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Boyz N The Hood Analysis

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The only apparent difference between Boyhood and Boyz N The Hood is a five letter discrepancy. However, the seemingly small five letter gap makes a world of difference. Despite sharing extremely similar stories, the two movies demonstrate a dramatically different outlook on the racial problems in America—or, as is the case in Boyhood, a lack thereof. Written in response to Imran Siddiquee’s article “Not Everyone’s Boyhood”, published in The Atlantic, Julius Kassendorf’s feature “Boyz n the Hood to Boyhood: Racial Difference in America” (September 2014) attempts to examine how different groups in America view the issue of race, or blindly ignore it. However, Kassendorf ineffectively delivers his argument due his overuse of anecdote, lack of …show more content…

Often, he attempts to support his claims with personal, and many times unnecessary, anecdotes. By relating his childhood to that of Mason’s, a character from Boyhood, “the society in which Mason grows up is reflective of the society in which I was raised”, Kassendorf attempts to acquire ethos, or credibility, by relating with the movie (Kassendorf). However, simply sharing a similar childhood to a character from the movie is not enough backing to make him an expert on race and segregation in predominantly white areas, or to acquire the reader’s trust. Additionally, many of the excerpts from his childhood seem to be dispensable, such as “the elementary school exception was a black kid...but he left my school in the first grade, so the memory is rather hazy” and “this had a wide range of results...and no I cannot make up that contradiction” (Kassendorf). Kassendorf commits a red herring fallacy by going off on, what appear to be, tangents. As a result, he quickly loses the reader’s attention. Anecdotes would have better served the author’s purpose had he chosen to use them selectively and sparingly. By bringing it to the reader’s attention that he is unsure of his recollections, a neither wise nor forgiving move, Kassendorf immediately damages his credibility and the credence of his primarily personal …show more content…

Racial issues and self-segregation are much more than “tribalism” (Kassendorf). To coin an issue that has disturbed people for centuries, so easily, as primitive instinct, is false reasoning. Although the complexity of the issue is evident to both the reader and Kassendorf, he fails to explicitly state it. He makes a hasty generalization by assuming that people live in predominantly one-race communities; there are many people that live in ethnically diverse areas. Finally, his hyperbolic claim that America is a place where “white people can go about their daily life without seeing a black person except maybe in a commercial, hear about a black celebrity, or interact with anybody who isn’t white” may have been true in the fifties, but holds no veracity today (Kassendorf). Once again, he over-exaggerates the extent to which “whiteness cannot be avoided in America” by stating an irrational and unproven statement as a fact; the complete omission, from his argument, of Americans that do not self-segregate provides a partisan and limited perspective on the diluted issue of racial problems in

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