"The Lesson"
Toni Cade Bambara’s story “The Lesson“ uses a first person narration that is refreshing to hear, since most short stories are written in the third person. One of the main details I focused on is how once at the toy store, the children feel uneasy and out of place. They’re completely stunned by the high prices(as I most certainly would be), seeing a chunk of glass that costs $480 in 1960s money, or a toy sailboat that cost $1,195! Miss Moore seems to use the trip to showcase how an unjust economic and social capital system creates disproportionate access for black Americans to resources, and offers education as one tool to protect themselves from the system. I can’t help bu think of Marxist theory throughout the story, and of the Harlem that Malcolm X grew to adulthood in. Civic leaders like Martin Luther King are often quoted but their socialist, economic justice perspective is often left out of school flyers and MLK day celebr...