“You have to be at your strongest when you are feeling at your weakest.” - Unknown. Racism is a huge issue in the world today. Just because you are a different colour than someone else, you should not be treated differently. Unfortunately for Rashad and Quinn, they are treated differently because of their colour. Rashad is beat by a white police officer and is sent to the hospital all because of his appearance and the fact that he is black. In the novel, All American Boys, by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, Rashad and Quinn are fearless, and strong. Unfortunately, because they live in a racist society, these positive qualities lead to injury and guilt instead of success and happiness. Rashad is a fearless and strong teenager. Because he …show more content…
The main difference for Quinn is that the injury of Rashad leads to guilt for Quinn. Quinn doesn’t even know who Rashad is until he gets beat up by the police officers. To make it worse, the police officer who beat up Rashad, is Quinn’s best friends brother. After Quinn and his friends saw the incident live, they had to run from the scene so they climbed and ran on train tracks during a high traffic time of the day. Page 39, Paragraph 5: I started to climb. “The tracks?” Dwyer asked. “Are you crazy?” When I got to the top, I looked both ways. No trains. Still, it was probably a high traffic time, so that wouldn’t last for long. I dropped one leg on the other side of the fence, swung myself over, and began to climb down.” Quinn sees his friends brother beating up Rashad so he runs away and has to cross a set of train tracks to get to a safe spot. It is said that it was a busy time for trains to come at that time which made even more dangerous. Quinn is very fearless as he is willing to put his life in danger to get away from a situation. The video of Rashad being abused was all over the internet and Quinn was in it. Quinn was watching the whole fight unflod and didn’t do anything about it. Page 124, Paragraph 2: No way I was watching that video. I wanted to erase the whole damn memory from my mind. Although everybody was talking about the video, Quinn didn’t want to see it as he wanted to erase