The Escape

While reading "Between The World and Me" I couldn't help but draw parallels to my own experiences in the same city at the same places and the ever-recurring themes of escape and violence. At first, when reading starting to read this book with no type of prior knowledge I was surprised that the places my family and I grew up around were the same places Coates grew up around with the major difference between him and me being generational. Coates grew up in the Baltimore that my parents grew up in and this fact made me think more in-depth of why they are the way they are, and how a generation has changed things while things are still entirely the same. On page 129 Coates writes, "I did not die in my aimless youth, I did not perish in the agony of not knowing. I was not jailed. I had proved that there was another way beyond the schools and the streets. I felt myself to among the survivors of some great natural disaster, some plague, some avalanche or earthquake.", in this quote, I realized a theme of escape echoed by my grandmother, my parents, and internally me too. My grandmother grew up in a segregated Baltimore with god fearing parents who taught her to endure, she didn't have a hope of "escape" because she was married and pregnant by 19 in the 60s. My parents grew up in coats Baltimore where the only choices were school or violence and this is seen in the scares they both carried, unlike coats they didn't escape the endured like my grandmother. my mother jumping from on low pay job to another, and my father being involved in gang violence until he was shot his body in danger of being taken from him pushing him to become a mechanic with no hope of "escape". then there is me I fell into the crowd of escape threw school I was given the recipe by the experiences of my family to avoid the dangers of Baltimore and the tools of teachers to get my foot in the door. and thus I became the hope,  the smart one, the good one, the one who was going to pull the whole family on to the path of escape. Coat was able to make me realize a driving force in all of my families life escape, my grandmother thought if she was patient enough and good enough she would be able to escape, my parents thought that they could fight their way to escape, and I knew the only way to end up better than them was to escape through knowledge. Generations worth of trying to get out, get out of poverty, get out of Baltimore, to escape.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Freedom Riders 3/26

As I watched the “Freedom Riders” documentary, the more disgusted I become at that racial injustices in American history. At the beginning of the documentary, there is a small montage of bigots giving poor excuses as to why the South should remain segregated. However, there was one quote that stuck out that stated, “You can not change a way of life overnight. The more they try to force us into doing something, the worse the reaction is going to be.” Racism should not be a way of life anyone wants to live through or put onto someone else. The Freedom Riders and many nonviolent protesters weren’t physically imposing on others, so why was the reaction of segregationists to worsening as “they try to force” them into a realistic way of life? Watching the documentary and listening to how the Riders were willing to be martyrs for the Movement as they were physically attacked, their property was destroyed via molotov and mentally drained daily makes me appreciate activism a great deal more, ...
Read more
After reading the rest of Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton's Black Power and then reflecting about what we talked about in class on Tuesday, I still cannot put my finger on an exact definition of "black power." I do believe, though, that "black power" cannot be achieved without a change in the political structure of America. When reading the fourth chapter of this book, the idea that people in power control the law is brought up. I, almost, one hundred percent agree with this. The quote from the book that stood out to me was "Law is the agent of those in political power; it is the product of those powerful enough to define right and wrong and to have that definition legitimized by "law." This is not to say that "might makes right," but it is to say that Might makes Law." This quote shows how political leaders shape the law. Those in power get to make the laws, whether they are just or not. I still believe this today. I believe...
Read more

What It's Like to Be Black on Campus Now

In Melissa Harris-Perry’s article, “What It’s Like to Be Black on Campus Now”, she discusses the issues behind race in education and institutions through ten black student journalists who tell their personal experiences. She gives an example from the University of Missouri, explaining how one student decided to stop eating in protest of inaction and ineffective administrative responses to racial incidents on campus. 30 Missouri football players joined this one student in protest and University of Missouri’s president resigned soon after. This example is powerful because it shows other institutions that when you unite together, change can come. Harris- Perry continues to talk about how important education is to black families and how hard it is to send their children to a place that can be so full of hatred towards their race. She wrote, “Viewing higher education as a pathway to equity, African American families and communities have made enormous sacrifices to send black kids to college...
Read more