McLaren, Peter; Race, class, and gender

 "Making it" is what many of my friends and I spoke about when we were young. Most of our parents and older siblings never went to college or even graduated. While most people dream of what amazing career they want when they get older, most black kids and kids that live in poverty are dreaming of “making it" by any means so they will be able to get out of the life they are growing up in. The problem is that most of us do not know how to "make it". This is because our parents do not know either. The parents do not know how to apply for college or even the importance of it. They were giving a garbage education and it has done nothing to improve their lives so most of us see what they got out of the system and feel like damn why am I working so hard in school which is most likely to lead to nothing when I could be doing other things to get money. Biggie Smalls said in one songs that "your either slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot". Now that statement is not as true today as it was in the 90s but in some areas it is very close.

We as black people do some of this to ourselves too. The whole "acting white" phrase gets thrown around a lot in the black community. We tell each other that you’re acting white if you get good grades in school, use proper English, use big words, and many other things. I feel that we do this to each other because the way we use slang and act sometimes is our culture and we do not want to see our culture die even if ti means we have the chance to better ourselves because sometimes our black culture is all we have claim over.

This video illustrates some of my points.