“The Marshmallow Test Trapping the Certain Individuals”

Our society and environment shapes us as people, who we are going to be, what we are going to pursue in life, if we are going to be successful or not. More than 46 million Americans live in poverty today and most of them will remain underprivileged. But how about those rare cases where the environment helped out that one individual find a better living? About 53% of impoverished college students will move up in the income ladder because of their college degree. Dante Washington struggled with living in poor neighborhoods, crime, and violence. He was surrounded every day with muggings, and balloons at his local park to mourn for the murders that had occurred. “In this area,” he says, “hearing a gunshot is like hearing a truck down the street.” He assures that most of the children he grew up with are still settled in the poor neighborhood, where the upper class houses consisted of brick, while the house next door is boarded up and run down. “When you grow up in an environment where there’s not a traditional next step after high school, the kid is stuck with a question mark,” he says. “ ‘Okay, what should I do now? Should I work? Should I sell drugs?’ ” He was raised by a single mother since his father had died of liver problems.

For a while, Dante would work almost every day since he was seventeen years old to places such as Au Bon Pain, MCI, and at a publishing company in sales and business development for a while. The last time John Hopkins researching interviewed him, he only had a high school degree. But as of 2013, he has a business bachelor’s degree where he had earned at Strayer University. He respectively owns his own home and remarkably drives through his old neighborhood driving a Lexus. Both of his parents did not have past a high school degree and out of his thirty friends, he is the only who attended college and got a degree. Washington’s past has encouraged him and forced him to become better than his parents ever were. He is successful and happy raising his family in his own home. So, even though most children who grow up in a low-income household and a horrible environment, they stay in their hometown and continue living at the poverty level. However, there are those exceptional individuals who realize what kind of awful life they are living, and it encourages them to become better and to have a bright future. Former rapper and actor, Ice T was born in Newark, NJ who then moved to South Central L.A. to live with his aunt after both of his parents died. At age 15 he started to hang out with gang members and would become influenced by their actions and judgments. He had done his time in confinement and when he was released he realized he had to change the person he was and had been becoming. As being raised in one of the worst neighborhoods in America, even famous Ice T could make it. The environment does not just drag and trap an individual, but it can inspire and persevere someone to change their lives around and better themselves.

Works Cited

Badger, Emily. “What Your 1st-grade Life Says about the Rest of It.” Washington Post. The Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2014. Web. 28 Mar. 2015. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/29/what-your-1st-grade-life-says-about-the-rest-of-it/&gt;.

Simon & Schuster. “Ice-T.” Rolling Stone. N.p., 2001. Web. 28 Mar. 2015. <http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/ice-t&gt;.