Analyse af 'The Baddest Dog in Harlem'

The story” The baddest dog in Harlem”, takes place in the northern par of the city New York, in a neighborhood called Harlem. Harlem is a very tough neighborhood to live in, and it has only got worse sine 1980. Harlem is known for a lot of crime, drugs, prostitution and violence. The number of crimes is getting bigger every year and it seems that the police are not able to target the problem. And in the fact that the story takes plays next to Bronx, shows that it’s a deprives neighborhood, and there is no doubt that the people out there didn’t choose to do so.However it is in this neighborhood that the story takes place. My very first guess is that the story is written in the present or shortly after Mohammed Ali’s big time, as they are using him a lot in the text. All the males in the story are most likely black people, because all they are mentioning are black people, and also the common citizen in the neighborhood Harlem is black or Latin American. The story is told by a nameless main character, who are using a lot of slang, and slang Is very common I the societies in Harlem for example when the police came, the main character says “if he the cop had his war, he would have had us sitting out in there in that police car”. Here the main character used the slang “cop”, instead of “police officer”. We can conclude that most of the members in that group, are in a lower social group because they are jobless, and that’s why they’re sitting on the street corner. Even though that you aren’t a gangster or a gang member, your need to adapt, and as Bruce Springsteen sings in his song “American skin”, “Is it a gun, is it a knife, is it a wallet, this is your life. That means that is you’re born in a neighborhood like Harlem, you have no choices and your life is almost destined. And also the black guys in the US, is having a hard time, and it is not always easy. In the text there is an example, when the black guys are hanging out on the street corners, the police stop to starts questioning them, because there are black. And this reminds of another quote from Bruce Springsteen’s song, he says “You can get killed just for living in your American skin”. And we see that in many states in the US, when people judge people by their colour of their skin.Racism can be find in all age groups, and in Bruce’s song we also hear about a worried mother, that is afraid that something bad will happen to her child. She tells him to be polite is the police stop him, and on these streets you can’t send your children out of the door without being worried about what could happen because of his colour, and the dangerous neighborhood they’re living in.