Brett Motta
Mr. Lewis
Writing III
The Contrast
In the two readings I read there were many contrasting events. In “Shame” by Dick Gregory he experiences many of them. They include starvation, poverty, and he also doesn’t have a father. He struggles to get food, he’s poor and cannot buy any, and he gets humiliated for not having a father. In “I became her target” by Roger Wilkins, he has it a little better. Although they are both young black males they experience two different lives. Wilkins’s problems aren’t nearly as bad as Gregory’s. But he still has tragedies. These two readings contrast in many ways. The three that stand out the most are difference in poverty, there different in class, and one falls in love.
The first contrast paragraph will be about the difference in poverty. Gregory talks about himself having to sneak into the cloak room to steal a bite of kid’s sandwiches. This tells me that he didn’t have enough money to feed himself. Plus with the loss of his father his mother had to support him on his own. He says he was pregnant with smells, poverty, shoes that had never been bought for him and pregnant with five people in the same bed. This just goes to show that he couldn’t shower, had no shoes, and had a small home. Wilkins on the other hand says how, his mother married his stepfather and he bought the best house he could afford for his new family. Here Wilkins has a nice new house, with a mom and dad to take care of him and to buy him food.
The second contrast paragraph is about their experiences in school. It says how the teacher thought Gregory was a trouble maker, who sat in the idiot’s chair. The teacher thought he was stupid, couldn’t spell, couldn’t read, and couldn’t do arithmetic. The teacher thought he was nothing but a black kid and couldn’t do anything. In Wilkins life the teacher actually liked him. He said that she thought Negroes were equal. He said that she would challenge...