Living A Lie

LIVING A LIE

The controversial decision of Armand’s parents to keep his true identity from him until into his adulthood was wrong and drastically altered his mindset. Armand was raised with racial preferences and prejudices during all of his formative years and this taught him to believe that he was superior to other types of people. He developed a certain attitude in his personality where his thoughts, actions, and beliefs were ingrained with tradition and influenced by society. Armand’s parents made an obviously extremely difficult decision, most likely even before his birth, to do their absolute best to protect him from society and its potentially harsh treatment, to shelter him from the judgment of family and others, and to guard him from the great unknown sea of consequences. The fear of society was quite probably the most influential factor in Armand’s parents thought process in deciding his fate. This time period in society was steeped in racial prejudices from the Civil War and slavery. Unfortunately, black people were looked upon as inferior and not equal to those with white skin. All too often blacks were viewed as items of ownership not people with feelings and intelligence. Horror stories of unfair treatment and abuse were undoubtedly all too fresh in their minds. These feelings of unworthiness and oppression were not something that they wanted to pass on to their children, a strong deterrent to telling the truth. His mother had experienced it first hand and felt the incredible pressure to protect her son in any way possible from such a lifestyle and from the verbal, physical, and emotional abuse of society. All mothers innately desire a perfect life for their children and will go to great lengths to obtain it, oftentimes making difficult and wrong decisions along the way including omitting truths. Fact of the matter is, however, that the truth is always the way to go and should never be compromised. Armand’s life would have likely been much