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.