Racism in a Small Town

Racism in a small town is very different from racism in a big city. In a small town, oftentimes racism is because they don't really experience other types of cultures other than their own. Especially in the time period that this book was written in.

In the case of this book Lednecky capitalizes on the kids ignorance and gets them to purposely take an opposing football player out of the game. Boomer, who I would bet hasn't met many black people in his life, if any, was just going on what Lednecky told him. For example, that they are bad people and the only way to stop them is to hurt them. Boomer couldn't formulate a decison for himself because of his lack of knowledge or experience interacting with other people. I grew up in a small town in western Maryland of about 3,000 people. In my elementary school, we had one black kid, and he was a first grader when I was in fifth grade. So instead of doing research on this subject, I will write from personal past experiences. We never interacted with any black people, ever. The only time we usually ever saw a black person is when we went and watched opposing basketball teams play our university's team. This brings to mind a story about my cousin Jens, who is now an adult. My cousin and my aunt walk into a elevator when my cousin was about 4 and they saw some black people, who at the time appeared to be tall to my cousin. So he said to his mom, "I wonder why all the basketball players are in this elevator?". Because of his lack of experience interacting with other races, he assumed that all black guys were basketball players. This is similar to the case of the football players at Trout High School who assumed that all the black guys were different than them.

The time period that this book takes place in also heavily influences the racism issue in this book. This is coming of the recent changes in the civil rights era, and most of the adults in the town were around in the time when blacks were REALLY thought of as scum. Not like today when it was only our grandparents that were around when blacks weren't treated equally. Also at that time people were a lot more separate for lack of a better word. Air travel was less common, so people just didn't get around as much and didn't interact with others as much. Whereas nowadays everybody moves around a lot more on vacations etc. This allows for what is called cultural diffusion. Or the spread of cultures throughout the world.

Hopefully now, though that most people travel enough that most people will have experience with other cultures. Though there will always be people like the people where I used to live that have never been out of the town in their life. I have confidence that this issue will be solved naturally by the growth of technology.