Promise Boys, written by Nick Brooks, follows prep school students J.B., Ramon, and Trey as they attempt to clear their names when they are framed for the death of their principal. Set against the backdrop of Urban Promise Prep, the novel delves into the themes of identity and post-colonial influences. This is evident in the characters’ relentless struggle against societal expectations and stereotypes, revealing their fight to maintain individuality amidst external pressures. In essence, Promise Boys shows that the post-colonial factors of agency, ethnicity, essentialism, and surveillance significantly affect how individuals can control their lives due to an inability to express their identities. Firstly, the agency traps individuals within …show more content…
It shows that the students are no longer “kids [.], [but] they [are] prisoners” (82). Portraying the students as prisoners underscores how oppressive systems diminish an individual's agency, constraining their capacity to assert control over their lives and express their identities freely. Additionally, it illustrates the colonial idea of education, emphasising obedience and conformity, which mirrors the expectations of the colonial workplace. In both contexts, individuals are expected to keep their heads down and follow the rules set by authority figures. It also prioritises assimilation into a more dominant norm, which can make marginalised individuals feel constrained by rigid expectations that limit their ability to express themselves. Ultimately, the depiction of the students as prisoners highlights their lack of agency, and that they are ensnared by circumstances that prevent them from expressing themselves or making independent decisions. …show more content…
The. This becomes clear when J.B.’s heart starts racing as a police car goes by the students, because “there [is] no one [there] to protect [them], only police [them]” (Brooks 224). This surveillance imposes upon the boys a feeling that they are objects to be monitored and controlled, which restrains their ability to express their identities without scrutiny. The students must also adhere to the police’s strict guidelines to avoid being further ostracised or subjected, since the police represent colonial power. This objectification and scrutinization makes the students feel unsafe and unprotected to be themselves. In summary, the pervasive presence of a colonial power, embodied by the police throughout the text, demonstrates how surveillance can hinder individuals’ freedom of expression, leaving them feeling objectified and constrained. In conclusion, Promise Boys by Nick Brooks reveals how post-colonial influences change the development of an identity. Through the stories of J.B., Ramon, and Trey, the novel explores themes of agency, ethnicity, essentialism, and surveillance, showing how minority individuals struggle to control their lives due to an inability to express their identities amid extraneous pressures.
Harding, D. J. (2010). Living the Drame: Community, Conflict, and Culture Among Inner-City Boys. Chicago, IL: The University Of Chicago Press.
The Boys of Baraka is an inspiring documentary that follows the lives of four African-American twelve and thirteen-year-old boys from the “projects” of Baltimore, Maryland. It is a neighborhood swarming with crime and poverty, but even in the middle of such hardships and against all odds, these four boys have hopes and dreams that can be materialized eventually. Aspiring for more than what Baltimore and its educational system can offer, which based on Anyon study is a working-class school, due to the way in which work is performed (197), they are presented with an opportunity of a lifetime. Thus, they are given the chance to get out of their crime-prone, drug abusing environment, to study in a remote location, far away from their homes and families, at The Baraka School, located in Kenya, East Africa. Consequently, family instability through drug abuse is portrayed in the documentary as one of the main causes of student drop-out. For example, Devon, one
Even before she stepped foot in the hallways of Central High, however, Melba’s sense of excitement and anticipation began to subside and was replaced with fear and frustration. As she went through her first few months at Central, she was plagued with a daily fear for her own personal safety. She could not understand how boys and girls could be allowed to behave in such hateful and often physically abusive ways. She learned, too, that the white students attending Central High were not the only ones who displayed such hateful behavior, as many of the school’s administrators as well as the members of the local a...
...lms these students get away with murder and still go on to college. This simply does not happen in real life; therefore, looking to Hollywood films for the true colors of schools is not in the best of interests. We have to realize that directors produce these films in their vision of American culture. We as Americans always look to the American Dream of sometime “making it.” The films neglect to see the loser’s point of view, meaning Hollywood films only look to a positive ending because it is in our nature to believe in the American Dream. This book allows our society to actually look past the films fantasies and observe the true inequalities in school. Although Hollywood films do correctly show how urban, suburban, and private students behave in schools, they do not show the true outcomes of real life.
