In my book Rez Ball by Byron Graves, Tre Brun has dreams of leading his school's team to a state championship for basketball and making it to the NBA. He had an older brother who died in a car accident who was the leader of the team. Almost everyone knows him as Jaxon’s younger brother, except Khiana who came to the school recently and are spending a lot of time together. Tre works really hard for the sport he loves and just needs to make varsity for the first time. Team selections come around and he does not make varsity. A couple of days later 2 of his teammates get busted for drinking and Tre gets his chance on varsity. The first game he struggles with the plays and fouls out. A few games later they are playing Minneapolis, a team way above them, and Tre leads them to beat them. The next game they play Nevis and they are dominating, Tre goes in at the end of the game to secure the win and ends up beating his brother's all time scoring record. The next game Tre has a scout from the University of Minnesota, dealing with bad refs he starts a fight and gets a technical foul.
In What Marrying an Immigrant Taught Me About Cultural Bias by Kyle Quinn, He talks about how people treated his wife differently just because she was not from the US. He brings up at one point how they were both treated at the BMV until the teller found out that he was a US citizen. “So we start to present the documents the first of which was her temporary green card and the moment the BMV rep saw that green card the reaction we got was shocking. She got up out of her chair began to raise her voice and in a very quick and accusatory way started demanding additional documents including mine which we hadn’t yet presented.”(Quinn). The way that Tre gets treated when he gets pulled over is treated awfully similar to how Kyle Quinn’s wife gets treated at the BMV. They were treated differently just because of where they were from. “You also have zero reason to believe that we would have any drugs on us, rather than racially profiling us for being from the reservation,” (Graves 37). Cultural bias is really prevalent in this quote and at this point in the novel.
In Why Children of Immigrants Experience Guilt and How To Cope by Sahaj Kaur Kohli. She talks about how children experience guilt with their parents for not living up to their expectations. They also feel as if they are not enough for their parents' trouble of moving to the US. She also talks about how to talk about differences in beliefs and expectations you might have that differ from your parents. “It's really important to question the guilt. It's important to identify your parent's beliefs and values and then explore your own and see how they overlap.” (Kohli). The biggest difference between the TedTalk and Rez Ball is that instead of talking to his parents about expectations, he internalizes them and doesn't mention them to his parents. I believe he does this to make him strive harder for what he wants. “He’d cross people over so bad they’d fall over, then hit a jump shot on them. Only one to ever be as good as him was your brother.” (Graves 75). His family mentions that his dad was one of the best and how his brother was able to beat him. Tre wants to live up to the expectations of being a great basketball player, but he also wants to exceed the expectations.
Where have you seen in your book a character pass judgment on someone else unfairly? Or where have you seen a character be asked unfairly to deal with the emotions of another character?
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