Calloway County Schools 9/24/2007 Grade: 98/100 Besides a few grammatical and formatting errors, this is a wonderful presentation. It was entertaining to read, the colors and format were delightfully simple, and the quotes from the book were genius. Great job! This is directly from the comment on my English power point on the book I read. I feel special. Wonder if I can get my powerpoint onto the OD... By Rebecca Walker Black, White, and Jewish About This is an autobiography by Rebecca Walker, describing how she grew up. Beginning-8 Rebecca Walker was born in a newly non-segregated hospital. Due to the fact that her mother was African American and her father was Caucasian, next to the words mother’s race and father’s race was a little written note, “correct?” . This word would haunt her for the rest of her life. When Rebecca is four, her father and his friends stay up all night playing poker. Her mother realizes this isn’t just to play the game, because she sees the rifle Beginning-8 next to the door and the card in Daddy’s hands. The card has a picture of a white rectangle with two eyes in it and THE CLAN IS WATCHING YOU underneath. The men are making sure no one attacks their house. Her great grandmother on her father’s side refuses to speak to Rebecca. Daddy tells her that she is too young to understand, and she replies that she is not too young to feel shut out. The Divorce Rebecca’s parents get a divorce when she is eight. Her mother doesn’t remarry for a long time, but her father will remarry in a year’s time to a young Jewish woman. She reacts with sadness because her mother is sad. Mama cries every night and sleeps with Rebecca in her room before the official divorce. Post-Divorce Rebecca lives with her mother during school days and her father and stepmother during the weekends. During fourth grade, Rebecca has a boyfriend and goes to an “alternative” school. After Christmas break, he breaks up with her after finding out that her father is white. He asks a mentally challenged kid to beat her up, and when he does she asks why. “It doesn’t matter why, you yellow -----.” Post-Divorce Rebecca’s mother moves to San Francisco so she can write better, and her father moves to Washington, D.C. to take a civil rights job. They decide that she will spend two years, alternatively, with each of them. “I don’t know how they come up with that number, two, as opposed to one, or why they didn’t simply put me in junior high here and high school there. I don’t know if staying in one city so that I wouldn’t have to spend my life zig-zagging the country, so that I could have a normal relationship with friends and family members, ever crossed either of my parent’s minds.” San Francisco When Rebecca is in sixth grade she meets an older boy, Michael. She lies that she is fifteen, and they become a couple. She and her friend Lena smoke weed they pilfered from Lena’s father. Weeks pass, and Michael and Rebecca have sex while her mother is away. Rebecca gets ready to move again, leaving her new friends and her mother behind. Camp Rebecca goes to camp in the summer before seventh grade. It is a camp that she thinks is for rich, Jewish girls, and every girl and the camp is white. There is a competition between different groups of the camp called Color War. She gets put into the Blue Camp. She gets elected to be Sing Captain. The Captain is the person who teaches the younger kids what songs to sing and the rest of her group how to sing. The camp leader won’t let her be Sing Captain, saying she would be too bossy, but Rebecca knows it is because she is partly black. The Bronx Trying to make friends and stick with them in this new place, Rebecca does drugs with her friends. When she starts laughing and then hysterically sobbing, her friends call her boyfriend Ray. Ray is angry at everyone, especially the man who sold her drugs. The drug dealer is found dead underneath a bridge days later. Her father and stepmother move to the mainly white suburb of Larchmont, where she takes piano lessons and feels left out. Another boyfriend, Luca, breaks up with her because he doesn’t like dating a black girl. Back to San Francisco Rebecca gets back with her old boyfriend, Michael. She attends Washington high school, where all the girls survey her suspiciously because she is “Michael’s gurl.” Because everyone knows Michael, a popular high school football player, everyone knows her. Michael’s friends try to get her to have relations with them, and she pretends she doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The Abortion When Rebecca is fourteen years old, she has an abortion. She tells Michael about it first, “…I tell him that my period is late, that I think I’m pregnant. …I tell him that I’m going to have an abortion, that it’s going to happen at the French Medical Building on Geary, and that he better come.” She then tells her mom. “When I tell her, mom, I think I’m pregnant, she responds without too long of a hesitation. Find a doctor to get a test, she says. Once you know for sure, we’ll schedule an abortion. She doesn’t lecture me, doesn’t say, How did this happen, aren’t you using birth control, she doesn’t say much of anything…and that she’s exhausted.” She doesn’t feel guilty or sad. It seems eerie to her later when she is twenty that she didn’t have any strong feelings about it. The New School “.. I turn to her and out of the blue tell her that I’m not learning anything at Washington, and that if I stay there through twelfth grade I’ll know less than where I started… I don’t know where this comes from…But I have just had an abortion at fourteen, and we don’t read books in my English class, only endless mimeographed handouts, and Michael’s friends in college work for minimum wage parking cars.” The first thing the private school headmaster says to Rebecca and her mother when they apply is, “Well, the first thing I can tell you folks is that there’s just no financial aid available.” He is implying that because they are black, they don’t have money. Even though Rebecca’s mother becomes very angry and tells him they don’t need financial aid, that he is rude, Rebecca still attends the school. It is the first school where Rebecca actually cares about her classes. Changes In twelfth grade, Rebecca decides to change her name. A few days after she turns seventeen she goes to the courthouse and changes her name from Rebecca Grant Leventhal to Rebecca Leventhal Walker. When she tells her father he reacts sadly, thinking her choice has something to do with her own anti-Semitism, wanting to distance herself from the Jewish within her. She defends herself, asking why she should want the name of the man who disowned her father when he was 8 years old, why she should carry the name of the man who beat her grandmother and has refused to this day to see his grandchildren. Travels Rebecca goes to several countries, Peru, Spain, Africa, Israel, and other places. She wants to find some sort of connection to her heritage, and instead finds that racism doesn’t end in America. Graduation Her mother and father come to see her graduation. In the photo her parents seem uncomfortable while she and her friends are laughing and having fun. That's just the text...

