Beneath the Smooth Skin of America

Beneath the Smooth Skin of America

Change is something you are probably familiar with. In “Beneath the Smooth Skin of America,” Scott R. Sanders talks about many changes in his life. The author starts the story looking throw the eyes of himself as a child. As a child he remembers that all that was in his sight was all he could see. The author’s best example of this is he says, ”Neighbors often appeared…where they came from I could not imagine” (27). As the author begins to see more by leaving the area he was around so often he starts to see more and more things. He started moving around to different places and started seeing the things that he had not see before. The author points out many things that he began to see like the stores around the town and the different colors of places. The smell of the certain area over the one smell he was used to. In his travels to the south he noticed the bathrooms signs in the south read, “Colored” and “White.” All these different changes made his world seen bigger and bigger.

As the author got out more the more world started to irritate him. The author’s relatives, who lived in the southern states, helped the author to think of himself as, “A Northerner”(p.28). After leaving for college in Rhode Island he explains that in his college days he thought of himself as a “Midwesterner.” The other students of his college, using the stereotype, made fun of him and the way he acted. “I was square, my new friends assured me” (p.28). This ...