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Ahandour
I was born in the old medina in Marrakech in Morocco. I remember growing up in the seventies in a jungle. If you are not strong or you don't have older brothers to defend you you will be physically and verbally abused everyday. I can't relate to the story in the movie but I understand a little about racism and police brutality because we lived in a corrupted society in my country of origin where only people with money are worth something in life the rest of us poor people we are nothing. We had to work hard to just survive. you needed more than resilience to make it.

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I grew up in the middle of East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn NY.
They say I lived in a pretty good area but most would call it the hood. This trailer resonated with me so I definitely will be watching this movie.
Where I grew up and how I grew up motivated me to want to do more. I needed more out of life. I seen what I didn't want out of life so I worked hard and my parents helped me to get me where I am today.
I'm not where I want to be but I am farther then most and I am helping my students to surpass me.

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Thanks for the lesson. I connected with the topic and movie, The Hate You Give. I am also from a hood, in Brooklyn. I think this both empowered me and disempowered me. I love having a place to call home; knowing the people that understand exactly why you are the way you are; it brings me comfort. I will never forget where I come from. Still, it disempowered me as well because I had to face lots of hurdles- the drugs, violence, the disenfranchised, daily. Its hard to stare at poverty daily and still have hope. It's hard to get out. Still, we rise. We fight. We rage on. Now I have to find ways to give back to my community. It will always be with me:)

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I grew up in Everett, a blue-collar White lower-middle-class city north of Seattle. I’m appreciative of the experience growing up as it developed humility in me as many of my classmates’ parents were factory workers at the Boeing 747 airplane plant. There seemed to permeate a sense of fear of significant layoffs as market demands fluctuated at the factory worker’s expense. The somewhat homey backwaters characteristics of Everett made me want to explore the world outside, which lead me to travel and live in various cities like Beijing, Honolulu, then New York. The community I grew up in allowed me to ground in a tight-knit community of social contacts challenging to experience in a large metropolis. Some of my fondest memories are there. Writing about it makes me nostalgic. Everett folks are very down-to-earth and friendly. Unfortunately, all my family has moved to Los Angeles over the past decade, and I miss my ‘hometown.’

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I grew up in the East Village of NYC. My building was diverse and had a strong community of families that lived in all of the apartments. There were multiple generations of families living on each floor. I felt very empowered by my building which greatly contrasts the private NYC school I attended.This education enviroment was predominately white, upper class. I did not experience a sense of community, rather, I experienced high competition in academic excellence.

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I grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn which was a large melting pot of different nationalities, cultures, and ethnicities. The elementary school I went to was really diverse and this aspect of my community empowered me. Growing up in that diverse community taught me how to be kind and respectful towards everyone, no matter what the differences between us were.

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I grew up in China. I have been going to cram school since I was young. I went to the math cram school and composition cram school from the third grade in primary school. It's not just me; it's many of my peers. Traditional Chinese parents attach great importance to education and compare it with other families. Other people's children go to cram schools and do well on tests, so they ask their children to go to cram schools as well. "Why can you get such a simple question wrong? Why did you make a mistake last time and make a mistake this time? Why can you only get 95 when others can get 100?" These are questions that Chinese children are asked from an early age. Under the pressure of the community environment, on the one hand, I did learn something. For example, my basic knowledge of mathematics is good. But on the other hand, it completely lost my interest and enthusiasm, and I hate math now.

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I grew up in both the Dominican Republic and Washington Heights in Manhattan. For both of these places, the community consists of mostly Dominican individuals, therefore I have always been surrounded by my culture and people. Having this sense of community empowered me because I always felt I belonged and helped develop a part of my identity which is important to me.

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I attended my elementary school in China. I came back to New York at age of 12. When I first attended school in the U.S. I was surprised because many students came from the same background as me. After one year, I transfer to a neighborhood where there are fewer students who came from the same cultural background. I was feeling a little insecure at beginning of the school year because I was afraid I don't understand everything that the teacher said. I become more confident after time pass and learn a lot during the school years. Now, I have a more confident switch between different cultures. These experiences empower me to become who I am today. I feel life is about discovering yourself and how to create value out of yourself.

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I grew up in Brookline, MA a town next to Boston. The community was made up of many people who worked in the nearby universities including Boston University, Harvard and MIT, where my father worked. There was a large community of people who had come from the former Soviet Union, and other countries, to work at these universities so there was a feeling of having an international population, and also a strong emphasis on academic achievement.  My mother lived in a more working class neighborhood outside of Boston. Shuttling between my parents homes, empowered me by giving me a strong awareness of privilege and class as well as a comfort relating to people from different parts of the world.

