Pg. 26-50 Response

 Pg. 26-50 Response

    The author continues siting the shortcomings of his childhood experience. He talked about how school wasn't designed for higher learning where he was from. I was designed to keep them off the streets. He mentioned that 60% of kids that dropped out of high school ended up in jail eventually. It's hard to imagine being aware of the intention of school not being learning and still following through. He talked about how school, religion, and the streets around him didn't give him answers to why things were the way they were. The ability to write that he gained from his grandmother helped him answer those questions why looking inward and making assumptions about everyone else from that. His use for writing again shows the discrepancy between my upbringing and someone like his. He used it as a tool to understand the world around him and I used it to write dumb little notes or bad stories. The assembly of literature that his father collected began to show him whole new ideas. He was enamored by the idea of the Black Panthers, and that their guns made sense. He started to see that violence was the only way they thought the white people would understand. It really makes me sad to see that both the school and his community failed him. He saw them as "two arms of the same beast." I found that the author gains confidence when talking about his experiences listening to Malcolm X. It sounds like for the first time in his young life he had found someone who rightly explained his anger and angst. He was reminded that he was not alone and that these feelings that he had had weren't unique. As he grew up he continued to be haunted by a movement to return to ways that had come before America, things that truly represented them. His writing about Howard university makes me realize how easy it was for me to find a community of people in my culture. He talks of it as if it's an oasis in a desert of white or conformed people. This discovery of a black diaspora allowed him to see that western culture was just as much black as it was white, if not more. He learned of the history of black people in Africa once at Howard, and it changed the way he saw himself and his race. He came to think that they were all, "Kings in exile."