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Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

  by Beverly Daniel Tatum

(about 488 pages)
121,902
total words
86th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
34.76%
vividness
1st PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
6.79%
passive voice
16th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
2.98%
all adverbs
54th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
1.38%
ly-adverbs
85th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
1.60%
non-ly-adverbs
15th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library

clippings from this book

We’ve analyzed hundreds of millions of words, from thousands of different authors, training our linguistic models to recognize the most vivid words in the English language… the words that create the most intense sensory experiences: colors, textures, sounds, flavors, and aromas.

Based on our analysis, we’ve scanned through the pages of this book to find the two pages at the extremes, both the most-passive and the most-vivid pages, so that you can compare them side-by-side and see the difference:

MOST PASSIVE PAGE
MOST VIVID PAGE
are represented there? If you are an employer, who is missing from your work force? What are you doing about it? “What if I make a mistake?” you may be thinking. “Racism is a volatile issue, and I don’t want to say or do the wrong thing.” In almost forty years of teaching and leading workshops about racism, I have made many mistakes. I have found that a sincere apology and a genuine desire to learn from one’s mistakes are usually rewarded with forgiveness. If we wait for perfection, we will never break the silence. The cycle of racism will continue uninterrupted. We all want to do the right thing, but each of us must determine what our own right thing is. The right thing for me, writing this book, may not be the right thing for you. Parker Palmer offers this wisdom about doing the “right thing”: “Right action requires only that we respond faithfully to our own inner truth and to the truth around us… If an action is rightly taken, taken with integrity, its outcomes will achieve whatever is possible—which is the best that anyone can do.” You may be saying, “I am a change agent. I am always the one who speaks up at the meetings, but I’m tired. How do I keep going?” This is an important question, because a genuine commitment to interrupting racism is a long-term commitment. How can we sustain ourselves for the long haul? One thing I have learned is of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, bell hooks relates a conversation she had with a Black woman frustrated by her daughter’s desire for long blond hair, despite the family’s effort to affirm their Blackness. Observing the woman’s dark skin and straightened hair, she encouraged the mother to examine her own attitudes about skin color and hair texture to see what messages she might be communicating to her child by the way she constructed her own body image. Countering the images of the dominant culture is a challenge, but it can be done. Finding images that reflect the range of skin tones and hair textures in Black families is an important way to affirm a positive sense of Black identity. A wonderfully illustrated book for children that opposes the prevailing Eurocentric images of beauty is John Steptoe’s Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale. As the story states on the opening page, “Everyone agreed that Manyara and Nyasha are beautiful.” These lovely brown-skinned sisters have broad noses and full lips, with hair braided in short cornrows. Though it is easier than it used to be to find children’s picture books depicting Black children authentically rather than as White children painted a darker shade, it may still be hard to find children’s books depicting Black children with very dark or very light skin. A medium brown seems to be the color of choice. Decorating one’s home with photographs of family and friends who represent a range of skin tones and hair textures

emotional story arc

Click anywhere on the chart to see the most significant emotional words — both positive & negative — from the corresponding section of the text…
This chart visualizes the the shifting emotional balance for the arc of this story, based on the emotional strength of the words in the prose, using techniques pioneered by the UVM Computational Story Lab. To create this story arc, we divided the complete manuscript text into 50 equal-sized chunks, each with 2438.04 words, and then we scored each section by counting the number of strongly-emotional words, both positive and negative. The bars in the chart move downward whenever there’s conflict and sadness, and they move upward when conflicts are resolved, or when the characters are happy and content. The size of each bar represents the positive or negative word-count of that section.

similar books by different authors

other books by Beverly Daniel Tatum

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