Roll Of Thunder Hear My Cry Essay On Racism

We’re good at ignoring things. We get up everyday, go out into the world, and turn our heads at anything we see that’s unsatisfactory. One might mistake change for the ability to conceal the problem. In that sense, yes, we have changed, we are beyond the racial strife of the country’s past. But then, when we’re told to look, to look really hard at what’s around us, we’re frightened to notice that what we thought had changed was only hastily obscured. So we go back to ignoring it, pretending not to notice, looking in the other direction. Because it’s easier that way. Although most are oblivious to its presence, racism is still a problem in current day America, and it’s possibly just as tense as ever. Early in the 1930’s, discrimination was at its worst. Most specifically, African Americans were commonly mistreated by whites, who felt their skin color gave
This was a widely accepted and agreed upon belief shared by the majority of non-colored Americans. For them, it seemed routine to offer services to a white customer first, provide only school materials that became unusable for white students to black children, demand certain behaviors of the minorities because of the seemingly automatic superiority; the list goes on and on. In the book Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, all of these situations and others of similar nature are exposed to an audience who may not recognize or understand such flagrant racism. One of the very remarkable moments in the book occurs when the colored children of the story go to the local store to purchase various items. As the clerk Mr. Barnett assisted the children, other customers entered the store, specifically, white customers. Mr. Barnett immediately abandons the idea of aiding the children and makes the white customers his priority, forcing the children to wait