389), creating the connection that the lower classes had so desperately yearned for. Becoming familiar with the environment that her community hated so much, Laurel discovered that her teachers had been the only ones that could teach her to "speak like and understand the stupid rich bastards" that controlled the way that she lived. Teachers had apparently been the only ones able to understand both the upper and the lower social classes, having the power to perform well in both communities. Laurel considered her teachers to have dedicated themselves, body and mind, to the attempt to ameliorate matters when considering the divergences between the rich and the poor. In spite of her obvious appreciation for her teachers, she had been afraid of becoming one of them, as she began questioning "Why did they make so little money? Drive those cars?"(Laurel Johnson Black, p. 390). Clearly, in spite of all of the advantages that a career in teaching would have meant for Laurel professionally, she could not help noticing that such a career would bring her all the financial freedom that her family hoped for. The very fact that she had been raised in a poor community stood as a disadvantage for her, as she had fixed concepts relating to how one should behave in society.

Even consequent to years of studying, Laurel felt useless when she came upon an ethical dilemma having her sister begging her to use her knowledge in order to help her avoid eviction. She learnt that her intellectual capacities...

The fact that she chose to be a teacher instead of taking up law school, as her family wanted her to, had been the very thing that led to her being unable to provide the assistance that her sister needed.
In spite of having gone through tremendous efforts and sacrifices which eventually provided her a similar life style as her teachers', benefiting from the same payroll as they had, Laurel did not succeed in achieving what she had hoped for. It turned out that the teachers had only been good at philosophizing, while they mostly neglected the practical side of their teaching activities. Consequently, even with the fact that she understood both the upper class (represented by her sister's landlord) and the lower class (represented by her sister), she did not manage to find any solution to the challenge that stood before her.

Standing between her sister that demanded that Laurel would talk to her like a "sista'" and the landlord that required that her sister should leave "tomorrow mohnin'" (Laurel Johnson Black, pp. 393), Laurel concluded that all her struggle to find a balance between her family and the rich world had been in vain, as all that she managed to do had been to understand the issue, while remaining incapable to find a solution to the problem

Works cited:

1. Delgado, Richard Stefancic, Jean. (1997) "Critical white studies: looking behind the mirror." Temple University Press.