To Die Free
Race, Class and Ethnicity in American History -- a La Sierra University Group Blog of Book Reviews
Monday, December 20, 2010
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son by Tim Wise
The Jesuit Relations
The Future of Race
It is always important to understand many important aspects about one’s life as well as the history, and in this essay we will be exploring the future of scientific understanding of what Race is, but before we begin exploring the future of race we need to know the real meaning of race, or in other words its definition according to our society today. And so what is race? The term race refers to classifications of humans into populations or groups based on various factors, such as their culture, language, social practice or heritable characteristics. On the other hand, the biological definition of race is a population of interbreeding species that develops distinct characteristics differing from other populations of the same species. Especially as caused by geographical isolation. What we can draw from both definitions is the fact that race classifies groups based on several factors that distinguish a certain race from another. For many people and for many scientists the history of race is clear. However, the future of race is not clear enough for many others due to the fact that the future cannot be determined by the human mind.
One of the many interesting things that I came across was a theory that explains what will happen in the future as far as race at large, and this theory is called the race of the future theory, this theory states that due to the process of miscegenation which is the mixing of different ethnicities or races or interbreeding, in marriage, cohabitation, or sexual relations, all the races are blending to become one race in the near future which also results in a very important issue of identity confusion where people will not be able to know their family history or where they are originally from. One key word which I think is quiet important and should be highlighted is miscegenation, and the definition of this word according to Webster’s dictionary is the mixing of races; especially through marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race. I personally think the race of the future theory is the most accurate theory out there as far as science goes. However, I do not completely agree with the fact that there will only be one race in the future due to miscegenation.
What I also found interesting in my simple research about the future of race was the fact that almost all scientists agree that at some point in the future there will only be one race due to interbreeding, in other words almost all scientists agree with the race of the future theory suggesting the occurrence of only one single mixed race. On the other hand, Other scientists believe that the idea of having only one race will not take place any time in the near future because God will intervene or He will not allow that from happening. At the same time a small number of scientists believe that the world will end in 2012, Thus there is not enough time for the development of having only one mixed race in the near future due to the lack of time.
In conclusion, the future of race to me seems very unclear from a scientific perspective due to the fact that we see how the number of people who are intermarrying is increasing and the mixing of different races is also increasing, however, I believe that there are several circumstances that could play a big role in determining what will happen or take place in the future as far as race. I was personally interested in exploring the future of race because I tend to hear people question the future of race and I see how there is still not an answer that could satisfy all the questions asked about race and its future. Clearly this subject of the future of race is still undergoing a lot of studies and research but at the same time I believe that although the number of intermarriages or miscegenation is increasing, the world will never reach that point of having one single race that is a mixed race of Eurasian-Negroid, similar in its appearance to the ancient Egyptians. This topic helped me learn several new things about race and how it is viewed by scientists and other individuals in our society today and how race will be viewed in the future.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
By: Kyle Lynch
Do you believe it to be true, that today’s youth is “dumber“than ever? Well, John Taylor Gatto believes so, and he says and feels strongly that it is all because of the school system. John Taylor Gatto, the author of the book “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling” was actually a teacher for twenty six years. He taught at all different types of schools at all areas such as private schools, public schools, schools in rich areas as well as schools in rural areas. Now, his book was not just something he sat down and wrote in his free time, the stories in the book were actually printed copies of speeches he has made, publically. Gatto feels very strongly about the schooling system and how it is ruining the lives of the present generation. He makes the assumption that the world is left in our hands and basically it will crumble.
Gatto makes the statement that the present generation is not humble and basically throw our elders and younger children under the bus. He says that we tend to ignore the elderly people, not giving a care about what they say or what they may need. Also, we shun the little children out because we think what they have to say is irrelevant or just not important enough for our time. And the reason for this is… the schooling system. He also talks about how America has the most divorces in a year. America has the most suicides in a year. He also states that America is at the bottom of nineteen nations in reading and writing. This is all because of the schooling system. One of the reasons is because the textbooks aren’t challenging and everything in textbooks is “dumbed” down to the simplest form.
