- After moving with his family to New York, Coates observes a difference between the way white parents treat their children and the way he finds himself treating his son. Find a passage in the text that best represents this difference (text-to-text), quote it, and comment on or raise a question about it. Starting with this text-to-text connection, what text-to-world connection might you make? ‘
“I could not help but think that this could have been me, and holding you, a month old by then – I knew that such loss would not be mine alone” (76).
I chose this quote because as Coates is reading the headlines about Prince’s death he is putting himself in those shoes and imagining if that was him and his child. I would say that this feeling is different than the one a white person with a child might have had reading the headlines because the police would not have wrongfully shot down a white person. The text to world connection could be the stuff that still happens like this today with the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and BLM in general.
- Offer ONE SIGNIFICANT PASSAGE you will be prepared to read and offer as a vehicle for class discussion. Quote the passage and write a few sentences explaining WHY you chose it and WHAT you’d like us to discuss in it.“
They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws” (Coates 83).
I chose this passage because this kind of stuff still happens today. It still happens that police don’t get punished for their actions and instead are sent back out to work. I guess what we could discuss could be why he has to tell his young son these kinds of stories and how crazy it is that there are people being raised to avoid/be aware of the police when they are supposed to be the ‘good guys’.
