”(P.7 Elie Wiesel).
He displays the sad moments in Ross’s childhood. The loss of his red horse, his father’s land being cheated from him, and the lack of money to buy his suit for the church program. Coates, also explains how Ross was bought “on contract” like many black individuals or families, the reason they were unable to receive a loan is because of racial propaganda. Coates states, “the men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay [. . . ]
In contrast, the narrator internalizes his feelings by repressing them as his father did after his brother passed away. As it was the relationship of their father and uncle, Sonny and his brother grew up in Harlem, a district replete with hopelessness and poverty. Yet each individual reacts to his environment in unusual ways. On the one hand, the narrator distances himself from his community in Harlem, including his brother Sonny. The narrator may love his brother but is in general judgmental of the direction of Sonny's life struggles and decisions.
African Americans throughout most of their history have lived under the power of the crime-justice system according to Coates and not it’s authority. “Nisbet, distinguishes between “power” and “authority” … authority… is a matter of relationships, allegiances, and association… Power…is “external” and “based” upon force.” Although one can imply as to why he makes the argument, he does not provide any evidence or reasoning to back up his claim. One can imply from Coates saying “Power exist where allegiances have decayed or never existed at all.
The Holocaust can be called one of the darkest sides and the biggest tragedies of the human civilization. There are many different stories and experiences that recap what happened in the camps. Each one is unique from the next, but also shares similarities with in each other. There are two stories that interest many people and have similarities and differences. In the novel Night and in the movie "Life is Beautiful", the Holocaust was experienced both similarly and differently through the mood of sadness, father/ son relationship, and self-preservation.
Many people forget that African Americans in this country have been enslaved for longer than they have been free. Coates reminds his son to not forget their important history and that they will continuously struggle for freedom over their own bodies. They must learn to live within a black body. These struggles can be seen in the racial profiling and brutality among police officers in cases such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and countless of others. He goes on to describe his childhood and how fear was the root of black existence.
He sees African American youths finding the points of confinement put on them by a supremacist society at the exact instant when they are finding their capacities. The narrator talks about his association with his more youthful sibling, Sonny. That relationship has traveled
When he first arrived the narrator began searching for jobs but was blacklisted by the dean of his college. He later found a job at a paint company where he was later fired the same day. These multiple encounters with injustice gave him a strong sense of “dispossession.” This lead to him joining this club called “The Brotherhood.” His goal while in this organization was to bring justice to the “dispossessed” people of Harlem.
Further humiliation was in store when the boys had to fight for coins and bills that were strewn on a rug, which they realized too late was electrified. The “good, hard American cash” (Ellison 8) that they thought they were fighting for turned out to be “brass pocket tokens advertising a certain make of automobiles” (Ellison 12). The entire incident made the narrator understand his own invisibility; the blacks were not important enough to be allowed to fight for real
Although he believes that this question is unanswerable, Coates’ purpose is to express his deepest concerns for his son and to help him understand his personal experiences as a black man. He achieves his purpose by incorporating rhetorical skills such as ethos, pathos, and logos. Coates has been a successful journalist and writer for several years. He previously worked for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and O
Today, money has made many people believe that you need to have a lot of money to live a great, happy life. People in the world, especially the people who don’t have as much money as the ones that do, look up to people like popular idols, because they have money. People think they have a great living life with all the money they have earned during their lives. In the short story “Why You Reckon?” by Langston Hughes, the author uses diction, colloquialism and dialect to express the fact that just because people have the money to go out to eat somewhere expensive or buy the newest clothes, does not mean that a person is happy all the time and expresses how people in the town talks. Money is what makes the world goes round and everyone has come
When it comes to justice, Polemarchus believes that justice is “…helping friends and harming enemies.”. Socrates questions this point of view because according to Polemarchus’ view point, only the people who are close to him and in his circle of friends would be worthy of any kind of Justice. Polemarchus is wrong in this viewpoint because if only the people that you know who are of your similar social status and you interact with on a day to day basis are considered friends, what of those that you do not know? Or what of those who are not of your social status, that you do not interact with? Socrates questions this by asking, “Do you mean by friends those who seem to be good to an individual, or those who are, even if they don't seem to be, and similar with enemies?”.
