Not My Shadow is a powerful expose of family life in an urban African American community. Blending real life occurrences with wonderfully intellectual metaphor the author articulately describes the joy, pain, confusion, and riches of his all to real experiences. Experiences that are mirrored in communities across the America!
The reader will be captivated in the journey through church, school, parenting, political thought, and African American sociology while touched with wit, humor, and pulsating emotions of the realities of the African American duality. Travel with the author through the streets of the community meeting childhood friends, family, and neighbors, and watch their dreams, hopes and aspirations develop, and often be devoured by poverty, racism, and their own misgivings. Walk with the author through an authentic Sunday church service witnessing the marches, preaching, choirs, and activities that depict the African American religious experience. Attend a day of school, and be transposed by the author's imagery into a student in a typical urban school setting.
Kenneth Rodgers offers this and more in his autobiographical journey through the streets of North Philadelphia in the 1960's and 70's when America was at its height of social change.
Not My Shadow uses is accounts of professional and community life experiences with suggestions and ideas as to healing processes for the African American community, and possibly a guide of sorts for those outside that community that seek to better understand it.
While powerfully intellectual but not complicated with data and research jargon, the text is eloquently storied, and positioned with usable ideas for real life applications. A true learning experience, and authentic recounting of African American urban lifestyle as experienced by a man born and raised in a major northern city, by a southern fundamentally Christian family.
A must read for anyone interested in the real human story of a sociology intricately woven into the American community.
