Shame of the Nation Annotation - Essay Example

Shame of the Nation Annotation The story is told of a nation that is just coming to terms with liberalism. For a long time the United States of America had been under the British colony. As the story begins, a lead character who is also the persona in the story introduces the readers to a series of brutality and inhuman murders targeted at a single group within the American population. It is not easy to accept the changes that have come with independence and the challenges that these pose is threatening to break the social fabric that holds the nation.

During the period of the agrarian revolution, massive labor was required. To mitigate this high demand, the masters of the farmlands were compelled to seek slaves. These people were shipped to the farm lands in America and other parts of Europe in very inhumane manners. Once there, they were forced to work in the field without pay and under deplorable conditions. When eventually the United States got its independence and started practicing self rule, the African American could not fit into the society.

The industrial revolution had come and there was no need for slaves to tend the fields as they had been substituted by machines. The African Americans could not be shipped back to Africa; they had increased in number and most of them had died. All those who were left were their descendants, being people who had played servants to their white owners; they had quite a difficult time integrating into the wider American society. The white people discriminated grossly against them with lots of stereotypes targeted at them.

This book portrays how bad the situation was and how difficult life was made to be for the African Americans by the whites. Right from the first page, the narrator of the story, which is consequently told in the first person narration, introduces the reader to the brutality of the government. The first page does not hide the fact that the government was made up of whites alone. Four volunteers who had gone to sensitive the locals to vote by teaching them the importance of the exercise disappeared mysteriously.

They do not ever return and when it is heard about them again, it is because their corpses have been discovered rotting in a nearby thicket. No formal follow up is made to try and determine the cause of the murders. From the whispers in the neighborhood, it does not become hard to tell that the deaths were instigated by the atrocious arm of the government. To make the reader visualize how bad the treatments could get, the white lead character who doubles up as the “I” in the story felt the pain when he studied the relationship that existed between the two races: one claiming superiority and thereby trampling on the rights of the innocent other who out of fear and ignorance was submissive to the oppression.

There existed severe segregation, and as the lead character narrates, these acts of animosity touched his heart compelling him to engage in his course for justice. He signed up as a teacher in a nearby African school (Jonhatan 2). He points out that he had not been into an African territory before in his life and this further helps the reader to conceptualize the extent of the segregation that existed in these times. As a teacher, he confesses to having many black friends. This is an occurrence that surprised him.

This means that even as the whites kept demeaning the blacks and calling them uncivilized, they had not taken an initiative of venturing out to study the social prowess of this other group. The lead character proceeds with his collage until completion upon which he becomes an educator. He is moves from school to school in the black neighborhoods as he refers to them. He later introduces the HIV/ AIDS factor. In a region in the south called Mott Heaven, he observes the high rate of the HIV prevalence and this is not made any easier with instances of mother child infection resulting in more young people being infected in these black neighborhoods.

This, however, is not the case with the whites who have access to social amenities and access family planning services. They have smaller families that they effectively look after. In brief, the author pities his nation and blames the lack of equal development on what he refers to as short sightedness. The country has enough resources to fend for all those who live within its border regardless of their skin colors, but the governing group does not see it so. They take pride in their color more than the virtues they poses inside.

Poor health and ignorance is threatening to wipe out an entire population which ironically forms half the total population size of the entire country. These attributes, as he understands, will eventually affect the entire nation if effective management is not put in place (Jonhatan 27). Work Cited Jonhatan, Kozol. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: crown, 2005. Print.