Building Blocks of America

American society is highly influenced by ethnic diversity with food, music, fashion and language being a few and great examples that can be considered. The ethnic diversity in American society enabled people to know one another through sharing the cultural aspect. “I am fourteen-year old girl with bad spelling and a messy room” (187). The girl who had a Japanese Descent revealed how she did not have good spelling. The girl loved tomatoes, which were not grown in the area she was moving to. Her friend Denise who had a white origin would criticize the girl. “You’re trying to start a war” (187). Despite the white girl criticizing her, she believed that she will miss her when the tomato seeds she left her grow.

The skin color led to reservation of some train coaches for the white people and other coaches for the ‘colored’. The young child travelling with his mother and sibling entered into a disagreement with the conductor who demanded that they were supposed to move to the coach for African American. They were commanded to leave the train when it came to a halt. “She told me that the laws required racial separation…” (211). The lesson that the mother gave to the child on race relations clearly revealed that even the law makers and probably the government allowed for racial separation due to skin color to an extent that made the white and the black colored not to share coaches in a train. The lessons made the child become a better person who would distance from purveyors of hate and misunderstanding.

“Mother dear, may I go downtown instead of out to play, and march the streets of Birmingham in a Freedom March today?” (452). This was a conversation between a girl and his mother. The mother is forcing the girl to go to the church which she thought was a sacred place rather than to go to the Freedom March. The church was later bombed, and the bombing was believed to have been organized due to the hate crimes towards minorities. The child’s wish to march for civil rights and her mother’s wish to protect her resulted to the child’s death in the church bombing. The hate crimes towards minorities made the mother fail to acknowledge the child’s pleas seriously. The child expresses the desire to support civil rights movement rather than playing as it is usual with children. The mother is also seen as an oppressive authority to the child.