From the beginning of America there has always been a racial problem that everyone is able to see (that they neglect it is another story). However, there is few talk about the class differences within a race. This is a struggle that many African Americans must face in America. The film Two Nations of Black America, the novel, Sarah Phillips, by Andrea Lee, and the memoir by Margo Jefferson, Negroland, can depict how we as a nation have failed the lower class but also how we as a higher class have failed the lower black class. The film Two Nations of Black American shows us the difference between the middle/upper class and the lower class and how the unity of black class has not been able to solve the problem of economic class. Henry Louis …show more content…
In the novel Sarah shows one certain moments in her life that made her and changed her to be who she was. Growing up Sarah’s parents tried to keep her innocence as long as possible by sending her to good school and moving multiple times to better neighborhoods. “We have to be careful. That school might ruin Sarah” (Lee, Kindle location 874) was one of the concerns that Sarah’s parents faced because they had just integrated Sarah into what was before an all-white school. Certainly, there were other kids that didn’t have to go through the hardship of integrating into white schools, but this was because they didn’t have the knowledge or the education that Sarah had been provided with to actually be integrated. “You and Daddy spend all of your lives sending us to white schools and teaching us to live in a never-never land where people of all colors just get along swell” (Lee Kindle location 1057) is something that comes to show the difference between the education that these kids were getting compared other black kids that were from lower classes. The biggest distinction was the fact that Sarah was able to go to a well-known University such as Harvard which is something that is extremely hard to do especially for a black person, but for Sarah it wasn’t because she had the right tools to do so. Furthermore, Sarah’s stay at the Prescott school shows us how much different Sarah believed to be from those of the lower class “his raised arm seemed to offer a kind of hortatory salute that filled me with a mixture of confusion and embarrassment. During my first fall and spring as a day student at the school, I saw him often on the kitchen porch, and I averted my eyes each time.” (Lee, Kindle location 861) Sarah wasn’t used to being the type of