- “It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society.” If a child was born into a world that they were never raised to be a part of society, they wouldn’t understand the people around them. They would be curious to ask why the people act the way they do or just why they themself aren’t like them.
- “it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees “liberty and justice for all.” He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization – that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people.” I agree with this statement 100%. How can pledge to a flag that treated your people hundreds of years ago while you still get that much hate to you now present day? It’s awful that we are still getting the same hate now.
- “Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives – even if it is a housing project – is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies – in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn’t know why.” It’s unfortunate but that’s exactly how I think. If I see the best part of a location and then go somewhere else and see the worst parts of that location it will most likely have a name, such as the ghetto.
In the quote that was given to us, I think James Baldwin is saying that even though you can see a lot of the ugly in the world, such as murders, climate change, and war. You can also see the beauty of the world such as respect kindness, nature, and peace. And that we must always let the children we raise know that they are the ones that can do whatever they want in the world and change it for the better. They are the future and we leave what we give them. And that no matter what, they don’t need to listen to others that try to bring them down because it’s our children that will decide their future. When James Baldwin says, “the world is larger”, I think he means that there are so many places in the world for us to explore. There are so many things billions of us in the world haven’t seen in our lives. The only thing that’s stopping us is anxiousness and worries. No one likes to leave their comfort zone, which is why no one likes to do anything different. I believe that things we should seriously learn more about in school are daily grown adult things, like doing taxes, mental health, and our own laws. These are some things that we have to know to get through our lives and we never learned that in our early years. I never learned about these things in middle school or high school and they would’ve been a huge help for me and others to learn this early. I don’t see why we have to find out about these things on our own. It would make life so much easier than learning about the mitochondria and how it’s the powerhouse of the cell or just a crazy amount of math. We need to be taught things that make us better members of society.
Excellent, Donovan!