Shorris wanted to explore on poverty in America and write a book based on opinions on what keeps people poor. Therefore, as results of varied conversations with special people in prison, Shorris came to support the prisoner, Viniece Walker’s, argument that destitute students are those most in need of a liberal education. Viniece introduced Shorris to the thought of the “moral life of downtown”, meaning to expose them to museums, lectures, etc. (Page 2), which he understood as the need for reflection for the poor. This emphasizes the very fact that in order for the poor to escape from their “surround of force” (Page 1) they must undergo a transformation rooted in reflection and self-realization. Shorris believes that “the surround of force is what keeps the poor from being political and the absence of politics in their lives is what keeps them poor.”(Page 1) He further explains that by political he means: “activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community city-state”(Page 1). This idea of a different type of learning, instead of your everyday math and English, but a broader education where there isn’t always a right or wrong answer is what Shorris believes is the key difference maker. Thus with these new realizations, Shorris set up an experiment to verify his theory of the importa...
Most people want to feel like they fit in, but for refugees and immigrants, that feeling was even more important. “Young refugees and immigrants... were caught between the world of their parents and the new world of their friends and schoolmates” (105) and had to choose whether they would vie for the approval of their peers or their family. One young boy on the Fugees soccer team refused to cut his hair because his peers thought it was cool, and ended up being kicked off the team (111). Other young refugees in Clarkston gave in to the allure of gangs, and ended up in a cycle of violence and crime, just for a sense of belonging and safety. “Gangs… promised both belonging and status”(105) and provided a way to become American, despite all the trouble and anguish they put their members in. As adolescents between worlds, young immigrants experience a heightened sense of liminality, when a person “becomes neither here nor there” (221), and struggle with finding out who they are and where they
On that viscerally vibrant Friday morning, in that urbanized oasis, a group of primarily Black and Hispanic students united at El Cerrito High School to discuss their parents and peers very real struggle to achieve the American dream. The stories of racism, oppression, gentrification, and deportation filled the classroom with the voices of varied languages and vernaculars, a majority of which felt caught between cultures and pulled away at the seams by opposing orientations. These fourteen and fifteen year olds spoke of parents requiring them to speak the language of a place they’ve never been, of teachers demanding a “Standard English” they’ve never been taught, of friends questioning their “Americaness” because they didn’t know the difference between Disneyland and Disney World. This youthful minority-majority population is faced with cultural double identity; a term that reflects the cognitive dissonance an individual feels when their identity is fragmented along cultural, racial, linguistic or ethnic lines. This conflict of self is not isolated in this classroom in San Francisco’s East Bay area. It brims over into every classroom within California, where “no race or ethnic group constitutes a majority of the state’s population” (Johnson). It must be said then, that the culturally and linguistically diverse California classrooms must integrate texts that examine the psychological state of double identity. Turning to Luis Valdez’ play “Zoot Suit”, Chester Himes’s protest novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Al Young’s prose poem “Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons”, we encounter literature and characters with double identities that assist in navigating marginalized adolescents with their own struggles in understanding their mu...
School systems have become the domain of learning about our own cultures; it prescribes what we know and how we engage within the global sphere. By students attending School it is a way to intersect knowledge to the new generations to come. We use textbooks in schools to help facilitate the information that has been passed down through the years of progression. In order to understand ones heritage one needs to understand what occurred and how one came to be. Education has become a fundamental process in which all youths must obtain too in order to develop into a valued functioning member of society. Educators strive to educate youth in the history of their culture but the reality of the truth is that history is a false perception derived from years and year of colonization, white hierarchy. “Textbooks are very influential message senders in the formal kindergarten through 12th grade school systems in the United States. The realities of students reading these textbooks are shaped by the information printed, especially of things that are unfamiliar and unavailable to them” (Clark & Moore, 2004). Textbooks have in turn brought upon a false history and claims to what the truth really is, but whose truth is it, whose truth is dominant, colonial truth is dominant and textbooks within the school system provide false truths of history to back up colonial ways. Colonization is a continuing process within the school system by means of history textbooks; it is this book that claims to speak the truth but only one truth.
