So for my final thoughts I’ll be talking about my final thoughts of pretty much the whole book but also bringing in some key points in the last chapter. This book provoked interesting thoughts about race and the judicial system. I found especially in this chapter the author emphasized she isn’t proposing a fixed to the judicial system rather proposing that talking about it and starting the conversation is more important or is what she’s doing. I found this moderately refreshing and authentic. The argument against books like this is that they are just whining or not proposing any change, the author unapologetically states that this book is about conversation and understanding what’s going on in the criminal justice system.
I found the book had an ebon flow between huge claims and more digestible claims. Making the author provoke ideas of things that may not be mainstream while also soothing the audience with mainstream acceptable ideas like things about affirmative action which she mentions a lot in the last chapter. I found this push and pull effective throughout the entire book which also made it seem like she wasn’t going on and on about the same thing because the topics do moderately change while still being in the same ballpark. One thing I didn’t really like about the whole book was parts felt extremely repetitive and towards the end I feel I already heard most of her argument and some portions just were boring.
As far as my opinion on her arguments it was a mixed bag. Some of them I found insightful and from a new perspective, like when she talked about the history of racism in the criminal justice system, The disproportionate amount of black people in prison and and that white people commit the same amount of crime and the discrepancies within fairness, and lastly the needing to have the conversation that’s uncomfortable. Having to push through the awkwardness that white people feel around topics of race and blame, to actually achieve anything. Well on the other hand there were some arguments I found moderately outlandish and made her other arguments less effective. In my last blog post I moderately ranted about how I did not agree with the fifth chapter talking about the unfairness of black men in jail, my issue with it was that anyone should get charged with a crime in that doesn’t make the black men doing the crime any less of a crime because somebody else doesn’t get punished. Regardless as a whole I mostly agreed with her arguments and she provided a lot of information and a lot of support.
This book was well written and had many powerful symbolism and imagery. The only downfalls of the book were it’s overuse of the same arguments and I found a downfall in it and then I didn’t fully agree but it was still interesting to hear the perspectives and still a good book.
Nice post Mady, I found your final thoughts not only interesting, but very relatable. Though we read different books, I had many of the same feelings about "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?". For example, my book was also wrapped up with talk about affirmative action, and I found that by the very end of my book, it had become somewhat repetitive as well. Despite this, I think my book, like yours, was overall well written. I found too, that my author was not proposing a fix to racism, but emphasizing the fact that the most important thing we can do is become aware of the issues and talk about them. That is all that can be done, I think. We live in such a diverse world with so many people and opinions, and by now we know that societal changes are not easily made. In my end-of-unit-project, I am focusing on this idea that what we need to do most is talk about the issue and become aware of not only the obvious, like events we see in the news, but how this racism is weaved into every part of society, and make an effort to disassociate from the things that contribute to racism. As always, I loved hearing your ideas!
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