Living Colour: Racial Representation and a Small-Town Teenhood

[Paragon]

This is amazing - this woman and I had eerily similar experiences, from growing up in small town Michigan to seeing Living Colour play at the same venue a couple of years apart. I could've written this essay myself.

http://www.americanstudies.wayne.edu/xchanges/1.1/burnett.html

I don't know very many things about being teen-aged in the 21st century, beyond what I learn from MTV, my little brother, and the students I teach in English 1010 at Wayne State University. I don't even know much about being teen-aged in the 1990s - unless the first few years of the decade count. What I can talk about with some authority is being a teen in the late 1980s and early '90s, in a small town not more than half an hour's drive from downtown Detroit. The town had and still has a Mayberry aspect - small post office, large white middle-class population, and acres of farmland and high school football fields. The growing-up process was quite peaceful in this environment, beyond the usual teen-angst episodes (the occasional car wreck or keg party out in the woods, among other incidents). I was never really aware of any large-scale conflicts or struggles beyond a fight in the schoolyard or two parents duking it out at a kid's t-ball game until I was well into my teens...