Analysis Of Alex Kotlowitz 's There Are No Children Here

   Throughout There Are No Children Here, a continuous, powerful tension always lurks in the background. The gangs that are rampant in the housing projects of Chicago cause this tension. In the Henry Horner Homes, according to Kotlowitz, one person is beaten, shot, or stabbed due to gangs every three days. In one week during the author's study of the projects, police confiscated 22 guns and 330 grams of cocaine in Horner alone (Kotlowitz 32).

Alex Kotlowitz's book, There are No Children Here, is a story about two boys, Pharaoh

There are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz, tells a story about the family of LaJoe and Paul Rivers. The book focuses on Lafayette and Pharaoh, two of the younger children in the family, and their interactions with each other, the neighborhood, their family, their friends, and the police. Following the family over three years shows the importance of neighborhood factors when it comes to crime. According to Sampson and Groves (1989), social disorganization refers to “the inability of a community structure to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls”. Many aspects in the book exemplify how neighborhood factors, social controls, and community factors have impacts on crime. The book exemplifies how neighborhood disadvantage can lead to informal social controls, which in turn produces crime. Due to these factors, social disorganization is the best theory to explain the crime that occurs in There are No Children Here.

     Alex Kotlowitz’s book, There are No Children Here, is a story about two boys, Pharoah and Lafeyette Rivers growing in the late 1980’s in Henry Horner, a housing project in Chicago. The boys try to retain their youth while they see constant gang violence, death of close friends, their brother in jail and their dad struggling with a drug addiction.

Alex Kotlowitz was a freelance journalist. In 1985 a friend came to him and asked him to write a text for a photo essay he was doing on (children living in poverty) for a Chicago magazine. That is when he met the Rivers brothers, Lafeyette, age ten, and Pharoah age seven. He spent only a few hours with them interviewing for the photo essay. Lafeyette had an impact on Kotlowitz. When asked what he wanted to be, Lafeyette responded with "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver." Meaning, at ten years old, he wasn't sure if he'd make it to adulthood. In 1988 Kotlowitz suggested to the boys' mother, LaJoe, the idea of writing a book about Pharoah, Lafeyette and the other children in the neighborhood.

The “residential segregation” did not happen overnight. It alludes for the most part to the spatial separation of at least two social gatherings inside a predetermined geographic range, for example, a region, a province, or a metropolitan territory (Trifun, 2017). Preceding 1900, “African Americans” could be found in many neighborhoods in northern urban areas since examples of urban social and spatial association were directed by little scale assembling, business, and exchange. It shapes the available resources all through juvenile or youth encounters through different ways which incorporate capital class, social class, and racial separation (Trifun, 2017).

The success of black youth is hindered in a variety of ways. The problem of residential segregation is perhaps the most prominent issue because it creates a blockade in opportunities and enforces social norms of that area. In turn, many youth are barred from higher education and full time employment or forced to choose other avenues of income. Although youth in these neighborhoods may be familiar with injunctive norms (what they “ought or ought not to do”), being surrounded by crime and forced into a survival mode brings about description norms or those we perceive as normal “based on the observed actions of others”. The Patterson reading discusses this growing disconnect from dominant institutions and how many youths “are neither in school

Orlando Patterson’s The Cultural Matrix, Understanding Black Youth, is a tantalizing summary of the obstacles to black youth survival and success in the United States today. Of course, the primary obstacles to that can be separated into institutional and cultural obstacles as we see best represented in chapter two, “The Social and Cultural Matrix of Black Youth,” and chapter eleven, “Culture, Inequality, and Gender Relations among Urban Black Youth” written by Jody Miller. To put it simply the institutional factors are the wider society-wide problems and inequities that place disadvantages and obstacles on Black youth, the crumbling inner-city schools, food-deserts, mass incarceration, and more that will be discussed, make up the institutional side of the equation; whereas, the “Hip-Hop” and “Hood” cultures I mentioned in my response to Jones’ work on violence against and between Black women is the cultural side of the coin. Misogyny, the elevation of single-motherhood, the elevation of violence as a means of problem-solving and loyalty illustration, the criminality and drug use prevalent and often respected or revered by Hip Hop culture make up the tail-end of that coin, the cultural issues associated among young urban African-American communities.

