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I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it, Elwood told himself, and I’ll make it brief. Everybody back home knew him as even, dependable—Nickel would soon understand that about him, too. After dinner, he’d ask Desmond how many points he needed to move out of Grub, how long it took most people to advance and graduate. Then he’d do it twice as fast. This was his resistance.
Here, in Chapter 5, Elwood explains his life philosophy. For him, hope is an act of resistance. With hope and hard work, Elwood believes he can advance and graduate quickly. At this point, Elwood is very new to Nickel Academy and hasn’t yet realized that life in Nickel isn’t fair or just. Hope is a theme in the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other current activists. The author contrasts the hopeful side of activism emulated by Elwood with the realistic side emulated by Turner. Hope and the drive to keep working toward a better future is what has driven Elwood throughout his life. Here Elwood continues to try to follow this trajectory after initially mourning the utter devastation and injustice that has placed him at Nickel.
‘It’s not like the old days,’ Elwood said. ‘We can stand up for ourselves.’
[…]
Turner said, ‘[...] The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course. If you want to walk out of here.’
In Chapter 7, Elwood and Turner discuss their views on how to get along at Nickel and in the real world. Turner shares his view that it is best to keep to yourself and follow the rules. Elwood proclaims that it is best to stand up to injustice. Turner continually reminds Elwood that people cannot be depended on to do what is right or just. People may say that they care for you, but if they are showing you the opposite repeatedly, you should believe that.
Throughout the story, we see Elwood and Turner’s viewpoints contrasted. Their conflict is symbolic of present day activism in the face of the knowledge that the United States exists because of slavery, genocide, and the continued marginalization of Black men and women and other people of color through segregation and mass incarceration. The conflict asks the reader to think about how society reconciles this injustice and how it can be used as motivation to keep moving forward to a more just future.
The blinders Elwood wore, walking around. The law was one thing—you can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people. In Tampa, Turner saw the college kids with their nice shirts and ties sit in at the Woolworths. He had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened—they opened the counter. Turner didn’t have the money to eat there either way. You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color.
In Chapter 9, Turner shares the problems he has with Elwood’s way of thinking. As he explains in this quote, you can change the laws, but you can’t change people. He also thinks it is nice that college students can spend their time protesting and working to change laws, but says he never had time to do anything like that because he was too busy working, emphasizing the struggle he faces as both a Black man and a member of the working class. He agrees with them and believes everyone should have the right to eat at the lunch counter at Woolworths, but that doesn’t matter much to someone like him who doesn’t have the time or indeed the money to eat there regardless. Overall, the laws didn’t change the way some people feel, and if a person is racist and evil, no law can change their heart.
