5. Cultural outsiders who write young adult fiction tend to romanticize the impoverishment of Indians. Junior is having none of this: “It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian.
There are also many other important issues and problems brought up in the book that were linked directly to the real life social problems in rural California which Steinbeck brings to life in a variety of techniques and language styles. The first and most obvious issue involved with inequality is racism, because crooks is black, he is looked upon in a typical and prejudice way, which was normal and socially acceptable in the 1930’s. His views and opinions are seen as worthless, “Why its just a nigger saying it.” Crooks is socially outcast in the ranch, he lives and sleeps alone, no-body had ever entered his room or decided to discuss things with him until the conversation he has with Lennie. I think it is ironic in the way that crooks dismisses Lennie as being the same as all the other white men, “You got no right to be in my room, Nobody got any right in here but me.” Considering Lennie to be racist is being racist himself. I also think it is very ironic that the most unintelligent person on the ranch is the only one who ignores the very unintelligent social hierarchy of racism, which the other supposedly better educated workers take part in.
Jim LaRose Professor Rollings Sociology 101 3/19/2012 The Social Construction of Parallel Worlds in the Jim Crow South There are two different worlds when it comes to White and Negro. They have different beliefs, different way of living, and a different way of treating people that aren’t the same. In the novel Black like Me it shows the reader the life style that black people had to live in the 1950’s. Racism was a normal thing back then and wasn’t dealt with the way it is now. Whites felt powerful and as if they were in control.
He states that, “he had the whitest shirt you’d ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had “(page 35). Here he is talking spitefully about how the black man has better things than the white man because he feels that all black people should be low because that is what the state of mind in his life was. He feels like the man is stealing away what should be his because he is white, so therefore he deserves more. Another subject of irony was when he was talking about how the government wants everyone but him to raise his son. He states in the quote, “here’s the law a-standing ready to take a man’s son away from him-a man’s own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expense of raising”(page 34).
He was explaining that he did not know the details of his backgrounds. He takes this observation one step further by stating the differences between white and black children. Instead of accepting this difference, he is keenly aware of the inequality of even the most minor details. These descriptions of inequality plague the first half of the book and the reader realizes the “worth” of a slave when Douglass in one important quote from “We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep and swine.
In the novel of mice and men John Steinbeck (the author) use the character crooks to represent racism and symbolize the marginalization of the black community occurring at the time which the novel was set. Crooks is significant as he provides am insight into reality of the American dream and the feeling of all the ranchers. Crooks got his name from his ‘crooked back’ this suggest that he repeats something different, a hard life and he is not your average ranch hand. It was common for white and black people to be segregated in the 1930s; black people had no civil rights and couldn’t use most of the facilities for example going to school and library. John Steinbeck explores this in the novel through crooks.
One example of this was the simple that no able bodied man was able to live in these projects along with their families. They were forced to struggle on their own to look for low-end jobs. This idea of the American family that consisted of a working father and a working mother clearly weren’t in affect here. It proved hurtful to the lifestyle of many African American families. As a women stated in the film, “The strong and tightly knit families I had grew up around had begun to shatter and it was one of the most tragic things I had seen”(Pruitt-Igoe).
Department of Education that show that girls outshine boys in reading, writing, science, math, and have a lot higher educational aspirations. She also gives us data that shows that girls are starting to beat boys in enrolling in college, and that girls are more engaged in academically then boys. She implies that all of this has been happening because the educational doesn’t “favor” boys over girls anymore. I agree with that statement, but I also don’t think that the educational should let boys be “left behind” either. Yes, boys are bad at school; I can say this because I’m a boy and I see everything first hand, my peers are less and less interested in school and college, they often talk about just either dropping out of high school and getting a job, graduating and just work and not go to college or simply join the military.
Sherry thinks this is wrong because it cheats them and the employers who expect graduates to have basic skills. 2. The author’s title is misleading. It leads you to think the story will be about cursing but it is really meant to represent the word failure or flunking. I think she chose this title because even though the “F” word is not as bad as you thought it would be, failure is still a pretty bad word for most people.
Academic achievement is devalued because of its association with the dominant and oppressive white culture. A contrary view notes that while both black and white adolescents may sometimes exert (or experience) peer pressure against being "nerdy" and working hard in school, this anti-intellectual norm is not usually racialized. Fordham and Ogbu reported on their observations from a single school. Several studies based on representative national surveys of high-school students have reached contrary findings. These have demonstrated that the differences between black and white students are negligible with respect to the value placed on education.