We are most curious when we are babies. Curiosity is defined as an act of wanting to learn. As babies, we see, touch, hear, taste, and feel the world around us. As babies grow, their minds start to develop and they imagine the world as their fairytale. This stage of a child is wonderful, but dangerous. It is the time when they begin to experiment with what the world has to offer, thus their creative mind is born. A child sees sand for the first time and is curious about it so he or she experiments with it. The child plays with it and creatively builds a sand castle out of it, he or she feels it, smells it, then tastes it, the child will either experience satisfaction of the taste or dissatisfaction. Later on the child may feel a pain in his

Inequality is an extremely prominent issue in today 's society, but typically goes unnoticed by the younger generation. Alice Walker’s short story “Nineteen Fifty-five” and “The Lesson,” by Toni Cade Bambara, both share stories of two innocent minds that are made aware of the racial split through personal experiences. In “Nineteen Fifty-five,” Traynor, a young white boy, receives fame and fortune from a song that was written by a black woman named Gracie Mae Still. Traynor and Gracie Mae form a close bond that exposes the young artist to the hardships the writer faced while trying to follow her dream of being a singer. In “The Lesson,” Miss. Moore, a college graduate, takes responsibility upon herself to teach and guide all the poor, young children in her town. She takes them to New York City, despite all the negativity from the kids, and allows them to realize the extreme economic and racial inequality in society. Both of these stories show young kids being stripped of their innocence when experiencing the sad reality that lies outside of their sheltered world. The kids of “The Lesson” are not voluntarily exploring the city whereas in “Nineteen Fifty-five” Traynor is curious about the background of Gracie Mae thus leading him to discover the inequalities of the world. Despite the different reasons, both stories allow the groups to realize not only the social differences between whites and African Americans but also the economic gap which, although may be initially harsh,

Although there are still horrible living problems of racism and anti-semitism today, the people in this film are living through a specifically hard time for the types of people they are. At their table alone, there are two black men who have experienced colonial control on their home countries and one woman who went through a concentration camp during World War II. Their insights would be extremely charged with experiences and prejudices of their time. That being said, I tend to believe they might discuss many of the themes we have discussed with our texts but with a more personal

Back in September 1957, a picture was captured of a Elizabeth Eckford, she is a young African American girl walking past Little Rock Central High School, being constantly abused with racist comments while her friend, Hazel Bryan, follows behind her. Since then, our society has made some process with race relations and incidents like this are diminishing. Furthermore, Elizabeth possessed a lot of courage to tolerate an angry crowd when they are constantly yelling and bullying her at a young age. Although part of the angry crowd, Hazel Bryan cannot be held accountable for expressing any intentional hatred; she’s too young to understand what the right choice is and is influenced by those around her. The author of “Two Women of Little Rock” David Margolick explains he only wants to help the situation and help the racist identify what they are doing and how cruel they are being. Treating people badly or unfairly because of their race is a terrible, and it is impossible to put up with acts of hatred. When a community of people in the world ignore racially charged crimes it appears as if they are supporting acts of prejudice.

In Boy’s Life, Cory Mackenson is excited that it’s the last day of school. When he’s waiting in the classroom to be “freed” from school by his teacher, the bell finally rings. “Rinnng! We all jumped up, like parts of the same squirming insect.” He feels happiness about his summer and being free of school. “I ran out along the corridor,my arms unencumbered by books,my mind unencumbered by facts and figures,quotations and dates. I ran out into the golden sunlight,and my summer has begun.”This shows how excited Cory Mackenson was to have his freedom

Another type of poverty that we see all the time are the kids from street which are poor at the point of homeless. Those children go through very bad situation as well. I had thought about those kids before, and I knew that it could be bad to live in the streets while being a child, but then, through my investigation, I realized that it was worse than what I thought. Since the 1990’s in New York city and other urban areas across the United States, the public violence that involved street kids was not a groundbreaking news. Nearly five thousand street young people die each year in the United States, primarily from violence, illness, and suicide. Also, there were a lot of crack dealing, prostitution and drugs. Many kids have died during this

Jake Ramsey is on the cusp of procuring information about the man who framed him for a string of terrorist attacks when his contact’s cab explodes in front of him.