He goes on further in the book to explain how children now days don’t do things because they want to. For example, children in grade school, usually within the first three to four years of school, are taught that whenever they do something good, they should get an award. As they grow up, they still tend to believe that they need compensation for their actions if they do something good or they will not do it at all. I can even apply this to myself, I remember when I was a little child, and I would always try to finish first or be the neatest whatever it may be, just to get that gold star on the chart. It seemed to me at the time that those gold stars would be all that I lived for. He is saying that we do things mostly because we HAVE to, not because we WANT to. Even to this day I can apply that theory to myself. I do not like my job, and if I had the choice I would not work, however I need that paycheck every two weeks. So in a way Gatto’s theory is correct in a sense.
One thing that Gatto says is a main contributor in the actual school setting is school bells. Gatto uses the analogy that school bells are the “devil”. The reason for this is because once the school bell rings, the children are no longer in control of the teacher. The teacher can be in the middle of a lesson that can be very important and what do you know…. The bell rings. So not only does the students get left in the middle of a lecture, the teacher may not have left off where they wanted, preventing them from keeping up with the lesson plan. Thus putting the teacher and the students behind which can cause a rush in material later towards the end of the school year.
Overall, this book was a real eye opener, especially for me. The things that Gatto were explaining can correlate to what is happening today. The situation even got too much for Gatto to handle so he decided to retire after dedicating his life to teaching for twenty six years. I would recommend this book for; parents, students, teachers, everybody. I was actually grateful for receiving this book to read and I give John Taylor Gatto five stars.
YELLOW: Race in America Beyond Black and White By Frank H. Wu
In the beginning the author brings up model minority myth with foreigner syndrome. As the book opens up with a story of his childhood and how he was known as the little Asian boy from the show “Johnny Sokko.” The author is brought upon, at such a young age, racism. Little kids were not aware of what they were doing because they were too young to understand. Because of this, some parents didn’t pay care to this problem because they were the ones teaching the kids. At one point in the book Frank Wu was asked by a parent, “What are you? Where do you come from?” Of course he was too young to understand that he asked the same question back but the parents just walked away. This was just an example that I thought was pretty important because adults would discriminate young kids even though the kids didn’t know what was happening. As I continued to read the book I realized that there is such a thing of model minority myth. That today in our time, we look at the Asian Americans and somehow dislike them because they are all successful. They all somehow go into the same career of medicine and overcome every other race. In my opinion this is done, only because we let it happen and get into our heads. If we really wanted to we could have all sorts of doctors and a large majority but right away we just don’t realize that its our fault for not wanting to do so because Asian Americans already beat us to it. It is as if we were referring to them as “they” instead of “us” because they are Americans and are a part of our country.
Furthermore, the author brings up the idea of foreigner syndrome. He brings up an important fact that we need to focus on. Asians have a distinct appearance among the rest of us. They have their appearance of foreigners because of the roots they carry. Like other races, their roots change over the generations, but somehow with Asian decent, they stay looking the same. One point that he brought up was the attack on Pearl Harbor and how right away Americans had no confidence on anyone that looked Japanese. I believe that was an unfair thing to do because Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and Japanese are all different. It is like saying someone is Caucasian when they are Irish. Just little things like these are what need to change in our world to reduce discrimination and racism.
As the author continues with his main topics, one I thought was interesting was the problems we face with race here in America. I say this because not many people pay much attention to this problem. Not long ago, maybe a couple years ago, he mentions the violence and discrimination he encountered. How, when he lived in a white community he was never accepted. That he viewed too much racial violence as he grew. Especially among blacks with whites, even blacks with Asians. That when the topic of immigration set forth that brought about more tension between the races. As he brings up this topic he does include other minority groups, but doesn’t bring them up as much as I thought he should have in the whole book. It is as if he only brought them up when he didn’t know how to put the Asian Americans into that topic. The author has many facts written in the book and I like how he adds himself and his encounters as examples. How one time at the Canadian border he was stopped and asked questions because of the way he looked. They believed that because of the way he looked, he was a suspect and that he was part of the Japanese group that was sending information to them.
