GUYS, I caved...

Sweet
Sweet 
Sweet
Coffee


Oh, how I missed you and your warmth

I love tea, I do but I can't help but cave and divulge in a cup of coffee from time to time.
There is still a district difference in my attention span. But

Oh. My.

So good!

The Race Card Project

Y'all, I'm a ranter.
When I have a point to make, it comes racing out really fast and passionate.
I can't stop.

I am currently taking a college class that deals with civil rights issues that makes us think about race in the United States and it's existence as a social construct.  
I think all my friends are tired of the civil right rants I've been on this semester.
So.. let me rant here :)

We've been looking into The Race Card Project and explaining how race has touched the lives of people around us.
A little about The Race Card Project: 1. You should totally check out their website
                                                            2. Michelle Norris found that race is a topic that people are
                                                                scared of talking about, yet she found them continually
                                                                wanting to discuss race.
                                                            3. She started an experiment where she gave people a blank  
                                                                postcard and asked them to explain their thoughts on race and
                                                                identity in 6 words.
Their website is filled with people's race cards and their stories explaining them.

After exploring, I decided to challenge myself to write about racism:

             I’ve sat and looked at this blank page for 5 days now.  I’ll open up my computer, sit down to write, and find myself at a complete lack of words.  How do I write a paper about how race has affected my life without filling these pages up with how awesome white privilege is while I scramble to explain how at some point in my life I’ve pathetically tried to understand racism from the eyes of others?  When I sit down and try to find highlights in my life that might be worth writing down to fulfill to the requirements of how racism is prevalent in our American society, there are only a few situations that come to mind.

            My sophomore year of college (2012-2013) I attended the University of Cincinnati where I was in a highly competitive industrial design program.  I moved there from my past university in Nashville and had to start over on my college experience with new friends in a new city.  This wasn’t easy especially since being denied housing; I had a month to find an apartment in walking distance of the university.  I ended up renting out a room in a four-bedroom apartment with 3 strangers.  The apartment was really nice and safe.  There was a keypad to get into the parking garage and into the staircase that lead to the apartments.  Unfortunately, the area around my apartment was far from safe and at times was scary.  I lived there for a year, 20 years old and walking home from my night classes while clutching my pepper spray and passing alleys where men (usually black) would holler and come at you while you walked by.  I watched people get arrested, assaulted, and shot from that Cincinnati apartment window.  I quickly learned to walk to the grocery store in a very specific time frame and had to go a couple blocks out of the way to avoid walking through a dark tunnel filled with homeless men and drug dealers to get there.  Now, I know you’re wondering what race has to do with this.  How does a 20-year-old woman feel about racism after living for a short time in a run down, primarily black community?

 To be honest, I’m not sure.  I was in a completely different culture than what I had ever been exposed to and it was obvious to everyone there that I didn’t belong.  I knew that I couldn’t understand what it was like to grow up in that community and not be able to escape it because I always had easy excess to new opportunities.  I had a hard enough of a time in this new community figuring out what the social laws were.  I couldn’t even begin to phantom what it would be like it that was all I ever knew. 

 I think a lot about the speech we watched given by Michelle Alexander over black criminality and how violence has grown to shape and define these communities.  She proposed that by building better opportunities these communities they could begin to heal from all the crime and become safer places to live and grow.  But yet, I went back to Short Vine Street, the same street that I walked home with groceries and had a couple black men corner me and whisper inappropriate things in my ear, that same street is completely different.  Brand new apartments for college students line the street with college bars and burger joints below.  What happened to the tattoo shop? Where did the odd to go Indian restaurant go that I’m still convinced was a drug front? They rebuilt this street with better opportunities but it didn’t benefit those who had previously camped out on its benches.  A new crowd now owned the street.  But where was the old crowd? Were they just going to shuffle over to a different dirty corner? Did they receive a hand-me-down part of town that was used into ruin by a different race, or as Michelle Alexander would call it: “ by a different caste”?

At this point of this paper, let me reevaluate a few things: I realize that up to this point, it looks like my Cincinnati story may be leading to a point where I admit that poor black men scare me.  But, they don’t.  I mean, I’m not ready to move back in but it is a completely different culture with a different set of rules on how to behave and respect others.

I haven’t thought much about my experiences in Ohio since moving back home.  I was really jumpy for a while and was laughed at repeatedly by my friends for instinctively getting out my pepper spray with my keys before walking out to my car or from jumping from the sound of AC units turning on.  But I relaxed and eventually stopped thinking of everything that I’d been exposed to.  My slice of home in Indiana isn’t racially diverse.  My friends are primarily white, all of my bosses except from my current employer have been white, and I’ve grown up in a family where the head of it, my grandmother, is extremely racist.  I moved back home, in my safe bubble of the world that lived apathetically in advantage of white privilege.