Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria Summary

Racial segregation and racism is one of the world’s major issues today. Many people are not aware of how much racism still exists in schools and anywhere else where social lives are occurring. It is obvious that racism is not a good thing as it was many decades ago and it is still occurring in society especially in schools even though the government abolished it several decades ago. Two articles—“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” by Beverly Tatum and “From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid” by Jonathan Kozol—present two opposite views on the desire to resolve the inequality in public education. On the other hand, Tatum focuses on African American racial identity development and the role …show more content…
Both of them have a problem presenting their evidence, as portrayed by Tatum, her evidence shows too little to no evidence leaving her claims unsupported. Tatum, the author of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria,” provides too little evidence to convince readers of her position. She does not include enough evidence to support her argument. This leaves readers to question the little evidence she provides is reliable. Her unsupported claims does not make her argument persuasive for example, she presumes to tell us all how to understand “Whiteness in a White context”. If I recall correctly, isn’t Tatum black? In her article she says “as I write this, I can hear the voice of a white woman who asked me, “Well, all adolescents struggle with questions of identity.” This is referring to her own knowledge that every White person in society thinks the same. In a way it seems like she is telling everyone the way they should think just because she gives her point of view without using facts and statistics leaving her claim to be unsupported. The examples she uses are not relevant and don’t back up her claim because her examples are based on racial privilege. Leaving her examples to assume that every privileged person is racist. If the examples she provided were more relevant and accounted more than just who are privileged she would have been able to more fully support her …show more content…
Both of them have an issue with their evidence. Kozol addresses a lot of problems with education. He mainly focuses on the discrepancies between minority education and white education in different public schools by expressing a mixture of statistical data that he gathered in order to try to strengthen his argument, but the way he uses his anecdotal experience and excessive statistical data in his argument does not strengthen his claim because he goes overboard and uses too many statistics making his argument seem like he strung a bunch of sources together leaving his argument to not focus on the main problem. He should take out some of the data he uses or at least use the sources more wisely to get to the main point and focus on the problem without being overwhelmed with too much information. In Tatum’s piece she also uses statistical data and examples but they are minimized significantly to analyze the effects of racial organization with her claim of value. Tatum should have included more sources and examples to help support her claim. Exploring more sources would have helped her obtain a variety of different viewpoints. She mentions several topics that involves development racial identity but she doesn’t provide enough evidence and facts to back up the topics she talks about making it less