essay 3

 

Rose and Coates shared similar experiences between their childhood no kid should have to worry about or experience. Rose encountered a lot of violence and toughness on the streets of Los Angeles as did Coates in Philadelphia. Coates ad Rose’s story both share these identities and how the schools corrupt what the world is actually like.

During an interview in Manhattan, Coates was asked about his body, or more specifically, why the success of white americans were built on looting and violence. The host wanted to know about his, a black man’s opinion, which leads into the story of his childhood. He writes to his fifteen year old son about the violence in the world, “And you now know, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It doesn’t matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It doesn’t matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy… All of this is common to black people.” (Coates 9). This quote shows the connection between your body, violence and racism. “When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream” (Coates 10-11). Coates wants people to see the violence black people suffer through from all races, and when he is asked about it, he doesn’t want to ruin people’s perception of what the american dream is.

Rose’s family came over seas from Calabria to Pennsylvania in 1921. That his where his father met his mother. After they had their son and went bankrupt, his dad decided to move his family to California. He had heard that that is where people re going to live the american dream and he wanted to make that for himself. They moved on to Vermont Ave where most elderly people lived and very few kids. Many of his neighbors were committed of crimes like child molestation and on the same street ,bones were found and many people Rose knew died. There were gang members that were three blocks away but they didn’t have much interest in Rose, the least they would do was push him around. “It was popular these days to claim you grew up on the streets. Men tell violent tales and romanticized the lessons violence brings. But, though it was occasionally violent, it wasn’t the violence in South L.A. that marked me, for sometimes you can shake that ugliness off. What finally affected me was subleter, but more pervasive…” (Rose 17). Unlike Coates, there was less violence that Rose encountered. However, one major topic they share in common is a corrupt education.

Rose’s education took place in a vocational school when he was placed their after completing a standardized test that got switched with another Rose.He didn’t understand what this meant as he and his family have had very little schooling. His sophomore english teacher didn’t understand much english so they mostly read the schools required readings such as Julius Caesar. To Rose, school was just a place to learn about stuff that wasn’t as important as life lessons are. Schools implant everything else into your brain except what really matters and reprimand you when you don’t understand something. “The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own gray matter to make this defense work. You’ll have to shut down, have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm, have to cultivate stupidity, have to convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world” (Rose 29). What this quote is saying is that sometimes you have to reject what the schools are teaching you because they will have no impact on your life in the future and you have to understand and learn what is important and pertains to a specific person’s life in order to be a successful and happy person.

When coates was a seventh grader. He says he remembers sitting in his french class not understanding why he was there or what the importance of taking the class was. He knew that he would never go to France and that was a whole nother world to him. “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say I truly believed any of them” (Coates 26). He believed the schools gave us a false idea of what the world was really like, and it was just a place to go and escape from the violence that’s in the world. However, the schools didn’t teach the truth about Baltimore, they hid them. This was the part he didn’t agree with. He experienced life on the streets and knew the truth about walking through them and the people that are involved. The violence would never be talked about and when they try to hide the fact that murders and rapes are happening affects more than just the students.

In Coates’s and Rose’s stories they share important aspects that all readers can relate to. Everyone in their lifetime has experienced some forms of violence, some more severe than others, and it’s inevitable. There has always been someone or something that conceals the truth, but it’s what you do with it. You can run from the truth or you can confront it. This is exactly what Coates and Rose did.