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.
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