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
28). Nathan is willing to endure the harassment and criticism of his own kind yet he couldn’t take that which was given to him by the white students he used to be classmates with. He would risk going back to that low place in his life just for his “own people” to acknowledge him and he would do anything to get their respect.

At the age of twelve, Nathan had already began and grown accustomed to a life of crime. His friends were delinquents and soon Nathan himself started making less of an effort in school. He didn’t realize that his friends were helping him ease his way into the life of a juvenile delinquent. Nathan would be late to school, get suspensions, not mention the suspension to his parents and instead would have his friends forge their signature. He started looking up to bad role models such as Cooder.

“At twelve, he had the older guys slang and manner down tight and had gotten an early jump on the rest of us as an accomplished thief” (MMWH, p. 33).

In just a short amount of time, Nathan’s views on what was most important had flipped. He went from believing that he had academic promise to believing that his life had no meaning unless he was a part of a group. He changed from the little boy who was excited about making some extra money on the side to help out his family and developed into a boy who, instead of eating a lunch that his mother packed for him, would rather gamble to win money for hot school lunches since his mom couldn’t