All American Boys takeaway

There are many things I've taken away from the book All American Boys. The book has been a great example as to what is going on in the world today. One thing I've taken away is that you shouldn't take any situation at face value. Just because you see the bad things that one race/ethnic group may do in the media doesn't mean that they don't do good. The news only highlights the bad, it shouldn't be like that, but that's the way things are. Another thing I've taken away is that there is a plague of police brutality in this country. There's a good amount of police out there that have done messed up things and made bad decisions and how the police take things at face value and just make an assumption, and not base their actions on fact. An example is Freddie Gray. He was no threat to police, he didn't make any attempt to harm or threaten them, yet he ended up dead from a spinal cord injury. How did he get that? It certainly couldn't have just happened, it must've come from somewhere, that being the police, and yet they all were acquitted, all six officers acquitted of many charges (link to the officers and charges and a timeline of that day: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/30/us/what-happened-freddie-gray-arrested-by-baltimore-police-department-map-timeline.html?_r=0). Just thinking of the current political situation with all of these scenarios of unarmed African American persons being brutally beaten has made me really look back on the book and how Rashad had been beaten based on assumptions that he was stealing a bag of chips. The takeaways from this book have really changed the way I see things in the media and in the current political unrest among the African American community and for that matter the entire country.

Jakob's Response

From our discussion in class today, I developed a couple ideas about All American Boys and Race/Police in the media. In All American Boys, I believe the author ended the book before the trial to show that the trial Ian that was important, the unity of the community was important. On the subject of race/police in the media, I think race is not as important as most people think. From my perspective, exciting news is exciting news, and when I am watching the news , I tend to either tune out or miss the race mentioned of the people affected or the one(s) who caused it. But, that is my perspective. Other people could be outraged that the news even mentions race, which I can totally understand. It's very unnecessary. For my final idea, I will talk about police in the media. Once again, from my perspective, I think police are too negatively represented in the media, especially when all the facts aren't given. A lot of the time, especially when a black teen is shot, the media responds very negatively, when it isn't always. One example that comes to my head is the shooting of Sylville Smith. He was shot and killed by an officer after he was discovered with a gun that contained stolen ammunition. Body cam showed that he was raising his guns to the police when they fired, killing him. Following this, there were riots in Milwaukee, destroying the city, over a troubled man who's motive seemed to kill the police, the police just defending themselves.