Love

Love life!2002 essays
Christopher Russell [262K PDF]
Megan Parker [235K PDF]
Alice Hu [252K PDF]
Tracy Ma [236K PDF]


Christopher Russell is, in his owns words, a boy who wants to become a man.

Fourteen years old. Black. A serious basketball player anticipating a career in either professional sports or technology.

He speaks from his home in Skyway, with its Christmas cards and dancing James Brown doll and a basement bedroom crammed with shiny basketball trophies, wrinkled T-shirts and hip-hop CDs.

He is well aware of those grim statistics that put him squarely in the bleakest of futures: those stats cruelly shadowing young black men throughout the U.S.

Chris, though, equal parts sanguine and practical, pays little heed to those figures.

"I'm not focused on that stuff. How come they never say how many black lawyers, how many black doctors, how many black men are making money?" he asks. "It's always about prison and drugs."

An eighth-grader at Dimmitt Midd...