Michele Wallace's Short Story 'The Wrong Lunch Line'

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America is made up from all different types of cultures from all around the world, such as Europe, Asia, and Africa. In America Street, there is a lot of different cultures in each story. Like in The Circuit, Francisco Jiménez talks about his family sharecropping and his opportunity and conflicts with going to school. The common theme of cultural, racial or religious differences appears in Sixth Grade, The Wrong Lunch Line, and The All-American Slurp. In the short story of Sixth Grade by Michele Wallace, it talks about an African American girl who is discriminated against mostly because of her race and her coming from a different background than the other kids. "Why Sandra, I'm amazed. I thought certainly you would be one of my F students" (Wallace, 85). It was because Sandra was black and that she was very different, spunky and intelligent. Her teacher paid the other kid more attention and treated them with more respect because they were white. In this story, it represents the racial differences between Sandra and the other children at her school. She didn’t have the fancy …show more content…

Mildred was Jewish and Yvette was Catholic, even though the two religions are very different but similar in some ways they still became the best of friends. The religious discrimination in this story appears when Yvette gets into Mildred's lunch line and gets caught. " This child … is eating lunch here with the Jewish children, and I don’t think she's Jewish. She looks Spanish" (Mohr 36). Why do the non-Jewish children get free lunch and the other children don’t? The religious differences and discrimination didn’t stop these two girls from being best of friends and being able to laugh at it all, in the end, is possibly what the world