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Makes Me Wanna Holler Essay

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Black people will get you into trouble. Not because they want to, but because they don’t know any better. They value things that others would find meaningless, they do things that others would know better than to do and their actions and mental attitude towards their futures are anything but progressive. Black youths are focused more on their attire than their education and they seem to have forgotten that they weren’t able to receive such a thing before. The black youth are hypocrites, raising hell for white people, believing that they’re doing their ancestor’s justice for the 300 years of oppression that they went through.

Nathan’s blackness got in the way of his education and success. At a young age, whether he knew it or not, he had …show more content…

Waters. Here, Nathan abandoned the feeling of having more academic promise than his brothers and instead, traded in better education for acceptance. This is the beginning of Nathan’s downfall.

At this school, education was not thought of as a priority, at least not academic education. Instead, students educated themselves on the hippest trends of the streets. For example, if you wanted to make it through Waters without being made fun of or “joned,” you had to wear what was socially acceptable in the black community, you had have your hair a certain way, you had to wear certain types of shoes from certain stores, and you even had to walk a certain way in order to show how much influence you had.

“I think the fear of being singled out and joned was one of the main reasons everybody at Waters placed so much emphasis on how they looked and carried themselves. You could be emotionally scarred for life if you got joned hard enough.” (MMWH, p. 24)

It wasn’t until Nathan started going to W.E. Waters when his views changed on his priorities. Being around his “own people” distracted him from seeing what his true goal in life was. Now, instead of focusing on his education, he instead focused on the latest trends and worried about fitting into the social scene believing that he “had to work on getting [his]

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