Amandla Stenberg Stars in Adaptation of Searing, Inner City Saga

16 year-old Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) straddles two different worlds which never intersect, one, black and poor, the other, white and privileged. That's because she lives in the ghetto in Garden Heights, but her parents (Regina Hall and Russell Hornsby) have sent her to Williamson, an exclusive prep school located on the other side of the tracks.

They know that Williamson gives her a better chance of making it out of the 'hood than the local public high school which is only good for girls who want to get “high, pregnant or killed.” Consequently, Starr uses slang when hanging out with her friends on the block, although she always talks properly around her classmates.

Then there’s the monumental but seldom-noted feats of Paul Cuffee who was born free in 1759 in Massachusetts.  His African-born father, Kofi (Cuffee) Slocum, was captured at age 10 from the Ashanti Kingdom and later freed by Quakers.  Cuffee always related to his roots, which fueled his life’s inspiration to return to Africa.  So his “both/and” correlations begin with the fact that his ancestry traces directly to the Kingdom of Ashanti, which remains today as a “constitutionally protected, sub-national traditional state in the Republic of Ghana.”i