Establishing an identity has been called one of the most important milestones of adolescent development (Ruffin, 2009). Additionally, a central part of identity development includes ethnic identity (ACT for Youth, 2002). While some teens search for cultural identity within a smaller community, others are trying to find their place in the majority culture. (Bucher and Hinton, 2010)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian chronicles Junior’s journey to discovery of self. As with many developing teens, he finds himself spanning multiple identities and trying to figure out where he belongs. “Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other” (p.118). On the reservation, he was shunned for leaving to go to a white school. At Reardon, the only other Indian was the school mascot, leaving Junior to question his decision to attend school he felt he didn’t deserve. Teens grappling with bicultural identities can relate to Junior’s questions of belonging. Not only is Junior dealing with the struggle between white vs. Indian identities, but with smaller peer group identities as well. In Wellpinit, Junior is th...
As Source A stated, “forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years.” Source B also outlines the strict scheduales in schooling by presenting a bell scheduale that is followed every day in a public school. Both Source A and Source B present arguments about the ridig structure of the school system. There is very little individuality within school days, students are required to be in every class and repeat these expections for twelve years. As Source E adds, “nothing of what it costs to repair the damage that these angry and resentful prisoners do every time they get a chance.” Source E is quick to compare America’s school system to America’s prison system in that public school presents structured days in oder to promote conformity to all. These constant and long school says that America’s kids are exposed to every day hardly promote creativity, free time, or individuality for children. Instead, it promotes conformity and teaches kids to be able to sit for eight hours a day bored out of their
Lacking the necessary support, many start to devalue the importance of doing well in school deciding that perhaps school isn’t part of their identity. In Susan’s case she’s eliciting multiple forms of subordination, and within each dimension she’s being subjective to different types of oppression; racial oppression, gender oppression, and class oppression, she’s experiencing cultural alienation and isolation and is not only based on her ethnicity as a Latina but is also influenced by how she is treated as a female, as a member of a certain socioeconomic class, and in relation to her English language proficiency, and even her perceived immigration status. In this sense, students like Susan experience different forms of discrimination or marginalization that stems from
Above all else the ten Latino boys Richard Mora observes over this time, have a want for control. Mostly control of their social identity; however, due to various social inequalities and differences that come attached to being working or poor class Latino children in urban areas, the boys are forced to overcompensate and exaggerate the one favorable aspect and privilege they have: Male privilege. The socialization of this happens early on and in certain cases has to if the boys even expect to survive contently in their social environment or even get half of the recognition their white male peers receive.
During the essay the author lost her innocence but graduated to a deeper appreciation and clarity of who she is and who she could become. In her school with no visible fences keeping the children within the schoolyard, there were the invisible fences of racism that tried to limit them from reaching their full potential. The author concludes, "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death" (841).
Racism, stereotypes, and white privilege are all concepts that affect all of us, whether we believe it or not. If an adolescent of a minority can distinguish these concepts in his society, then we all should be aware of them. These concepts are all clearly demonstrated in “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”. Anyone and everyone could clearly understand this novel, but the intended audience is middle school to college level students. The novel’s goal is to help white students understand the effects of white privilege in an easier, more understandable way.
Humanization, dehumanization, oppression and oppressors are all main concepts in the opening chapters of pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire. Freire entertains the idea that school system oppresses students through dehumanization tactics and curriculum. Terry Wotherspoon in The Sociology of Education in Canada explains that teachers and students are the agents in schooling, and subsequently affect each other. The teacher-student relationship has been examined closely and both Wotherspoon and Freire have important ideas on what it entails. Without the understanding and analysis of how teachers and students relate, it is impossible for us to make any positive, and progressive changes to education.