Summary

Pages 21 through 29 – The author describes how growing up in West Baltimore taught him rules of behavior in relation to the life of the street - to gangs and to other individuals who were, like him, simply trying to defend their lives and their right to have them. He wonders what his son knows of those rules, even while acknowledging the very public, widely known incidents of race-defined violence “…you understand that there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a way that he could never terrify me.” He goes on to comment on how schools, like the street, left him without answers to the race questions and issues he was facing, commenting on how school felt pointless and irrelevant to the situation (the fear, the violence, the uncertainty) he was living in, in...