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Part III: Diary 26
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Freedom Writers Diary, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Ethnicity, and Tolerance
Education and Healing
Family and Home
Violence, War, and Death
Summary
Analysis
This student feels that murder is everywhere s/he looks: on the television, through the O. J. Simpson trial, and in the classroom, through the play Twelve Angry Men. Her/his brother is undergoing a similar experience, as he is being judged for murder.
This student realizes that what happens at school cannot be divorced from “the real world,” thus implicitly demonstrating Ms. Gruwell’s success at addressing her students’ daily experiences in the classroom.
Themes
The student expresses anger at what happened. Even though her/his brother was innocent, the friend he was with confessed his crime to a person who did not have the legal ability to record the confession. As a result, unlike in the case of O. J. Simpson or in Twelve Angry Men, the student’s innocent brother ended up being condemned for murder, proving that justice does not actually succeed in defending the innocent.
This student’s resentment demonstrates the complexity and unfairness of reality when compared to fiction or to a highly sensationalized trial. Her/his view of justice is entirely colored by her/his own experience, proving the effect that personal experience on shaping opinion—a mechanism that Ms. Gruwell tries to exploit in positive ways in the classroom.
Themes
