I was about to go get dressed to go to the gym and play basketball when my mom called me into the den to read me something. It was
Chocolate Me by actor Taye Diggs. It starts out pretty negatively and shocked me, personally.
The kids teasing our main character about his skin, hair, and facial features is quite realistic and common today in schools amongst kids. Kids’ racism is often just extreme ignorance to the history of racism but it still is annoying.
Even still the white kids in this book attempt to sound innocent using phrases like “Don’t you hate to comb it?” in reference to our main character’s hair which is not straight like their own.
The kids ultimately make him hate himself until he goes home and his mom shows him that he is beautiful and unique in his own skin. This change in the book is positive even though overall the writing in the book is very poor. His mother describes all the things that make him African American and his own type of person. She shows him he doesn’t need to be the same as other people. He just needs to be himself. Even with this I still don’t like the premise of the book. I don’t like the title or anything. The writing is poor. I see the message that’s trying to be shown to the reader but its just so poorly done that it annoys me.
~ZJ
