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Dream of Athlete

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Submitted By howson
Words 909
Pages 4
Haoshun Guan
English 96
Paper 1
9:30-11:15
Dream of Athlete In the essay “Delusions of Grandeur,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. talks about the issue of young blacks and their aspirations of being a professional athlete. He argues that there are actually not have many successful black professional athletes, but there are many successful black doctors and lawyers. (COORD)In his argument, he puts most of the blame on schools; stating with that they don’t do enough job in encouraging young black children to pursue other careers beside the sports. Although schools are one of the reasons why black youths are perusing careers as professional athletes, there are also other factors that Gates, Jr. neglected to mention in his essay. By only singling out the schools and some unilateral information, he was not able to give us a strong enough argument. By neglecting to give us different factors or reasons to how black youths are being encouraged to pursue a career in professional sports more than other careers, his argument is nothing more than a letter of frustration black youths. As Gates, Jr. used a lot of examples on how black youths aren’t passing in their school courses, those example are not enough to show that encouragement toward sports is the main reason why they are failing. For example, Gates, Jr. stated that “A recent survey of the Philadelphia school system, for example, he stated that ‘more than half of all students in the third, fifth and eighth grades cannot perform minimum math and language tasks. ’” (P248) Although he tries to blame schools for the reason why black youths are encouraged more to pursue careers in professional sports instead of other careers, this example only tells us some information about Philadelphia has a bad record in their school system. (SUBORD) All Gates, Jr. does is bring out stats of black youths failing, instead of giving

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