A Different Kind of Literacy
This article was very straightforward, bold, and especially powerful when realizing the author was African American. Although the advent of blacks was described, the slave trade history, Mr. Walton did not use this event as guilt to compensate for the lack of technological advancement of blacks in our society. Rather, slavery was included as the first initial sign of western technology that would have other detrimental progressions such as the cotton gin. The origin of black stereotypes was new to me, as it resulted from the resentment of Irish, Slavic, German, and Italian immigrants over factory jobs (17). The education of blacks as sometimes attributed to lack of motivation, is also connected to the folkways that the author refers to. When many of us said in class how we would encounter black students at our high school or tutoring organization who didn’t want to “look white� to their peers therefore they did not try hard in school, is an example of the “consciousness of the race� (17). It is also interesting how, overwhelmingly, young blacks aspire to be in the NBA or a famous rapper. I remember my mom saying, after a study showed these same high numbers, that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than make the NBA. Of course, I am not meaning to discourage teenagers from having dreams, but just because you do not achieve your dream does not mean you cannot be happy doing something else. This might be what the author meant when he said “the very opportunities that would allow young blacks to vault over decades of injury and neglect into the modern world go unclaimed- even unseen� (18) because sometimes people can be so focused on a dream they do not realize other possibilities that are out there, such as doing really well in school as opposed to playing basketball all the time. Lastly, I think the author clearly recognizes the focus is not on blaming western society or African Americans. Instead he makes a call to action for African Americans to change because the world we live in is a technological world, regardless if we think it does not affect us.