Read this passage and write a synopsis. (sorry about quality) Reality at Yale On
ID: 3497056 • Letter: R
Question
Read this passage and write a synopsis. (sorry about quality)
Reality at Yale One of my friends at Yale, a black man named JR who was onc or two ycars ahcad of me, worked in the dining hall serving food and busing tables to earn his way through law school. He's now a successful lawyer in Connecticut. One day a white law student approached him after the dining hall had closed for breakfast. The guy insisted on being served-something about, "Im only a few minutes late. JR said, "I'm sorry, but the dining hall is closed," whereupon Jerko (not his real name, but he was a jerk) hit JR in the mouth, breaking his front tooth. Jerko didn't get expelled-probably suspended. But I do remember that he was a well-heeled young man who wore a preppy sports jacket and brown loafers without socks. I also remember staring him down in the law school, hoping he would say something so that I could get in his face. All the black guys did that, but he always looked away. I also remember that JR sued him and got a lot of money Then there were the Vietnam War confrontations around the television, also in the dining hall. Those of us against the war (black and white) against those for the war (mostly white). Lots of tension at the tube when the news came on-people took their war positions seriously. One day, somebody on "their" side got mad at something one of us said. He jumped out of his seat, and threw a big heavy armchair into the television set in the lounge area just off the dining hall. I guess this was his definition of due process. When I first arrived, I was one of four black first-year students, who included Chuck Lawrence, Stan Sanders, and me. Did the admissions office at these New England exclusive schools all call each other and say, "Four blacks, please?" The next year we were joined by D'Army Bailey and Jeroyd Greene in my class. Greene (now Sa'ad El- Amin) was thrown out of Howard for protesting the Army's Vietnam recruitment effort. I don't remember why D'Army left his previous law school for Yale. And then there was Joan Anderssen. Joan was white, and from an "Old Left" family in Los Angeles. In my dealings with SDS and other phases of the Movement, I met people with connections to various left-wing traditions connected to old-line socialism or the Communist Party. People with Old Left backgrounds were stereotypically very intense, full of themselves about their political correctness, and generally plain, with a worn-down, disheveled look. Joan was none of the above. She came to Yale with a California tan, wore short dresses, and she was fine. I couldn't help bu notice. However, I was not interested in dating white women, and so we became friends. Life for me at the law school was not pleasant socially, because most of my schoolmates, white males, al at the top of their academic games, were against or lukewarm to everything I had come to believe about politics, civil rights, life values, priorities, organizing, protests, direct action, and on and on. "Direct action" or them was asking somebody out on a date and "scoring the first night. I didn't have very many friends. As at Amherst, I led a pretty lonely existence. I spent a lot of time on the Hill for that reason, just hanging out with the people. And I went to Newark on some holidays. But all that changed almost overnight thanks to a debate I had with Stan Sanders, one of the black men in my class, in the hall in the law school. Stan was a graduate of Pepperdine College in Los Angeles, a Rhodes Scholar, and had an offer to try out for the Chicago Bears football team. He chose Yale Law School instead. He had been featured in Eborty or Life magazine that fall talking about the Watts riot of 1965. Stan is a great guy, but his politics were conservative compared to mine. And so we were debating whether Richmond Flowers, the attorney general of Alabama under the racist governor George Wallace, should have been invited to speak at Yale in the next week or so. Flowers was allegedly a "liberal" and he had a "right to speak," said Stan. "Besides, he might have something we need to hear, a new voice of the South,* he argued. I responded, "If he was so great, why didn't he convince white people in Alabama to let black people have the right to vote" I'm sure I reminded him of my earlier stay in Kilby State Prison in Alabama, and the jailings, beatings, and killings endured by black and white advocates in Alabama throughout the decade, all on Flowers's watch as attorney general. "He didn't speak up until the passage of the Voting Rights Act," 1 reminded Stan. "He's a politician and wants all those new black voters in Alabama on his side whe he rus for office." To me Flowers was a phony, and I didn't see giving the enemy a forum. "Where was he when the [stuff] hit the fan?" I demanded. Stan and I were really going at it. It wasnt unusual to have topical debates in the hal, but very unusual seeing two black lawyers squaring off and raising their voices at each other. And so a crowd gathered, and still others came over to see what was attracting so much attention, u the hall was full of people. In the law school tradition, other people joined in the argument. They all took Stan's side. I was battling back and forth, until I realized I wasn't alone Joan was on my side! We stood ther like two gladiators, side by side, shooting them down one by onc. No one wins or loses that kind of debate, and Flowers did speak, giving us platitudes and sidestepping race as much as he could. However, he looked good to the liberals, got some headlines, and went home. But I had won something else in the process: a new respect for Joan, a new friend who shared my views, an ally, and pretty soon after, we were an item in the law school. Joan and I were together for almost a year. We saw each other through a dry spell that was Yale Law School, mutually supportive in a school hostile to the ideas that made us who we were. Joan was invited to join the Law Jotma, and I wasn't, with my C+ average C"What did you expect, JW?"). This tested my chauvinistic attitude, but I reconciled my relatively sparse grades against her A's by looking at the goals we both shared. And she helped me. When I didn't go to class because of my other commitments, she was generous with her notes, and gladly explained what happened in class. For some reason, the same notes she used got her A's and the highest they ever got me was a B. I wanted to say, "It's racial, man, i's rac"but then she did go to class, and kept up with the class reading on a timely basis. Again, I had to focus on my objective: discipline over emotion.Explanation / Answer
The author of the passage explains his dilemma on discipline Vs emotion while his time as a student in Yale University. Although he knew that racial discrimination was found all over the University, he convinces himself to stay focused with his disciplined life. The author starts his discussion with his experience where he witnessed JR a black senior student who worked in the canteen to support his education was hit by a white man who was just suspended and not dismissed. Although JR was right in telling the white man that the canteen was closed, the white man was arrogant. Secondly, when he and his three black friends were branded as four blacks and this was another instant where go got angry but overcame his emotions. Thirdly, when he scored a B and Joan scored an A using the same notes, it was still racial discrimination. Earlier racial discrimination was very explicit but today it is institutionalized where people from other races apart from the major European Americans are discriminated in terms of housing, job, education and medicine.
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