"Pick One"

Black or white? In his essay, David Matthews uses colorful words to describe the situation surrounding the choice he made.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 10 Unit 2's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Where I'm From, Funny in Farsi, Kaffir Boy, Pick One, If You Are What You Eat, Persepolis, poems about parents, Hunger of Memory, Thanksgiving: A Personal History, Time to Assert American Values, Rough Justice, On Civil Disobedience, On Surrender at Bear Paw Mountain, On Women's Right to Vote, Declaration of the Rights of the Child, School's Out for Summer, One Word of Truth, Hope, Despair, and Memory
10 words 40 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. swarthy
    naturally having skin of a dark color
    I was neither blessed nor cursed, depending on how you looked at it, with skin milky enough to classify me as white or swarthy enough to render me black.
  2. idyllic
    charmingly simple and serene
    But before moving from our integrated and idyllic neighborhood, I really knew nothing of "race."
  3. sallow
    unhealthy looking
    The black kids, who made up more than 80 percent of the school's population, ranged in shades from butterscotch to Belgian chocolate, but none had my sallow complexion
  4. alabaster
    a very light white
    And the white kids, a salting of red and alabaster faces, had noses that were tapered and blunted
  5. partisan
    devoted to a cause or political group
    They were rigidly partisan.
  6. avidity
    a positive feeling of wanting to push ahead with something
    And I had a hunch, based on their avidity, that the question had a wrong answer.
  7. contemplate
    reflect deeply on a subject
    I didn't contemplate the segregation; it was simply part of the new physical geography, and I was no explorer; I was a weak-kneed outsider, a yellowed freak.
  8. intonation
    rise and fall of the voice pitch
    I didn't know that with the wrong intonation, or the wrong addressee, any mention of one's mama could lead to a table-clearing brawl.
  9. vicarious
    experienced at secondhand
    The only experience I had with cool had been vicarious, watching my father and his bebop-era revolutionary friends, and feeling their vague sense of disappointment when I couldn't mimic their behavior.
  10. ruddy
    inclined to a healthy reddish color
    Then a ruddy boy with blond bangs lopped off at the eyebrows looked up from his Fantastic Four comic book, caught my eye across the cafeteria, scooched over in his seat and nodded me over.
Created on Fri Oct 10 16:16:34 EDT 2014 (updated Mon Oct 13 15:08:21 EDT 2014)

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