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I was mostly raised right outside Newark, NJ where my mother was a schoolteacher. The community was largely shaped by the riots and subsequent white flight that occurred after the 1960's. As a result the town  I grew up in was at the meeting point of several different demographics, which I think was an advantage. Although the school system itself went through some turbulent changes- and is still struggling in many ways, the diverse representation in the student body meant that inclusion was always an ever present discussion point.

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I grew up on the south shore of Staten Island. There were benefits and drawbacks to growing up there, but overall it was a pretty good middle-class neighborhood to grow up in. Back then it wasn't as densely populated as it is today and there wasn't a lot of traffic. That meant my friends and I could rome the neighborhood freely without anyone bothering us. We could ride our bikes through the streets without encountering many cars and trek the two miles to the school yard to play stickball. And there were ample woods with bike trails we could ride through, too. The freedom we were given by our parents and the neighborhood environment that made that possible likely contributed to the independent minded adults my friends grew up to be.

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I grew up in Astoria, Queens. I was surrounded by greeks, arabs and Albanians. Being albanian myself, I felt empowered by living with people that shared the same culture as me. I was able to express parts of my own culture outside of my home and I was comfortable being myself outside of my home and in my own community.

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I grew up in Ridgewood, Queens, and neighbor to Brooklyn. I grew up in a community that was Italian- Polish-American. I think the barriers of neighborhoods were conflicting because one direction east was a predominately white neighborhood known as Maspeth and Glendale, to the west, Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick and East Williamsburg. As a kid, I remember my parents bringing me more to Bushwick because of the playground and its locals, trips to the Mexican grocery stores, and enjoying Spanish cuisine. I believe this community empowered me to stay true to myself. Although my family and I did not relate to the people around us, we learned to acknowledge our roots.

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I grew up in Orange County, CA, with a diverse population but the majority were White.  I recall growing up all my friends and neighbors were White, and I attended a diverse performing arts high school where I befriended friends of all backgrounds and I studied ballet. I think the environment of the community I grow up in served me well. I am grateful that I attended a school that celebrated diversity and the arts. Had I gone to a public school in my neighborhood, things might’ve been different. Once I arrived to New York, I did not experience any cultural shock since it kind of resembled Orange County.

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I was raised in an upper middle class , fairly affluent community. The small enclave of well to do, mostly white people was jarring to me as the rest of the neighborhood was comprised of people of color and the less economically advantaged. The fact that my parents did not really belong to this socio economic strata confused my identity even more as I struggled to belong. The environment made me feel disempowered ultimately as I felt neither a sense of belonging in the outer neighborhood or the semi- elitist community within it.

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My father was a teacher and I grew up on a boarding school campus until the age of 12. One aspect of this community was that it was very small and homogenous - primarily white and middle class/upper middle class. Aspects of this were empowering because I felt very supported and like I belonged to my community. However, the lack of diversity and the small, safe, 'bubble' that I lived in did not prepare me for the complexity of the real world. Moving to Cleveland in middle school and then later to New York for college introduced me to far more perspectives and people from different backgrounds and cultures, and I had a lot to learn about the world.

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Karina Varela: I grew up in the South Bronx. There was poverty, gangs, homelessness and the population consisted of African Americans and Hispanics. I believe this community contributed to my identity in a positive way. It made me more humble, appreciative and aware of my surroundings. It also made me work harder. I think it's about perception. My parents were never embarrassed about living in the hood. It made my family stronger and resilient.

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Because I have lived the majority of my adolescence in the Dominican Republic, I grew up in a community which was composed of entirely Dominican children, where I had moved to at the age of 10 from New Jersey. The transition from mostly Mexican-American and African-American students that used to be my peers in NJ, to purely Dominican kids was pretty drastic and obviously the primary language had changed so I was required to be completely fluent in Spanish which I previously had little writing and reading training from the U.S. which was quite unfortunate. Although I struggled initially, I felt very empowered to learn how to read and write the language that was mainly spoken amongst my family, but now that I think of it, I felt disempowered by my previous education that did not allow me to become fully fluent in Spanish before I had no choice but to.

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One characteristic of the community that I grew up in was that it was a mixture of Asian-American and Italian-American. The elementary/middle school I attended were also in a predominantly white upper/middle-class neighborhood. When I was growing up I was taught my parent's native Cantonese dialect but eventually English became the language spoken at home. To an extent I was disempowered since I drifted from my family's cultural roots in order to blend in and assimilate as the first-generation born in the U.S. within my family.

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One characteristic of the community that I grew up in was that it was largely white. What I learned at school and at home reflected the population of my town, and I wasn't exposed to diverse perspectives. I think this ultimately disempowered me, because when I went to college (and later post-college when I moved to New Orleans), I realized I had huge gaps both socially and academically. I spent much of my time in college unlearning what I learned growing up.