A Good Kind of Trouble

Coach West makes the class do sprints in PE. Shayla observes how fast her classmate Carmetta runs, which makes her feel unworthy of joining the track team. She encourages Yolanda to join, too.

Shayla changes clothes and rushes to English class, where Ms. Jacobs shares a quote from Emerson that encourages the reader to go “where there is no path and leave a trail” (60). She interprets Emerson as an individualist thinker and surmises that he would have advocated strongly for the Black Lives Matter movement. As her classmates challenge Ms. Jacobs’s statement and she tries to explain how Black Lives Matter isn’t “racist” to prioritize focus on Black lives, Shayla considers how her mother compared Black Lives Matter to treating a broken bone: Every bone is important, but only the broken bone needs special attention (the metaphor is ultimately a response to the widespread rebuttal that all lives matter).

Ms. Jacobs singles Shayla out for her thoughts, making Shayla deeply uncomfortable. She mutters angrily about the injustice of senseless racist police violence. Ms. Jacobs encourages the class to think critically about the information they receive and form their own opinions. She then quotes Nelson Mandela, a South African political leader who fought against apartheid: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.