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America Beyond the Color Line

In: Social Issues

Submitted By cinnymon
Words 791
Pages 4
America Beyond the Color Line
Shanna Armstead
ETH/125
1/20/2013
Lydia Kerr

The video America Beyond the Color Line: Streets of Heaven gives people an outlook on life in a housing project in Chicago. It shows examples of how black people struggle to survive in the environment or to get out of it. This video gives good insight on the mindset of individuals who only this way of life. Dr. Henry Louis Gates delved seep into the lives of the people and exposes what it is like to grow up, to live, and to escape this type of environment. In the beginning of the video it offers the statistics of the African American community. These statistics stated that one in five Black men in their twenties is in prison on probation or parole, sixty-nine percent of all Black children are raised in a single-parent household, the average lifespan for an African American man is 59, and only 45 percent of Black adults are working in any given week. I believe that the real life stories from the video support these statistics. The video itself showed examples of each statistic.
When Dr. Gates visited the prison the video showed mostly black men behind those bars. In his interview with Eric, Dr. Gates asked him why he thought so many black men were incarcerated and he told him that it was because of the lack of positive role models in the black community. When interviewing Marlon, Dr. Gates asked how old he was when he started selling drugs and Marlon said “fifteen”.
The statistic that says that sixty nine percent of all Black children are raised in a single parent household was backed up when Dr. Gates visited some of the homes inside the Ida B. Wells projects. One woman was twenty-nine with six children and no husband. There are so many single Black mothers because most of the Black fathers are in jail, dead, or just absent from their lives. It is because they were not taught to

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