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The Day I Became Black Analysis

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PART A TASK 1 I find the text “The day I became black” very interesting. This is a text by Willem Reerink, where he writes about “when he became black”. What he means with that is that one day in school, some of his classmates was talking about that it was no African American kids in their class, but Willem was in fact African American, but it didn’t show. His skin was caramel, so nobody had ever thought of him as “black”. But as soon as Willem “came out”, he felt that the other classmates and the kids at school started to treat him different. He felt like his classmates felt betrayed and all of a sudden, the other kids at school started to give him fist bumps and kids he had never before spoken to, started to speak to him. I like this text because it is very interesting how he describes the way people started to act after they found out that he was African American. At first they didn’t believe him because his skin wasn’t black and he didn’t play basketball or listen to rap, and he felt that the expectations that were set for him, were all stereotypes. This text shows us how the …show more content…

Parents often give their kids names that means something to them, or names that are familiar. Kids often get named after their grandparents, their great grandparent and so on. My own name for example, is one of my great grandmother’s middle names. Our names might also come from places that our family has been living for generations, or our names might mean something special. In the news article “Native American Heritage Month” we meet a woman that has a very special name herself, and has given just as special names for her children. The reason behind the special names is that the family is a part of a special tribal community and their names mean something spiritual in their language. So as we see, these names tell us a bit of who we are dealing with and where they come

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