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Quizlet on cultural diversity
Importance of morality in human life
Review of related literature about cultural diversity
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Anderson’s Code of the Street introduces readers to a society in Philadelphia consisting of decent and street-oriented individuals. Old heads are considered to be role models who set powerful examples of work ethic and responsibility to youths. Old Heads consists of the decent daddy and the black inner-city grandmother. This paper will compare and contrast the characteristics of my father and grandmother to Anderson’s description of the decent daddy and decent grandmother. Based on Anderson’s Code of Street, “The decent daddy is a certain kind of man, with certain responsibilities and privileges: to work, to support his family, to rule his house-hold, to protect his daughters, and to raise his sons to be like him, as well as to encourage other …show more content…
My father works two jobs. He is a Sheet Metal Mechanic at Spirit AeroSystems and he owns a Vietnamese and Chinese restaurant called Pho MC. At one point in time he was the main supporter in my family money wise. He not only supplied my family with the necessities and wants in life, such as, food, shelter, clothing, and material things, but also his attention and love. Growing up in an Asian heritage my household’s authority was patriarchal. My father was born into Buddhism, but converted to Catholicism for my mother, and has been deeply religious ever since. My father was always overprotective with my sister and I. We could not date, hangout, or even talk to boys until my junior year of high school. Since I was young my father always said, “Do not be a penny. You are worth much more.” He has high standards and morals that he has put upon me. My father always takes the initiative to teach my brother and cousins life lessons and instructs them to have a good honest lifestyle. In Code of the Street, Anderson explains how the home of the decent daddy is a safe haven for the community. My house has always been the “protected nest” for my extended family. There are many times where my cousins would come live at my house for a short period of time due to family problems and my father would be the peacemaker between altercations involving their families. He has …show more content…
My grandmother is deeply religious. She goes to church every single day, prays multiple times a day, and spends time in the adoration chapel. Similar to the decent grandmother, my grandmother use to live with my family and take care of my siblings and I when we were young due to my parents’ heavy work schedules. My grandmother is the backbone for my nuclear and extended family. She is well respected among many and is caring, loving, and has “mother wit.” The difference between Anderson’s decent grandmother and my grandmother is that while most decent grandmothers are around thirty-seven-years-old, my grandmother is seventy-years-old, and became a grandmother at the age of forty-five-years-old. Another difference is that my grandmother did not have to deal with her children becoming crack addicts and abandoning their children for days on in. In Code of the Street, Betty is resistant in letting her daughters, Angela and her youngest one, move back into her apartment due to their boyfriends doing drugs and Betty was not financially stable to care for all of them. This situation differs from my grandmother, because my whole extended family from my mother’s side lived in one small house with my grandmother back in 2000. My grandmother accepts everyone and does not worry about her financial stability regardless of difficult
Two different stories, two different individuals, two different lives, but one thing is obvious in both stories, each situation is the same. Whether it is the hardships that one faced or the wealth that the other enjoyed, each grandmother was a victim. A victim to something many people are afraid to talk about. In both stories each grandmother goes through a form of disrespect, because of their race. Racism was an issue then to some it is still an issue now. To me these two different ladies are not different at all they are actually the same. They are both individuals that were placed in certain situations for certain reasons. Not everything in life will be filled with enjoymen...
Although John Addams was extremely wealthy, his neighbors appreciated and respected him because of the benefits he brought to their community, such as a reliable mill, a railroad, a bank, and an insurance company (5). Remembering the respect her father earned from their community, Jane Addams did not see her father “as an overbearing capitalist dictator from the Gilded Age but as a self-made steward from an era when leaders put the community's interest alongside their own” (5). Jane Addams’s father did, in fact, influence her way of thinking, regarding the devotion to community service. She looked to her father for guidanc... ... middle of paper ... ...
For this assignment I decided to read the book Code of the Street: decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city by Elijah Anderson. This book is about how inner city people live and try and survive by living with the code of the streets. The code of the streets is basically morals and values that these people have. Most of the time it is the way they need to act to survive. Continuing on within this book review I am going to discuss the main points and arguments that Anderson portrays within the book. The main points that the book has, goes along with the chapters. These points consist of Street and decent families, respect, drugs violence, street crime, decent daddy, the mating game, black inner city grandmother. Now within these points there are a few main arguments that I would like to point out. The first argument is the belief that you will need to accept the street code to get through life. The other one is the belief that people on the street need “juice”. For the rest of this paper we will be looking at each one of main points and arguments by going through each chapter and discussing it.
It’s not easy to build an ideal family. In the article “The American Family” by Stephanie Coontz, she argued that during this century families succeed more when they discuss problems openly, and when social institutions are flexible in meeting families’ needs. When women have more choices to make their own decisions. She also argued that to have an ideal family women can expect a lot from men especially when it comes to his involvement in the house. Raymond Carver, the author of “Where He Was: Memories of My Father”, argued how his upbringing and lack of social institutions prevented him from building an ideal family. He showed the readers that his mother hide all the problems instead of solving them. She also didn’t have any choice but to stay with his drunk father, who was barely involved in the house. Carvers’ memoir is relevant to Coontz argument about what is needed to have an ideal family.
