As short as this chapter was, there was so much information packed into it. Pettiway provided real life example which he has encountered growing up a black male during a time in which blacks were treated as less than whites. The thing that shocked me most about this chapter was not only how recent (mid-1950s) most, if not all, of these events have taken place, but that they are still occurring to this day—maybe not to the extremes encountered in the past, but existent nonetheless. In this chapter, Pettiway was granted about a million dollars to study drugs and crime in a large urban setting—he notes that he revisited his past in the faces of some of these people. He recalls walking into a room of participants and seeing the shock on their faces when a black man was the boss of this study. He remembers interviewing one of the female participants and her claiming how proud she was when she saw a black man rather than the expected white man running this study. It’s unfortunate to think that people view a boss as a white man when in reality, it could be a anyone—white, black, yellow, purple, male or female.…show more content… The author really wrapped up the 5 pages with the last sentence: “We must remember that even in the darkness of racism, sexism, and homophobia, the dignity of the human spirit prevails and every road has an end”. It is really hard to grasp the idea that those who commit heinous crimes toward minorities or homosexuals have an ounce of dignity in them. Thinking back to the when segregation was legal, this is really all people knew—meaning that whites were raised to think that this was okay while blacks were raised to just deal with it the best way they
