Racism In The Same Kind Of Different As Me

RACE - Race and prejudice against skin color is a common theme in The Same Kind of Different As Me. One of the main characters, Denver Moore, is black. Ron Hall and most of the other characters are white. The interactions between Denver and other characters provide insight into how blacks are treated at this time in America, even if race is not specifically talked about in the book. Denver and his family are sharecroppers. Sharecropping is referred to as modern-day slavery because the sharecroppers are so in debt they can not leave and have to rely on the owner. Most of the black people mentioned in this book are illiterate. As a result, the parts of the book written by Denver does not have proper grammar. Ron Hall’s writing, however, is perfect. …show more content…
The only white person he ever likes is this boy his age, but Denver ends up being moved to a new farm. All of the stories that Denver is told about white people involve violence. One time, some white schoolboys did not like the black schoolboys walking on the same path as them. They did not care that the black schoolboys went to school at a later time. The white schoolboys ambushed the black schoolboys with sticks and old pieces of wood, making sure they kept the path to themselves. Denver personally experiences violence from white people as well. When he was a teenager, Denver saw a white woman who is having car problems. He offered to help, but some white boys drove by and decided that Denver must be trying to bother her. They put a rope around his neck and tied it to the horse. They then made the horse gallop away while dragging Denver behind him. When Denver meets Ron and Deborah, he does not trust them because of these past experiences with white people. Ron and Deborah do not know all of this, as they had never been abused by black people. Ron himself lived on a farm during the summer when he is …show more content…
This was a common way to keep blacks in “slavery”. While they are technically free, they are forced to become in debt to the man who owned the land. The owner rents out all the tools to grow food, but the sharecroppers can never pay the money back. They end up stuck working there for their whole lives. The farm Denver works at is a plantation farm. The book does specifically say that he grows up on a plantation farm, but a reader can infer it from several parts of the book. For example, the crop grown there is cotton, a plantation crop. The man who owns the plantation would sell the cotton, but none of the workers would ever see any of the