The author adds more and more facts to what he is trying to explain, he finally brings up a point on how to have a resolution. The way he brings up this point is with racial mixed marriages. How many Asians began marrying whites to help themselves out. He even mentions how some Asians women married white men so their children can have a better start, once they are older. I believe this is a bad way to think in life because it seems like we are just fighting with every other race. How we just need to look at the bright side as well as work together to bring up our race and fight discrimination.
I didn’t enjoy reading the book as much as I thought I would have, only because I thought the author was going to focus a bit more on every other minority groups. I was hoping for him to have more examples and details on the problems they faced. Overall the way he brought up examples of Asian Americans was good because somehow it is kind of the same for the other groups. I just believe that by doing so, he could have made the book a lot more interesting and enjoyable to read.
Yellow by Frank Wu
America is known around the world for being a melting pot of culture. It’s difficult to find any place in America that isn’t multicultural. Yellow, by Frank Wu is a social commentary on how America treats and reacts to Asians. However, Wu expands the ideas of racism to not only Asians, but also all other minorities in America such as Mexicans and people from the Middle East.
The book begins with some comical Asian stereotypes. As I read the book and being of Asian descent, I frequently found myself saying, “Hey! That does happen!” For example, when the kids at school talked about Pokemon, they all had this notion that I would know everything about them because my being Filipino somehow related me to something of Japanese origin. Wu explains that it’s pretty frequent that Asians are believed to be other Asians. To the majority of America, Japanese people are Chinese, Koreans are Chinese, and Filipinos are Chinese. Aside from being mistaken as Japanese, I’ve also been mistaken as Chinese. However, mistaking Asians for other Asians isn’t just common to Asians.
Wu also points out that people of Central American descent are often confused as Mexicans, but these people in actuality could be Salvadorians, Guatemalans, or even Hondurans. This all stems from people’s ignorance of other races and how to differentiate from other races. However these things can’t necessary be helped because people will always be most familiar with who they spend the most time around. This also brings about the idea of discrimination.
In America, because racial discrimination has become such a taboo topic, it has evolved into something better called rational discrimination. What differentiates racial and rational discrimination is the fact that rational discrimination leaves out any sort of racial factor involved with reasoning. Rather, rational discrimination deals with behavior that is frequently witnessed. For instance, Wu generates this example. Rather assume a group of men is rowdy because they are black, one would look at a factor such as how they dress, i.e. baggy pants, and then assume they were rowdy. Clearly, no racial factor was involved. However, this sort of reasoning poses many dangers to human interaction.
If all judgment were based purely on rational reasons, all opinions would fall under some sort of extreme. People with nice clothes would be rich, and people with trashy clothes would be poor. People who sagged their pants would all be gangsters, and people who wore hard rimmed glasses would be good at math. As extremes as these examples are, if rational discrimination would take over all thinking, this is how people would be viewed. As bad as this sounds, discrimination isn’t actually a bad thing, according to Wu.
Discrimination is a natural self-defense mechanism that’s engrained into human nature. We instinctively integrate information into our lives in order to preserve ourselves. If we see a rowdy group of people, it is within our best interest to stay away in order to prevent any unnecessary antagonizing. In regards to race, Wu says discrimination is inevitable. People are always going to believe that Asians are phenomenal at math, and that black people are natural born athletes and singers. Which brings another issue to light: positive stereotypes.
Now, the idea of a positive stereo really should appeal as a good thing. However, Wu looks at it like a ball-and-chain. They don’t actually encourage people to excel, but rather they restrict people of their true potential. This is because when they’re expected to good at something and they aren’t, they feel they didn’t live up to the standards of their race. Take Asians for example. They’re renown for their abilities in math and science. Therefore, there is instant pressure for them to pursue a career in the medical field. I’ve seen many times over, people pursuing dreams that people create for them. If people didn’t create positive stereotypes, the dreams of others would only be influenced by themselves. Asians parents also hold high expectations for their kids.
One of these main expectations is in regard to marriage. In a hierarchy of preference, Asian parents prefer their own race, then other Asian, then everything else. Most Asian Americans however don’t really care and don’t see race as a reason to marry or not marry someone. This really is for the best because it means people marry because they love someone, not just because they’re the same race.
