One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered. Living in agony, many people give up their identity and surrender to the evil. Kunta Kinte, Kizzy, and the fiddler were embarrassed, harassed, and humiliated by their masters in the book Roots, by Alex Haley. However, despite being under the hand of the influential white men, Kunta kept his identity as an African, Kizzy stayed strong and proud, and the fiddler refused to compromise with his master, and they all managed to maintain their dignity, and live up to their lives in the foreign world.

Kunta kept his identity as an African by putting pebbles into the gourd to calculate the days, keeping his faith in Allah, and telling and passing on stories about Juffure to the next generations. After getting captured into a foreign world, Kunta kept his...