Prompts for Second Session

Prompts for Second Session

1.  I was struck particularly by Stevenson’s noting several times, the effect arrests and murders have on the surrounding community (112).  I mean I get it, but in my White mind, bad things happen.  People are picked up by the police, jailed, and adjudicated.  In my White world this seems to happen as it should.  

Not so with the Black lives in Stevenson’s world, both his world as a writer and his world as a Black man.  The effects of domestic terrorism by the Klan during the Jim Crow years, manifested by public lynchings and other forms of night-riding murder must be replicating itself through Black neighborhoods today.  remember Emmet Till?  What do you think about the rise in police murders and the overflowing numbers of Black Americans filling our jails as being nothing more than a third wave of determined oppression of Black America, eased and focused by Supreme Court rulings that make it all okay? 

2.  How is it possible that in America, we can have stories like those of Ian (152), Trina (148), George (157), and Antonio (154)?  Would our founding fathers have been similarly shocked as we have in reading of their occurrence?  What are your thoughts about the idea that the 3/5 clause of exclusion in our Constitution creates a loophole in our fundamental consciousness as a people that allows an “out” for the “inalienable rights” each one of us is to constitutionally enjoy as an American?  Perhaps our Constitution is the cause of these horrible things our majorities do to our minorities?

3. Ian writes a letter to Bryan after the report on the plight of children in the United States was published.  He writes the photos and the photo shoot “were a welcome addition to my sensory deprived life.”  Do you have family photographs that raise such emotions in you?  What do the photographs connect to in your psyche that engender feelings similar to those of Ian?  Do you suppose that this is one way Ian is us and we are him?