Sugar in the Raw by Rebecca Carroll

Author:Rebecca Carroll [Carroll, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56041-4
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2011-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

AISHA

Thirteen

Seattle, Washington

I live in a very quiet neighborhood in Seattle that is made up of both black and white families. It is what I have known for my entire life. I go to a diverse public school with all different types of races. Beyond the typical followed-around-in-the-store story, I don’t give that much thought to being black. I have as many black friends as I do white and I think all of my friendships are based on honesty. The black community in Seattle is spread across the city, although there are very poor areas of the city where mostly black people live. I’ve been to these areas and their schools are run-down, unsafe, and not very well kept. I have a friend who goes to school in one of these areas. She goes to her school and I go to mine. It doesn’t define who we are.

I know that I am black, but I don’t think I’m different. My family and home carry in it a strong sense of black culture. We celebrate Kwanzaa, we talk about black history, there is always black literature and art around, and we are all black in my family. My mother is a writer and I have read her first book, which is a children’s book. But I haven’t read her novel, which came out last year. I went to kindergarten through second grade at a school called The Garvey School, as in Marcus Garvey. I learned a lot about black history and whatnot. The school was all black, and we talked about everything and read about things that have happened in history that might help us to understand things that are happening today.

In the third grade, I went from an all-black school to a mixed, predominantly white school. That was a transition just in terms of looking around and seeing white faces. At first I felt uncomfortable instinctively, and then there were things that just seemed wrong. For example, one of the counselors told me that my scores were not high enough to be in the honors program, but they were. My parents told me that those counselors were trying to hold me back and that I just needed to persevere. I ended up getting into the honors program.

I know that more things like that will happen to me as I get older. But I think my best quality is that I am smart. I want to be a brain surgeon and a concert violinist. I can’t be stopped from playing the violin, and being a brain surgeon just requires intelligence, discipline, and dedication. I’ve got that. My parents help me a lot and encourage me to think. My father is an ultrasound technician, so I have learned a lot from his precision. I love history and I’m all right in math. Whatever I focus on, I just love to get into it and explore all sorts of ways of looking at it.

My relationship with my parents is good. Sometimes we argue, but

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