The book is about two best friends, Justyce and Manny. Both of them are black, and they get confronted by the problems many black people have to deal with. At the beginning of the book, Justyce gets arrested by a police officer because he tries to help a drunk girl, but the officer thinks that he tried to kidnap the girl. After this, Justyce has to think a lot about racism. This gets even worse when his best friend Manny gets shot by a police officer just because they are listening to loud music. Something I didn’t expect was that the book caused me to think a lot about hidden racism. People who are confronted with racism often interpret racism differently from people that don't have to deal with it. It also let me think about racism in the form of normalized behavior that most of the people don't even recognize because they see it as a normal thing. This is very dangerous because when you are used to this ground level of racism that still exists in our society, you don't reorganize more extreme racism. This is also shown in the book in which one moment a person just makes a “harmless” racist joke but in the next moment Manny gets shot just because he is black. This example is very extreme because most people would never treat a black person differently from a white person. But “racism” is not just the discrimination against people with different skin color, it’s rather the discrimination against any person because they are different. This still happens a lot, especially in schools, where a lot of kids get bullied just because they are slightly different from the average. Everyone should think about how they deal with other people, and how these people think about that. This is what the book makes you do, at least in my case. The book changed my way of thinking about some things. I have a couple of black friends, and they are very open-minded. When they know that you don’t have a real problem with them, they also don't have a problem with dark humor. Sometimes they also make jokes about their skin color by themselves. Before I read the book, I thought this was great because it shows that no one has a problem with each other. But after reading the book, I see a good and bad side about it. I still think it shows that everyone accepts each other, in this friend group, as they are. But I also think that we should take the problem of racism more seriously, even when we don't have any problems with it in this friend group. A lot of other black people don't have the luck to have an environment that is so open-minded. By Leander Buettner
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AuthorSTenth grade students at Decorah High School share how they're reading outside of their own experiences and how it has changed them. Categories
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November 2022
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