Journal #6

     Racism has always been an ethical issue in the world, and although we would like to think it has disappeared, it is still present today. Sloan portrays racism as an issue that quietly haunts our world: she recognizes it in her own city's architecture and through the stories of her father's friend. Sloan accompanies her narrative with historical events and relates those events to her father's friend, sprinkling her text with emotions concerning racism and ultimately implying that her friend is a metaphor for the city of Los Angeles.

     Sloan begins each "chapter" with a story about an artist, an architect, a riot, or an event that she has witnessed. Each of these events serves to add logic to her text: she explains how the extenxive use of glass in the city's architecture represents the division between the White, Black and Latino cultures. Through this division, she implies that the city is diseased with racism but that it manages to survive, similar to the way her father's friend has suffered from cancer several times, but is still alive. During their conversation, her friend says "I think that everything we go through is something that we were supposed to learn. And if we didn't learn it that time around, then we are given another opportunity." These two sentences refer to racism in Los Angeles, and how the city has not learned to accept other cultures and skin colors. Until the city's population learns to accept other races, Los Angeles will still be ravaged by segregation and violence.

     Just like she began each chapter with recounting event, Sloan ends every chatper with a story of her father's friend. By doing so, Sloan relates the event she has just described to a single person who has experienced that event, adding credibility to her text. For example, Sloan mentions that Los Angeles is "separated by hard-drawn geagraphical lines, which kept the city color-coded". At the end of this chapter, she describes that her father's friend has survived a "life of incessant fragmentation". Her friend's fragmented life refers to the glass architecture, which is itself a metaphor for the fragmentation caused by racism.

     Similarly, Sloan adds emotions to her narrative by including stories of her father's friend. These episodes help put the described historical events into context and give a sense of reality to her story. The reader doesn't just read about these events, he/she can now feel what it was like to experience them. Sloan's friend recounts the racial diversity in her family: her great grandmother was "full-blooded Cherokee; her husband was full-blooded Irish", her father was black, and her grandfather was "very much a Southern white guy". The father's friend is a mix of races: she is often mistaken for Latino, White, or Black, which relates to the fact that Los Angeles, too, is composed of many different races. Sloan also explains that her friend's body is so "busted" because "she has been walking into walls since the day she was born". These walls are the glass walls that make up Los Angeles's architecture: they are the quiet, invisible barriers of racism.

     Through a logical narrative, credible historical events that relate to an individual, and emotional stories, Sloan creates a metaphor implying that her father's sick friend is a symbol for the decaying city of Los Angeles. But just like Sloan's friend, the city is given chances to learn from its mistakes and perhaps that, finally, the glass walls will succumb to liberate a united, open-minded society.