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As I got older, people who heard my story would ask me how I dealt with the idea of death and dying. Even though she is a direct survivor of severe ethnic violence, some adults still ask her what her ethnicity is: Serbian, Croatian, Muslim? I was probably more proud of being a “label” than of being a human being, that’s the way most of us were taught. I would think about it for a minute and reply, “See, being poor, black, and living in the ghetto was kind of like a disease that I was born with, sort of like AIDS or cancer.
They read about the Freedom Riders, a group of civil rights activists—seven black and six white—who rode a bus across the American South in the early 1960s to protest the segregation of public buses. Up until that point it had always been: “So Joyce, how do black people feel about Affirmative Action? I don’t even remember how the whole thing got started, but it’s obvious that if you’re from one family, you need to be loyal and try to get some payback. Gruwell’s students soon note similarities between their own lives and the senseless violence that these two young girls had to endure.Since the day we enter this world we were a label, a number, a statistic, that’s just the way it is. They come to realize that peace and tolerance are much more inspiring messages than ethnic hatred and rivalry. Most of them have been shot at, have directly witnessed gang-related violence, and have seen their friends die over the course of the years due to gang rivalry. Ethnic and racial communities were also in direct rivalry with each other, as African-American, Asian, and Latino gangs engaged in a ruthless war for power and territory.
When the police officers were acquitted for this act, six days of violent rioting erupted in Los Angeles, protesting the long-standing discrimination and abuse that the African-American community has suffered from the police. After long months of studying the historical consequences of racial hatred, the Freedom Riders conclude that dividing people according to their appearance or group identity is absurd and dangerous.Gruwell’s teaching, the students discover that racial and ethnic tensions have deep historical consequences in other places in the world. The school quad is divided according to color and ethnicity, as people mostly make friends with members of their own identity group. The students at Wilson High School are immersed in the urban world of Long Beach, where racial tensions and a vicious gang war divide the population along ethnic and racial lines.
Gruwell] always tries to corner you into accepting that there’s another side, when there really isn’t. The rivalry between black, Asian, and Latino gangs affect their everyday lives, constantly making them potential victims in a war where only external appearances and group loyalty matter. The students come to terms with the fact that separating people among racial or ethnic groups can generate injustice and harm. When her students discover the stories of two fellow teenagers, Anne Frank and Zlata Filipović, they come to terms with the devastation that ethnic divisions can cause.Gruwell begins to teach her class about the historical consequences of ethnic violence around the world, focusing on the stories of Anne Frank in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and Zlata Filipović in contemporary war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, her students are forced to confront the horrific consequences of ethnic hatred. It’s just two sides who tripped on each other way back when and to this day make other people suffer because of their problems. When I was born, the doctor must have stamped “National Spokesperson for the Plight of Black People” on my forehead; a stamp visible only to my teachers. This decision demonstrates her commitment to recognizing everyone’s humanity and dignity, regardless of their race or identity. I immediately decided to throw out my meticulously planned lessons and make tolerance the core of my curriculum.
Two years earlier, in 1992, officers in the Los Angeles Police Department were filmed brutally beating Rodney King, an unarmed black man, before arresting him.Gruwell questions a student about the rivalry between the Latino and Asian gangs, trying to make that student realize that this war is just as senseless as that of the Capulets and Montagues in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the student comes to realize that Ms. Running with gangs and carrying a gun can create some problems, but being of a different race can get you into trouble, too, so I figure I might as well be prepared.
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