It is hard to understand the struggle of another person that is forced to live in a society where they are seen as inferior to the societal norm due to uncontrollable circumstances. How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon is a story about a young African American male that is shot by a white American male. The story is made up a multiple accounts of the people connected to the lives of Tariq Johnson and Jack Franklin. These are real life accounts of the person 's emotions and their point of view on the incident. The big question of the entire incident is whether Tariq was armed or not, and the more we are exposed to multiple stories the further we are from the truth. In How It Went Down, Kekla Magoon strives to find a way to present the strength of a minority community through exposing their daily obstacles of living in a struggling …show more content…
When one is maturing, they absorb the environment around them and the actions seen around them become their habits. If one is surrounded around bad influences, these influences slowly create people who cannot morally decipher right from wrong and constantly make the wrong decisions. Thus, furthering them from society’s view of acceptable or equal. In How It Went Down, Underhill, the name of Tariq’s neighborhood, is named specifically to show the social divide in the community. Underhill was created by Magoon to serve as a symbol to people to show that this neighborhood is below others. As Tom Arlen exclaimed that he has “lived here twenty years, and I’ve never known a gunman in Underhill to walk away that easy, no matter the circumstances” Underhill serves as the figurehead for all neighborhoods that the world has lost hope on and has been left to fend for itself. When one is raised in such an environment where murder and theft are so heavily occurring. It is nearly impossible to focus on the important things that help you develop into a mature young
Where we’re from, who we know, and how our mental makeup is, is very important in our lives. It can be the deciding factor between life in prison and a life dedicated to giving back to others. In The Other Wes Moore, The lives of two young men are examined through three distinct lenses, how the role our environment, social capital (How we get ahead by helping each other) and how our mindset can dictate who we become later on in life. Both of these young men grew up in roughly the same environment, the ghettos of Baltimore, Maryland and the Bronx, New York, respectively.
In “Growing up unrented on the lower east side” by Edmund Berrigan is a written piece that tells the story of his struggles trying to settle down in the bustling city. He starts off the passage with an explanation of a repeating dream he has about an old apartment that he used to live in, and how he felt he never went anywhere no matter how high he climbed. After moving from place to place, Edmund and his family make their next home an apartment in New York. In the apartment lived Edmunds siblings and their parents, who both made a living by utilizing their talents as poets. Living in this apartment was difficult due to its pricing, which was very hard to maintain due to Edmunds father dying when he was 8.
The teacher asks whether or not black students still care about racial justice and the boy responds by saying, “In the fifties we still had something to prove so we had a reason to fight”. The teacher asks, “you don’t think black students are competing now?”. His response: “No.” Maybe the filmmakers took this exchange out of context or maybe the student was trying to say something else, but it saddened me to think that there might be children who already feel a sense of defeat. The recent media campaigns surrounding police violence against black individuals, something that has been going on for decades just without media coverage, is showing the public that there is far more that needs to be done in order to make America equal for all races.
Conscience is the feeling inside one 's self that alerts them that something is wrong. This can sometimes be overpowered by stronger external forces such as a powerful authority figure, surrounding circumstances, or the belief that what they did was correct. Through, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt argues that for the first time the world has encountered a different kind of criminal- - one that blindly followed orders from superiors and was made to believe the anti-Semitic ideology, although it could have been any ideology. Similarly, in her work, A Human Being Died That Night, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela claims that the actions of ordinary citizens could be influenced by surrounding practices and drive people
In February 2012, a 28-year-old man followed a 17-year-old youth and killed him on a residential street. The youth hadn’t done anything; he did not commit a crime, and he hadn’t provoked the older man. He was shot simply because he seemed “suspicious.” This was the story of Trayvon Martin’s death in Sanford, Florida at the hands of George Zimmerman (Cooper). Zimmerman, the killer, is a white man while Trayvon was an innocent black youth.
