The inner city is an altered place. It is the refuge of many minority groups. I personally was raced in the common African American part of town. The streets filled with children in the hot summers, and in the winters dark evenings made the street lights glow. Inside my home there were bills to be paid, which made moving around not so unusual. Clothes didn’t come in much while in my youth, but as a younger my family tried their hardest to provide food; cooked meals.
As a society, a capitalistic society, there is a hierarchy. Today, it may be called “social class” to dumb down the fact that the equality that our forefathers stressed is not very present in the lives we lead today. From slavery, to the civil rights movement of blacks and women, to mass production all of which contribute to the hierarchy’s existence.
Today is the age of the cyber. The human interaction with technology is at a very high rate. In history the interaction was very intricate and empathetic, which helped gain the civil rights of African Americans and women. But, look around you the pace to which upper class Americans are moving is unbelievable. Knowledge is becoming more and more popular, but communication has almost become vital. According to Rebecca Schaefer, Western Kentucky University, “if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India (Henrikson, 2011). There are 800 million active Facebook users (“Statistics,” 2011). So everyone is moving rapidly? Well no, not exactly. 45 percent of black homes do not have Internet access, and 47 of Hispanics. This trickles down to the growth of children in the inner city because reading is so very important in the world we live in.
Division is continuing to cause a hierarchy, but it is not through physicality or dictatorship, but disguised in the form of the odds of an opportunity. In the inner city there is much violence, much death, and much emotional heartache. The cooked meals that I received was my family’s way of keeping the promise. Growing up I always had food on the table and this was the way love and care was shown, which gave me the confidence to go out and be sure of my abilities. Opportunities are not given they are taken. Many inner city children do not have the family, which in most cases leave them insecure and unconfident.