John Singleton’s film, Boyz N the Hood, displays the challenging upbringing of adolescents who have to live with harsh conditions around not only their home but also their surrounding town. The film compares the differences between the lifestyles of Tre Styles and his friends’, Darren and Ricky Baker. Darren and Ricky are half-brothers who are nothing alike. Singleton demonstrates the importance of male leadership in a home in the ghetto of Los Angeles by comparing the difference between the lifestyles of Tre and his friends. While many adolescents in the hood have close friendships, some form close relationships by assembling gangs and create a world of violence due to alcohol abuse, which together ultimately breeds discrimination.
Moore is establishing his indisputable motive to write this book; his motivation I believe is much more significant than just a mere interest in the coincidence, but also an opportunity to explore how the choices that one makes can alter one’s future. Upon his return from Oxford University, Moore recognized how Wes Moore and himself had both been raised in Baltimore, a breeding ground of violence and crime, a situation in which few can flourish in. Moore is exploring what the tolls of living in a twisted, urban area have on a young, child and how certain characters can leave such dissimilar influences. Moore secures validation over his motivation, yet others and he even himself questions “so what?” , however, I feel many, youth, in particular,
Evicted is a book that tells of America’s very real problem of poverty. Matthew Desmond gives readers a detailed image of the lives of eight people who are struggling to live in some of the poorest of neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The characters in this book speak for themselves and we get to witness firsthand their attempt to rise above poverty and fight against a system that profits off of them being poor. The characters struggle to afford places that many would consider uninhabitable. Eventually, they get evicted when they succumb to multiple problems that are a factor of their surroundings.
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
Life had never been easy for Jeanette Walls, growing up she consistently faced several forms of adversity at the hands of her parents, such as hunger, sexual assault, practical homelessness, and abuse. With so many tribulations, one would expect her to have become another low income statistic. However, just like a mountain goat, who does not actually belong to the goat family, Jeanette is of a different breed. While her parents exposed her to many harsh realities, they also instilled many important life lessons, whether they were aware of it or not. If it weren't for Rex and Rose Mary Walls, Jeanette would not have been as tough, driven, or creative enough to have survived in Manhattan.
The tone of chapter 11 in John Steinbeck's, “The Grapes of Wrath,” is sympathetic, sad and hopeless. His word choice and syntax show how the sad houses were left to decay in the weather. His use of descriptive words paints a picture in the reader's mind. As each paragraph unfolds, new details come to life and adds to the imagery. While it may seem unimportant, this intercalary chapter shows how the effects of the great depression affected common households.
How well Wes Moore describes the culture of the streets, and particularly disenfranchised adolescents that resort to violence, is extraordinary considering the unbiased perspective Moore gives. Amid Moore’s book one primary theme is street culture. Particularly Moore describes the street culture in two cities, which are Baltimore and the Bronx. In Baltimore city the climate and atmosphere, of high dropout rates, high unemployment and poor public infrastructure creates a perfect trifecta for gang violence to occur. Due to what was stated above, lower income adolescent residents in Baltimore are forced to resort to crime and drugs as a scapegoat of their missed opportunities.
They had very little human interaction and cared little about human life. Mildred and her friends were at home watching “White Clown”, a T.V. show that degrades the importance and miracle of being alive. (Hamilton 84) People watched this show because they had nothing else to do; Books, rocking chairs, front porches, and gardens had already been removed from society. That same night Montag asks Mildred’s friends if they are worried about their husbands who are in war.
Andre Dubus III’s memoir titled, “Townie” reflects on Dubus’s life beginning before he was born and ending at age 40. At a young age his father left his mother for a college student and from then on his mother struggled to provide for him and his three siblings. Even though his father sent child support payments monthly, his mother had difficulty fully providing for her children. However, despite her efforts, Dubus and his siblings were able to get away with a lot simply because their mother was working long hours in order to provide a place to live and food on the table. His oldest sister, Suzanne, sold and did drugs while Dubus and his younger brother, Jeb, drank, stole, and did drugs.
Evelyn Powell Mr. Horn Ela 5th period 2/13/23 How do the Logan’s use family and community to help them survive? In the book “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry”, written by Mildred D. Taylor, you follow a family of 7 named the Logans, the Logan family lived in southern USA, during the peak of racism and Jim Crow laws, the family was better off than many other African American families at that time, they had their own land and could afford decent food, but they still weren’t extremely well off. Their family had a countable amount of debt and could only buy new clothes in turns, but they could handle their own, one of the main contributors to this relatively stable life was their family and community. When times were tough, they would work together with friends and family, white and black, to help each other, they would lend money, they could give people food
Harris works and lives in the inner-city streets where the drug dealers overrun the city. Harris’ personal beliefs and sense of justice are a result of his life experiences with criminals and drug dealers. His ideas of justice and sense of right and wrong coupled with the social factors of drugs and crime in his community contribute to Harris’ unethical conduct. For instance, the temptations are always present in the circumstances when raiding any drug dealer activity. Drug dealers possess a lot of money and drugs, such as the Training Day movie, in which money and drugs influence Harris, so he acts criminalized.
Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance is a memoir that follows J.D. through a childhood full of hope, adventure, and physical and mental abuse. This memoir follows not only J.D. through a life of poverty, but examines a culture in crisis, commonly referred to as ‘hillbillys’. J.D. helps examine and identify the characteristics of the culture from the inside, while effectively telling the story of the class’s social decline. J.D. examines the hope his family possesses following the war, however as years begin to pass it becomes abundantly clear that no form of government aid can truly help the people of his community. In search of a life above the poverty line, J.D.’s family leaves Kentucky in search of a better life, possessing only hope in their hearts.
The informal language, creative word choice, and diction used by all of the characters in this story are true to the Southern Gothic genre short story style (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). Southern imagery extends beyond the characters to the setting and language. As we read about dirt roads, southern plantations, “red clay banks”, and crops in the field, we are
The Institutionalization of Coherence: “Families are the primary locus of institutionalized coherence” (Pearce, 1989, p. 69). Additionally, “children are voracious interpreters, remembering with awesome detail the patterns between their parents, their parents’ commentaries about others drives and relatives, and modes of expressing love, anger, hate, and frustration” (Pearce, 1989, p. 69). Children look up to their families so that they know how to act, interact, and communicate with others. Children tend to mirror their families practices, therefore, if a parent yells at others when talking to them, the child will more than likely do the same. There is no doubt that in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance learned how to be a Hillbilly from none other than
Vance calls these individuals 'hillbillies', and his book comes as these groups are surviving social and financial emergency. Enduring at the sharp end of the USA's fast deindustrialisation, the generously compensated, talented occupations of past ages have vanished, leaving towns and urban communities in changeless subsidence and buried in compulsion and neediness. Vance paints an enthralling representation of his developmental condition: as he puts it, of 'what it feels like to have destitution and dependence hanging round your neck from