Kids in the most disadvantaged neighborhood, with low family resources, bad schools, and neighborhoods characterized by violence are the ones who are being punished unfairly and are not given second chances. This is because of the discrimination and the bias of the criminal justice system against poor African-American communities, which represent a concentrated disadvantage in that case. Moreover it affirms the theory that the poor are more likely to get to prison because there is a bias in arrest such as the neighborhood social class that affects the presence of the police and their arrests. In that case 6th street is considered a neighborhood that represents communities that are disadvantaged, and therefore the presence of police is greater than necessary. Instead of having the resources from outside to ameliorate the conditions of the neighborhood and improve schools or academic institutions, the efforts and resources are being invested in the war against crimes, but without giving an alternative solution for their
The Hate You Give written by Angie Thomas was inspired by a lifetime of events, but the death of Oscar Grant was what prompted Thomas to write her novel. Thomas lived in a poor, black community in Jackson, Mississippi, and was exposed to and witnessed violence on several occasions throughout her young life. She first heard the news of the death of Grant while she was attending a predominantly white university in Jackson where many students made assumptions that Grant was automatically at fault or involved with gangs or drugs. From this event, Thomas realized that the world needed to hear what she had to say in The Hate You Give. Grant 's death by police wasn 't the first nor the last that lead to a community uprising.
For countless families, this violence instilled immense fear in their hearts. Fear took over the lives of many people, but I decided that this situation would not stop me from living a normal life. When people asked me why I was still living in such a deadly city, I would simply respond that I loved my hometown. The city was going through a tough period, but it was up to its people to keep the city alive. We had to work as a community to rebuild what had been lost through violence.
Elijah Anderson, a Yale professor, developed the concept or theory entitled the “code of the street” which explains the reasoning for high rates of street violence among African-American juveniles in a Philadelphia community. The “code of the street” is the way of life for many living in poverty-stricken communities which attempt to regulate behaviors. Anderson observed that juveniles in inner-city neighborhoods who are exposed to racial discrimination, economic disadvantages and alienation from mainstream society may lead violent behavior. The strain, social learning, and labeling theories are all directly related to Anderson’s work.
Another aspect is that fighting amongst each gang is fostering a criminal environment. Throughout the book and when Mitchel turned his life around by contact of becoming friends with Elias Batrouney, I related with him, Mitchel. It has encouraged me to take a serious view of my life on what I wanted to do with my life and vocation, starting my apprenticeship in a school environment. Brendon Wild P.3 I enjoyed reading this book as the characters are boys and it is written in an area of controversy.
They await the police to report the crime and an African American officer suggested to Furious that he should have just killed him to rid the streets of another African American thug. This upsets Furious because someone in a position of power is corrupted with the thoughts of black on black crime being the solution to the violence in South Central. The message behind this is to show how some people perceive the situation of what is causing the problems in their own community. In this African American officer’s perspective, he believes that the stereotypical young black man is almost always a thug and is the reason for all the crime in their
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
Racial profiling by law enforcement is commonly defined as “a practice that targets people for suspicion of crime based on their race, ethnicity, religion or national origin” (“Racial Profiling”). Racial profiling can be done because of stereotypes like “Blacks and Hispanics are more prone to crime” (Niller). However, that doesn’t mean that is alright for officers to “stop and search people” (“The Problem”) or shoot them because they look agitated. The power to stop and search is given by the fourth amendment requires that the police have a “reasonable suspicion that a crime has been, is being, or is about to be committed before stopping a suspect.
Gook does not simply show the Korean side of the struggle or the African American side of the struggle, but it displays both of their struggles and how they converge. Eli and Daniel attempt to maintain their father’s shoe business, but they fall behind in rent and must buy illegally in order to maintain their store, while many Kamilla and her family deals with abusive households and poverty. Both ethnic groups share the same struggle, but the mainstream media pushes the Model Minority myth to create the imaginary that all Asians Americans always do well. This misrepresentation of Asian Americans creates a division between the Korean and African American communities by taking the story out of context. Gook challenges this racial division and describes the interdependency among the Asian, Latino, and African American community.
The great philosopher Plato once said , “Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, and the other of the rich; these are at the war with one another.” This quote perfectly summarizes the theme of S.E Hinton's novel, The Outsiders. The novel is about two gangs/groups that live in Rural, Oklahoma, the Greasers and the Socials. The Socs are the more affluent and often times referred to as the ‘West-side rich kids’, and the Greasers, are the less fortunate gang. Throughout the novel both gangs experience various types of conflict and at one point their differences ended up costing the life of a couple gang members.