In reality, all of these pressures are not healthy for any body of people. Racism will only serve to stifle the growth of mankind. Rather than base ourselves in a world of stereotypes, rather, we should work to create a word where no ones’ abilities are doubted, everyone lifts each other up. Wu says that in order to abolish racism, we must not be blind to race. Being blind to race robs people of their identity. Instead, we embrace all races and just love regardless.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
White Like Me By Tim Wise
Monday, December 13, 2010
Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
- Confusion (The natural order of real life is violated by heaping disconnected facts on students.)
- Class Position (Children are locked together into categories where the lesson is that “everyone has a proper place in the pyramid.”)
- Indifference (Inflexible school regimens deprive children of complete experiences.)
- Emotional dependency (Kids are taught to surrender their individuality to a “predestined chain of command.”
- Intellectual dependency (One of the biggest lessons schools teach is conformity rather than curiosity.)
- Provisional self-esteem (“The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests, is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials.”)
- One can’t hide (Schooling and homework assignments deny children privacy and free time in which to learn from parents, from exploration, or from community.)
Dumbing Us Down
John Taylor Gatto is an author and great teacher who sees education way differently than those who are actually teaching in this time of period. The book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling is based on John Taylor Gattos speeches rather than on a short story. He restates his purpose over and over again in every speech he has written and spoke. John explains that the new time of era of kids are not learning anything, but just knowing how to go to school and forgetting everything once they hear the school bell to be able to go home and do the things they wish to do. In college, students only attend college dorming to live the full college life and do not really want to be there. College students only study to continue the purpose of parents wishes or life’s purpose rather to seek what they really want for life.
This great believer who is called John Taylor Gatto quit teaching because he could no longer take part in a system that destroys lives by destroying minds. In every school he taught, pretty much everything was the same process within learning the same thing so he rather taught his students confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and one cannot hide.
In one of John Taylor Gattos speeches, "We Need Less School Not More," states so many true facts that only those who have lived life can relate to it. He states that by extending the school day or year, we would not understand the difference between communities and networks or families with networks. Strongly disagrees on networks being able to be described workable substitutes for families and that school will cost a lot of money. At every paragraph he finishes he restates this sentences, “People should think of less schooling." More ever, John Taylor compares how losing weight and attending school is pretty much the same. Losing weight is not going to last because in a short time you will get it back and comparing to networks, both are just temporary "work-outs" that people suffer with. Aristotle, a specialist, did a discovery on how people argue with drs, lawyers, ministers telling them what they want instead of accepting what they get is not working, but are trying to fight for it. For example, people really want to be able to start a dinner from scratch and cook every little thing rather than going to restaurants or fast food places and getting their food defrosted, but one of the causes that this does not happened is because people are lazy and do not have time.
John Taylor describes that people should accept that school as networks create a large part of the agony of modern life and that students do not need to be taught by officially by certified teachers in schools to be consider a good education because in the end, it all depends on the student if he/she wants to retain the information given. Another example of not really needing to go to a certified school so that once a kid graduates he/she wants to experience college life, so there goes the "certified" education because John strongly believes that it is an awful way to renew those associations.
Explaining this book more, John states that a community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety, good parts, bad parts, Therefore, a person will never get happiness if they listen to what others say trying to please them after the fashion of schools rather than pleasing themselves and that this can tell what kind of life you’re going to live.
After reading this paragraph, it really made me think because John's statement opened my mind because if you really want to live up your life you have to do it by yourself and not what others are telling you because at the end who is really living your life, you or them? I strongly would say that in this time of period, there are more followers then leaders and this is going to destroy our dreams.
He once belonged in networks himself, but those that do not require all the extra energy. In other words he did it for himself. John rather would what kids to spend all the school time with their parents to learn about each other rather so later on their strangers are not living under the same roof and not wasting their time on school. Networks can divide people; first by themselves and then from each other and later make them lonely. As for this paragraph described in the book, he wants to repeat it until we get sick of it and listen to him. The difference between communities and institutions is that communities have natural limits; they stop growing or they die, we live in a world of rewards and punishments: A's, F's, bathroom passes, gold stars, etc. are given to learn the good and bad.
