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Tanisha by Mind Map: Tanisha

1. Race: Mixed

1.1. Tanisha also struggles with her race quite a bit in the novel. One of the main male characters, Tyrone, calls her "caramel cutie" and this is something that bothers her a lot. She is of mixed race while a lot of her peers are African- American. This is something she is often self-conscious about.

1.1.1. She says about her two best friends, "They know the only difference between my color and theirs is that the slave master who owned my family raped my great-great-grandma instead of theirs. And like my dad says, that ain't nothing to celebrate or be stuck up about." (Grimes, 2002).

2. Gender: Female

2.1. Tanisha struggles with the way she is viewed by others, especially males. A main theme throughout this book was the way females are seen by others versus the way they view themselves. Tanisha struggles with this much like the other females in the book, but in a different way. She is notorious throughout the school for being extremely beautiful, but she is upset because no one ever acknowledges how smart she is.

2.1.1. At one point in the book she says "I'm better off with friends like Diondra and Janelle who know I'm more than what I look like. They know I've got a brain, and I know how to use it." (Grimes, 2002).

3. Age: High School, exact age not known

3.1. A goal of multicultural education, as described in the article An Introduction to Multicultural Education, written by James Banks, is to provide all students with the necessary skills in order to function within community, mainstream, and other cultures. One of the main aspects of this book is how the teacher was able to bring his class together through their own poetry readings and give them a way to connect to each other. This helps build necessary social skills that the students will use across the many different cultures they interact with on a daily basis (Banks, 2008). I do believe this book can be used to achieve this goal because it can start necessary conversations that relate to cross-cultural interaction and skill building.

4. Religion: Not sure, this aspect was not the main focus of the characters struggles in the story so it was never mentioned in her section of the book

5. Language: English

6. Ability: Able-bodied

7. Class: Lower-class

8. Sexual Orientation: Not sure, this was never specified in the book as her struggles centered around the people who viewed her for her looks, so she never explicitly stated who she was interested in