Sarah-Jane (SJ) Friedman Character Analysis

SJ: Sorry. It’s just—you’re completely oblivious to the struggles of anyone outside your little social group.

Jared: Whatever, SJ.

SJ: I’m serious. What about the economic disparities? What about the fact that proportionally speaking, there are more people of color living in poverty than white people? Have you even thought about that?

Jared: Dude, Manny drives a Range Rover.

Manny: What does that have to do with anything?

Jared: No beef, dude. I’m just saying your folks make way more money than mine.

Manny: Okay. They worked really hard to get to where they are, so—

Jared: I’m not saying they didn’t, dude. You just proved my point. Black people have the same opportunities as white people in this country if they’re willing to work hard enough. Manny’s parents are a perfect example.

SJ: My point is I’ve seen you commit the same crime Shemar Carson had on the “criminal record’’ you mentioned.

Jared: Whatever, SJ.

SJ: I know you’d prefer to ignore this stuff because you benefit from it, but walking around pretending inequality doesn’t exist won’t make it disappear, Jared. You and Manny, who are equal in pretty much every way apart from race, could commit the same crime, but it’s almost guaranteed that he would receive a harsher punishment than you.

Me: Well, either way it went, I was sayin somethin’, you know? Staying woulda been a statement of solidarity with these guys I grew up with—and who look like me. Leaving was a different statement, and the fact that I chose to do it with a white guy who was dressed as a Klansman…well…

Let’s observe, shall we? I’m ranked number two in our class, I’m captain of the baseball team, I do community service on weekends, and I got higher test scores than Justyce . . . yet he got into Yale early action, and I didn’t. I know for a fact it’s because I’m white and he’s black.

Now say you have a black guy—not Justyce, but someone else—whose single parent’s income falls beneath the poverty line. He lives in a really crummy area and goes to a public school that has fifteen-year-old textbooks and no computers. Most of the teachers are fresh out of college and leave after a year. Some psychological testing has been done at this school, and the majority of students there, this guy included, are found to suffer from low self-esteem and struggle with standardized testing because of stereotype threat—basically, the guy knows people expect him to underperform, which triggers severe test anxiety that causes him to underperform.

[…]

Now erase the two backgrounds. We’ll keep it simple and say GPA-wise, you have a four-point-oh and he has a three-point-six. Test scores, you got a fifteen-eighty, right? Well, this guy got an eleven-twenty. Based on GPA and scores only, which one of you is more likely to get into a good college?

“So check this out,” she said, rotating the screen so he could see it. “The Myth of the Superpredator” was the title of the article. “The gist of this: back in the nineties, some big-shot researchers predicted that the number of violent crimes committed by African American teen males would skyrocket in the years to follow. The ‘leading authority’ on the matter dubbed these potential criminals superpreda­tors.”

[…]

“Fortunately, the prediction was incorrect,” she went on. “Crime rates among youth plummeted.”

He smiled. “Okay . . .”

“Unfortunately, it seems the fear of young black guys created by this research is alive and well.”

SJ: Sorry. It’s just—you’re completely oblivious to the struggles of anyone outside your little social group.

Jared: Whatever, SJ.

SJ: I’m serious. What about the economic disparities? What about the fact that proportionally speaking, there are more people of color living in poverty than white people? Have you even thought about that?

Jared: Dude, Manny drives a Range Rover.

Manny: What does that have to do with anything?

Jared: No beef, dude. I’m just saying your folks make way more money than mine.

Manny: Okay. They worked really hard to get to where they are, so—

Jared: I’m not saying they didn’t, dude. You just proved my point. Black people have the same opportunities as white people in this country if they’re willing to work hard enough. Manny’s parents are a perfect example.

SJ: My point is I’ve seen you commit the same crime Shemar Carson had on the “criminal record’’ you mentioned.

Jared: Whatever, SJ.

SJ: I know you’d prefer to ignore this stuff because you benefit from it, but walking around pretending inequality doesn’t exist won’t make it disappear, Jared. You and Manny, who are equal in pretty much every way apart from race, could commit the same crime, but it’s almost guaranteed that he would receive a harsher punishment than you.

Me: Well, either way it went, I was sayin somethin’, you know? Staying woulda been a statement of solidarity with these guys I grew up with—and who look like me. Leaving was a different statement, and the fact that I chose to do it with a white guy who was dressed as a Klansman…well…

Let’s observe, shall we? I’m ranked number two in our class, I’m captain of the baseball team, I do community service on weekends, and I got higher test scores than Justyce . . . yet he got into Yale early action, and I didn’t. I know for a fact it’s because I’m white and he’s black.

Now say you have a black guy—not Justyce, but someone else—whose single parent’s income falls beneath the poverty line. He lives in a really crummy area and goes to a public school that has fifteen-year-old textbooks and no computers. Most of the teachers are fresh out of college and leave after a year. Some psychological testing has been done at this school, and the majority of students there, this guy included, are found to suffer from low self-esteem and struggle with standardized testing because of stereotype threat—basically, the guy knows people expect him to underperform, which triggers severe test anxiety that causes him to underperform.

[…]

Now erase the two backgrounds. We’ll keep it simple and say GPA-wise, you have a four-point-oh and he has a three-point-six. Test scores, you got a fifteen-eighty, right? Well, this guy got an eleven-twenty. Based on GPA and scores only, which one of you is more likely to get into a good college?

“So check this out,” she said, rotating the screen so he could see it. “The Myth of the Superpredator” was the title of the article. “The gist of this: back in the nineties, some big-shot researchers predicted that the number of violent crimes committed by African American teen males would skyrocket in the years to follow. The ‘leading authority’ on the matter dubbed these potential criminals superpreda­tors.”

[…]

“Fortunately, the prediction was incorrect,” she went on. “Crime rates among youth plummeted.”

He smiled. “Okay . . .”

“Unfortunately, it seems the fear of young black guys created by this research is alive and well.”