Ending this great book, he quoted, "Trust in families and neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, "What is education for ?""
Frank H. Wu wrote an interesting book called “Yellow”, which brings an important topic on the issues of races in America. We go beyond the colors of black and white to bring in new colors, red, yellow, orange, etc. The point being that America needs to realize there are more colors to the spectrum of race.
The book helped me to understand a little of how harmful generalizing races can be. Positive ones and negative ones still hinder races because if you don’t live to those standards society tends to disclaim you from that race. Like in the book he talks about how he doesn’t think he’s the smartest guy in the world, or good with computers, does that mean I’m not Asian. People tend to generalize Asians to being doctors and technicians, but the book convinced the reader to see much more than that, to see the Asians as people who are passionate at what they do. Take Jackie Chan, Michelle Kwon, Lucy Lou, or Bruce Lee, they aren’t’ doctors but people who are good at what they do.
Another thing that this book helped me to see was how society today has left everyone thinking that looking Caucasian is what makes you look beautiful. A great example would be to look at the media and see what they think defines beauty. Other races even straighten their hair, nip and tuck the structures of their bodies to try and achieve this look. And speaking about looks Frank Wu brings another point of how Americans perceive Asians. He talks about how a famous magazine Article from World War II made it a Sport of how to tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese people. They came up with answers like facial features and body structures.
Frank Wu wrote the book in a way that, instead of writing a story of his life, he persuades the reader to understand the issue as if the whole book was one big research paper. He breaks the book down to eight chapters each expressing a deep and well thought out point. The reader is left with a reassuring truth that what frank Wu is writing is fact, because at the end of his book he provides all the sources he ever used to making this book. At the Beginning of the book he started kind of slow in order to get the reader to understand the things that he is saying. Because in everything that he wrote he wrote it like a step-by-step process, somewhat like a series of events. To conclude this book should be in the homes of Americans everywhere because this is a great meaning of what it is to be an American; the ability to accept different people no matter their race.
Domestica
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo embarked on a goal to listen to the stories and trials of immigrant workers in the United States. She specifically focused on the domestic workers who clean and care for a job. Pierrette interviewed countless women from either Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America to understand the difficulties of the job or the life revolving around it. She also was able to interview a few people who hired domestic workers to clean their homes and care for their children. Pierrette touched on a subject and a style of life that few have even thought about. Cleaning homes and babysitting can be easy, depressing, back-breaking, and much more from the stories these immigrant workers tell. And the people who employ them sadly sometimes do not even consider the job that immigrant workers to in regards to cleaning and caring for their children is a full-time job. In this book, the lives of immigrant workers, the job, the feelings, and the actions of the people who hire them are descriptively written about.
Immigrant people go through difficult and strenuous journeys in order to cross the border to the United States. Most of the immigrants who come to America had left their country because they needed to earn money somewhere to care for their families back home. The women that were specifically talked about in the book Domestica, had at times left their children back home. Many had described the process of finding a job in the America difficult and laborious. Most people want to work in an environment that is not back-breaking and hard on ones mindset, yet the only job available for immigrant workers are jobs just like that. Finding a job for an immigrant who is male is a lot more difficult than finding a job for a woman. The need of having an in house nanny and housecleaner is one of the jobs that are often what immigrant women first start in. This job as a nanny/housecleaner is also one of the jobs that most immigrant women resent the most. One of the main components of this job is living in with a family and providing care for their children. Many immigrant women describe this job as the least family friendly and most isolating job. For example one women described her experience in depth about the family she had stayed with when she newly arrived to the United States. She had said that they had put her in room that was on the other end of the house. They never really talked to her and ignored her when she was around. She was a silent figure in the home expected to clean and care for children with a real low wage. The family invited her to eat their food from their home, but never once did they invite her to have dinner with them. At times they would even label the food as to which was allowed to be eaten or not. Caring and cleaning for a home is one of the most isolating jobs for newly arrived immigrants. It hides them away from immigration police yet it takes away the vibrant culture that these women had been part of.
