Many people have stopped trying and others have adapted to the way they have to live and their sense of being human is still almost gone. So many African American people who come from poverty are still stuck there because they don't know what else to do even though they are or have been in prison. If this story had happened 100 years ago, the whole family would have been killed or locked up in an asylum and tortured. Even if they are still tortured by this phrase and even if time is certainly taking its time to change things, a lot has changed and without these stories or poems a lot of this change would not have happened.