During prelims, we got second place in our class. I gave it all that I had, and when we were at our last set (which is a hold), I saw the two color gaurd teachers jumping up and down and screaming. We went back to the high school. Our color gaurd was best out of everyone's, and there were 21 bands there. Are we awsome or what? Um. Went back that night, tired, and won fifth out of the twelve, and got another Distinguished. WOO! We didn't beat Madisonville, but we were close. How close? Our score was 80.2. Theirs was 80.5. Frick. When we changed out, I realized that my tennis shoes were no longer in the locker room. I searched until Mr. Mullins went to lock it up. MY SHOES ARE GONE!!! NOOOOO! Went home, plopped into bed. here comes the stupid part. I heard a crowd cheering, and I kept hearing some band playing. This has happened before; The Cavaliers came to town, and I heard them from my bedroom, and it's because I live near the stadium. It was twelve in the morning. I was tired. I thought the Racer band was practicing or something stupid like that, or maybe I was hallucinating. To prove to my tired self I was hallucinating, I reached upto my bedroom window to open it. I couldn't get it to go up. I pushed harder. Instead of pushing up, I pushed out, and ended up breaking the window. With my bare right hand. It was a clean break, only one big chunk, otherwise I wouldn't be able to type right now. OH WHAT NOW? I'm so strong I can break a window without punching it with anger and busting my hand open. Oo. I went back to bed. Woke up the next morning, went to church, didn't realize that I had broken it until I was starting to take a nap with Ryan. His arms were around me, and I was really sleepy and tired, when suddenly I remembered breaking my bedroom window and said it aloud. When I told Ryan, he snatched up my hand, as if I had hurt it. It made me feel strange to know that he cared so much. I'm at school writing all this. I'm not aloud to get onto the OD, so I'm writing this from songmeanings.net. I'm in English. Regular English. Honors English 2 has read seven novels so far. What have we done? NOTHING! Wrote a memoir. Woopdefreakingdoo.

And if you need further proof that I am NOT the most intelligent person in the world- I broke a window Sunday morning. Friday we went to our homecoming dance. I have nothing against rap, I even like it in small doses, but after fourty minutes it gets on my nerves. I hopeful after the slow song, because OK Go came on, but the freaking DJ turned it back to something else. RAWR! Chris came up with the idea to go to Mrs. Bonds room and have our own dance. Chelsea, her date (whose name I can't rememer-which isn't a bad thing, I just can'nt remember names), Chris, Mackenzie, Ryan, me, and someone else, went to her room and listened to The Fray and The Monkeys. Yea Monkeys! It was a goood dance. Before that, at the football game, Marissa was dressed up because she was on the homecoming court and could've been queen. Although she didn't win queen (some girl I don't know won), she looked very pretty. She was wearing a dress, and she marched half-time in it, wearing her white band shoes. I want to see that tape, I bet it was awesome. When I changed out to get into my dress, I left my tennis shoes in the girls locker room. I left them in there overnight and when I went there Saturday morning to put them on the doors were locked. I had to wear my marching shoes during practice. I washed them the day before with Scrubbing Bubbles, and now they were all disgusting and sweaty. RAWR for me being fogetful. We went to Festival of Champions Saturday. Usually at Festival we get ripped off no matter how good we are because Murray wins, no matter how bad they are. Thi

My name is Empathy, and people will most likely find me commenting on Beatle songs. I didn't know this place had a journal, I just wanted to comment... Bye!