Thomas’s work really stood out to me and I loved how she built such a strong foundation in her ethnography by considering so much history, many social factors, and the role that violence so often has to play in anthropological work. I think that her piece, as an ethnography, juxtaposes Shange’s in the fact that it goes very in-depth into the potential foundational causes of what she observed in her ethnography. Shange’s piece, in my opinion, did a great job creating a thesis around what she saw at Robeson, and remained very grounded and contained in her findings there. The larger social implications of Shange’s findings felt more implied because her work was so grounded in the setting, and we discussed in class how Shange’s piece is written with a bit of an expectation of knowledge of the school-to-prison pipeline and San Francisco’s problematic, segregated history. Contrastingly, Thomas lays a lot of foundation before delving into her ethnography, which shows the differences in the substance and purposes of these ethnographies. However, at the same time, both of these ethnographies show how circuits and systems of power and oppression affect societies today. These similarities and differences really stuck with me in the reading this week. I think these are both examples of excellent ethnographies that grapple with incredibly important topics. I am curious – what differences were there in the intended audiences of these two ethnographies? I also wonder why Thomas wanted to include so much background in her Introduction before jumping into the book, as she addresses history again in the midst of Chapter 2 when describing the perceived “culture of violence” and discrimination towards Jamaicans because of this.