Both The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara and The Growing College Gap by Tamara Draut discuss our nations growing financial issues between social classes. The Lesson juxtaposes black life to white society while Draut’s compares college attendance and financial aid statistics with those from 40 years ago. Both the story and essay comment on lifestyle differences as it relates to wealth.
The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara is a story about social values and norms of black society compares with those to whites. The story follows a group of African-American children who live in the slums of New York. Another woman named Miss Moore, who is an upper class black woman, gives these kids five dollars and puts them in a cab to show them around New York City. She takes them to FAO Schwartz where the kids are shocked with the ridiculous prices for simple toys. The point of this was for Miss Moore to show the children how upper class white society lived in comparison with them. Most of the kids couldn’t even understand how some toy would cost a family $35 when “thirty-five dollars would pay for the rent and the piano bill too” (Bambara 5). Miss Moore’s goal was to educate these children about the divide between the two classes and to understand how the wealth in our country isn’t divided up properly. She explains to them that “poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie” (Bambara 5). Miss Moore’s intentions were to contrast their lifestyles with the lifestyles of wealthy whites in order for them to better understand the divide between social classes.
Tamara Drauts’s essay entitled The Growing College Gap similarly discusses social class in America but how it relates to the college education system. Draut compares income differences and tuition costs from the seventies to now to better explain the gap between well-off education individuals and the undereducated minority population. Draut first discusses the baseline in the seventies when “a professional with a college degree and a blue collar worker with a high school degree could live in the same community” (Draut 379). She then goes on to explain that skyrocketing tuition and a major decline in financial aid creates a huge divide between those who attended college and those who didn’t, as it relates to their enormous earning difference. African American’s are more likely to enroll in a two-year college whereas “wealthier students are battling it out for seats at a handful of elite private institutions” (Draut 380). She explains that even though graduate enrollment increased among students of color, they still do not continue on for advanced degrees because of high levels of undergraduate debt. She asserts that as this problem worsens, “we’ll have a well-educated minority that is mostly white, and a swelling, undereducated majority that is mostly African American and Latino” (Draut 390).
Although leaps and bounds have been made against discrimination for African-American’s in our country, both Draut’s essay and Bambara’s story seem to suggest otherwise. Both the texts comment on the African-American struggle relative to financial and social class differences. They draw similar parallels between the social class struggle and the hardships minorities still face today.
