As a teenager in South Central Los Angeles in the 1990's, my life straddled two worlds. While I ate, slept, and lived in South Central, I commuted daily for school to Santa Monica an affluent California neighborhood. In both communities people noted the gap
between their expectations of a young black man from South Central
and my actual personality.
According to them, I should have been a thug or a gang member working
his way through the system, but nothing could have been further from
the truth. I spoke differently than most of the African Americans
in my neighborhood, rarely using slang. I read science fiction and
listened to jazz. In my educated and uneducated worlds people either
saw me as the Great Black Hope or a dangerous threat to the status
quo. At school and at home I was an outsider.
My outsider status,
coupled with the media coverage of South Central L.A. at the time
as a wild, lawless place, led me to consider the cowboy. I identify
with Hollywood's traditional gunslinger, the stranger riding into
town idolized by those seeking his help and feared by those content
with things as they are, the status quo. Like him, I found myself,
as a very young man, pressured inside and outside my community
to fix sweeping social problems, to make things right. Like him
I experienced alienation from those who found my differences
threatening and scary. The cowboy, our hero, is really just a young
man trying his best in a violent, difficult world, faced with
pressure from his allies and scorn from his enemies. His impossible
position forms the foundation for "Way Out West."
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