A Week In Review

I think the reading by Baugh is good. I have never really thought about how my skin color affects some of the things I can and cannot do in the world. I guess it comes as a shock to me because I never really lived with that issue. I grew up in and upper class suburban neighborhood that only had two black families in the whole community. But, that didn’t pose a problem in our community. Everyone got alone with everyone. Most of the kids in the neighborhood attended the same school and played on sports teams together in the neighborhood park. From what I could see race was not an issue. As far as African Americans and Hispanics devaluing the property in the area case they trash the yards and stuff like that, that’s where your neighborhood council and dues come in. In my neighborhood everything was organized. Your grass had to be cut , you had to get certain things approved before you could put it in your front yard and every month you paid a fee that took care of someone patrolling the neighborhood for people not following the rules. If issues came up people were warned and given a day to have the problem fixed by. If it wasn’t done by then the person was fined. Everything was perfect in that neighborhood.

When It comes to speech I think that as an African American, we are our hardest critics. Like I stated in one of my first blogs, when I reached high school I told my parents that I wanted to go to a public high school. Now the funny thing about the high school in my community is that it is one of the worse in the state. One reason is because people in the community really don’t take interest in it cause all the kids go to private school . another reason is because they bus students half way across the city to fill the school. These kids did not come from the greatest neighborhood in Nashville. When I started school I had a few problems because of the way I talked. Now, when I was little I had a speech impediment. This was one of the reasons I went to private school so I could have a speech specialist work with me. But, the problem at this school was that I spoke too proper. In a school of people of my own race I was discriminated against because of the way I spoke. I think that blacks devalue their own a lot. That’s just like Obama, some people say that if he gets to be president it would be like having a white man cause he is not black enough. I think that the African American race needs to sit back and take a good look at itself and start forming new more positive judgments about us. If we cant do that then how can we expect other races to?