Throughout the article “The Code of the Streets,” Elijah Anderson explains the differences between “decent” and “street” people that can be applied to the approaches of social control, labeling, and social conflict theories when talking about the violence among inner cities due to cultural adaptations.
The tenement was the biggest hindrance to achieving the American myth of rags to riches. It becomes impossible for one to rise up in the social structure when it can be considered a miracle to live passed the age of five. Children under the age of five living in tenements had a death rate of 139.83 compared to the city’s overall death rate of 26.67. Even if one did live past the age of five it was highly probable he’d become a criminal, since virtually all of them originate from the tenements. They are forced to steal and murder, they’ll do anything to survive, Riis appropriately calls it the “survival of the unfittest”. (Pg.
In “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, O’Connor introduces the reader to a family representative of the old and new Southern culture. The grandmother represents the old South by the way in which she focuses on her appearnace, manners, and gentile ladylike behavior. O’Connor writes “her collars and cuffs were organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady”(O’Connor 118). In this short story, “the wild diproportion of the terms, the vapid composure that summons up the ultimate violence only to treat it as a rare social opportuinty, and the cool irony with which O’Connor presents the sentence makes it both fearful and ludicrous”(Asals 132). The irony that O’Connor uses points out the appalling characteristics of the grandmother’s self-deception that her clothes make her a lady and turns it into a comic matter. Flannery O’Connor goes to great length to give the reader insight into the characters by describing their clothes and attitudes. The fact that the grandmother took so much time in preparing herself for the trip exemplifies the old Southern tradition of self-presentation and self-pride. The grandmother takes pride in the way she presents herself because she wants everyone to know that she is a “lady”.
The lives we live today encompass many moral aspects that would not have been socially acceptable fifty or more years ago. John Updike’s short story, A&P, addresses these issues of societal changes through a 1960’s teenager point of view. This teenager, Sammy, spends a great deal of his time working at a local supermarket, observing customers, and imagining where his life adventures will take him. Through symbolism and setting, Updike establishes the characters and conflicts; these, in turn, evolve Sammy from an observational, ignorant teenager, promoting opposition to changing social rules, into an adult who must face reality.
The book asks two questions; first, why the changes that have taken place on the sidewalk over the past 40 years have occurred? Focusing on the concentration of poverty in some areas, people movement from one place to the other and how the people working/or living on Sixth Avenue come from such neighborhoods. Second, How the sidewalk life works today? By looking at the mainly poor black men, who work as book and magazine vendors, and/or live on the sidewalk of an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The book follows the lives of several men who work as book and magazine vendors in Greenwich Village during the 1990s, where mos...
If O’Connor wanted to present the South as strong and righteous, she probably would have chosen a character more like Red Sam to be the main character, but nonetheless the grandmother is the main character and that provides enough criticism by itself. Throughout the bulk of the story, the grandma doesn’t seem much different from any other elderly grandmother. She is stubborn, as evidenced by her unwillingness to admit her wrongdoing after the car accident. She is also forgetful, forgetting what state she is in and the appearance of the Misfit, despite fawning over his image in the newspaper. Because of her relation symbolically to the South as a whole, the reader associates these negative qualities with the South as a
Alice Walkers “Everyday Use”, is a story about a family of African Americans that are faced with moral issues involving what true inheritance is and who deserves it. Two sisters and two hand stitched quilts become the center of focus for this short story. Walker paints for us the most vivid representation through a third person perspective of family values and how people from the same environment and upbringing can become different types of people.
Author Armond Boudreaux makes a valid point in the article “There Are No Good Men to Find.” He states how “The grandmother believes in her power of dress and Southern manners to prove her dignity and superiority; she disguises her racism in kindly condescension (page 151).“ He also discusses the topic in the short story, “Compared with her hollow faith in Jesus--- whom she invokes only to save her own life (page 151).” Armond also states“ pity at best for the grandmother, and when her moment of beatitude and her ecstatic last words signal that she has received grace she has lacked all her life ---“You’re one of my own children!”--- We may quite rightly feel bewildered and even outraged (page 152). Armond goes on discussing how grandmother was hoping she could use her southern belle charm, to regain power over the situation.
She only cares for herself and uses her manipulative skills to trick the other characters into doing what she wants. However, she views herself to be of higher moral standings than the other characters. If the grandmother has any lesson for the reader, the lesson is that no matter how tricky one is or how high one holds their standards to be, not everyone gets their way all the
In Charles Chesnutt’s story “The Wife of His Youth,” it illustrates the reality of what individuals of mixed races had to go through in order to fit in with society. From the beginning readers are presented with troubles African American’s had to face through racial division and inequality, along with a correlation between race and color. The main character in this story, Mr. Ryder, is a great representation of how a society can influence one’s beliefs and morals. In order to become apart of the Blue Vein society, Mr. Ryder had to leave his ethnic background behind him, so he could be accepted into a white community. The purpose of the Blue Vein Society, as Chesnutt described it, "was to establish and maintain correct social standards among
People on his side of the family are always hunting for money, yet none of them are ever wanting to work for it. When my father turned thirty, he married a woman that worked at a great job and her parents made fabulous money. He married into money and his head has been the size of a hot air balloon ever since. They had children together and he didn’t really care about my sister and I after that. His values on family are nonexistent. He doesn’t care about family as long as he is getting money some