Breaking into the domestic work of a housecleaner is a job that could be easy to do or be complex. House cleaning is a job preferred by most immigrant workers for many reasons. Being a housecleaner, one can have the ability to pick their own hours, decide how many times they are going to work during the week, the job allows working mothers to come home instead of being a full time nanny, and the pay can be a lot better than other work that immigrant workers find. Much of the way these immigrant women obtain houses to clean is through having people recommending their services, through agencies, and or through the good old flyers and newspaper ads. Many employers sometimes exploit the recommendation system for housecleaners. On many cases an immigrant’s services are cheaply sold to their neighbors and friends. Many immigrant women have talked about how some recommenders tell the price they had hired their housecleaner and they pass on the amount to others. This hinders the ability for some immigrant workers to increase their pay or their pay is at an extreme low. This practice is fairly common phenomenon and if the women does not want to accept the low wage, there are hundreds of others who would. Agencies also are a big help to immigrant workers who are looking for jobs in housecleaning. Many though complain that working for these agencies causes them to loose the little wage they have. Sometimes they end up with employers who treat them badly and many immigrant workers request never to work for someone of their own background or Jewish people. It has been known among the immigrant community that these particular employers are a lot harder and judgmental to work for. Using ads and newspapers can also have its own difficulties for immigrant workers. Some resort to this measure because they do not want to go through the difficulties of agencies and also because they do not have that many sources that could recommend their services to others. Immigrant women use this method with extreme caution because they could be called by anyone and sometimes the people who call can be of trouble. Sometimes though, immigrant workers get calls from their ads or flyers for people who want them to do an overload of work. For example; one immigrant women talked about how she answered one of those calls, showed up at the door to the individuals house and was given forty dollars to work. The pay was low but she needed it and upon walking in she noticed how disgusting and filthy the home was. Forty dollars was not enough for such an awful job and she put the money back and left for good.
Work in the United States is at point where its extremely hard to find jobs. Many jobs such as working at McDonalds are not even open to some. Being a nanny/housecleaner or a housecleaner is a job with many trials and troublesome factors. It a job taken up by many immigrant workers in the United States. These jobs are important for the women who do them and employers of these domestic workers should respect that ideology also.
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
As most of the world knows, the President of the
Obama was born and raised in
Now, Obama’s mother is Caucasian and his father was African. So when it came to identifying with one particular race Obama recalls jumping in between the two.
“As it was, I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” (Obama, 82) In this book Obama talks about his friend, who he calls “Ray,” and the many different things that they encountered together. In fact his friend had a lot to do with Obama embracing the African side of his heritage. Obama talks about how he and his friend made up “half the population” of black students in the school, and everyone else was white. This being so, he looked desperately for a place of belonging.
Due to many hours after school and during the summer on the basketball court, Obama became a decent ‘baller. He could hold his own against the university students even while he was still in high-school. Naturally, he looked to his fellow basketball teammates for a sense of belonging, but even that didn’t work out too well. The reason you ask? There were white and black people on the team. This seemed to cause a false sense of camaraderie in Obama’s mind. This is because they would all be working together on the court but as soon as they would hit the locker room his fellow black teammates would start to talk about the white people as outsiders. Obama was torn. Whenever he tried to identify with the white people he would feel as though he were not being true to himself. Conversely, at when he would hang out with his friend Ray as well as other black people, he would sometimes feel like he was on the outside looking in. He didn’t like how some black people would treat their oppression as frivolously as a light switch. “Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure.” (Obama, 81)
What Obama also found irritating was the tendency for people who identified themselves as “multicultural” to become annoyed when you called them black. “They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.” (Obama, 99) It was becoming increasingly apparent to Obama that to be anything other than white was negative. “We were always playing on the white man’s court…by the white man’s rules.” (Obama, 85)
He read many different books looking for numerous ways to validate his new understanding of life. This mentality was troubling for Obama and it essentially drove him to become a little more than just the social drinker and smoker. Not wanting it to affect his grades too much, Obama’s mother tried to talk him out of his new-found outlook on life. However, despite his threats to his mother that he would end up like his grandfather, he went on
Even though I am not a fan of Obama politically, after reading this book I have a new respect and understanding of what he has been through and how that affects his life now. I would recommend this book firstly to anyone who lives in the