Tag: education

There’s a knowledge among first generation immigrants – that they aren’t going to be the ones to achieve the American Dream. They have to work hard and struggle so that their children will have a shot at it. So they educate their children and pass the Dream along to them. And now I have an obligation to make more fucking money than them, to live the American Dream, to validate all the risks they took and everything they went through. And that’s a heavy burden.

This kid, as told to Humans of New York (via quotesfrombooksandshit)

My dad had a vocabulary that I had never heard matched. Extensive vocabulary – Greco-Latin, Anglo-Saxon. He knew English inside out – syntax, grammar, perfect. Constantly telling us as punishment that we must enunciate our words, no dropping Gs, had to speak correct English. My dad came from a lineage of people who had to do hands-on labour and at the same time were learned. His own father was Barbadian, a sailor, and his mother, Nettie Clarke knew four or five languages – Latin, Greek, German, French. She made a living as a laundress. She took in people’s laundry; that’s what she had to do. My dad was a learned labourer. In the black community that was not uncommon. When we talk about employment segregation, you could be someone who had a B.A. or M.A. and you were never going to be a teacher or professor. Being a porter was the best job you could get. My great-grandfather had an honorary doctorate from Acadia University and went to Bible college in Virginia. These were learned men who weren’t able to escape poverty due to lack of opportunity.

George Elliott Clarke (via gravalicious)