When people ask me where I grew up, my usual response is one of pride: "I'm from Missouri, which for all its problems is one of the most beautiful places I've seen."
This last week has challenged that belief extraordinarily.
Looking through my high school yearbook, I count fewer than five people of color in my graduating class of fifty-two people. I begin to wonder: as a middle-class white girl from rural Missouri, would I truly be as proud of my home state if I weren't a member of the group which benefits hugely from the oppression of others?
Weston, Missouri is an aesthetically gorgeous town full of honest and hard-working people. But since I've left, I've come to realize that--like a lot of small towns in America--it's a sheltered bubble away from the real world. Questions of race and privilege never came up, because the vocal majority of people chose to believe that those issues were irrelevant to our lives. People are routinely discriminated against; so what? That doesn't matter when nearly everyone in your town is white. Right?
As if that weren't enough, an alarming number of people seem proud of these beliefs. Scrolling through my Facebook news feed, I've noticed an unsettling trend. There are hundreds of posts declaring solidarity with the students of color at Mizzou, but 99% of those posts seem to be coming from my peers in the contrarily sheltered world of liberal arts colleges. I might know a lot of people who are openly expressing concern for the safety and expression of students of color, but it seems to me like very few people in my virtual "friends list" from Missouri are talking about the protests online. The ones who are talking about it are posting hateful comments about how "ridiculous" the protests were to cost the school "a five-star football recruit." In case it wasn't obvious, most of these people are choosing not to post about the valid and real motivations for the protests.
To nuance that a bit: I'm not in Missouri right now, and I don't wish to condemn any of my at-home acquaintances for keeping silent on Facebook about the protests. I have no way of knowing what sort of true, face-to-face dialogues about race are taking place right now. And those in-person conversations are vastly more important than simply copying and pasting three sentences into your Facebook profile for a day (which is what most of my Wellesley acquaintances seem to be doing).
What this trend does suggest to me is a reluctance to publicly open the door to these discussions. In the three years since I began college, I cannot enumerate the number of times I've been called out and corrected for being misinformed about privilege. Those discussions, though not always easy, have helped me learn a lot. When I first came to Wellesley, I was far beyond ignorant. For instance, I recently found an old high school journal, in which I wrote that, "as guilty as I feel about being white and never truly knowing prejudice," I found affirmative action "a bit unfair" because "how blacks were treated in the Fifties was a disgrace," but "the wrong we did sixty years ago" was over.
I look back on that passage and feel a lot of emotions: guilt, shame, disbelief and disgust are perhaps the strongest. How did I truly believe that racism wasn't still an issue? Only now, after having lived outside of a homogenous and insular "All-American" town, am I beginning to realize that the battle for equality is so far from over. It's thoughts like that--like the ones I wrote in my journal a few short years ago--which are quite possibly our biggest obstacle to achieving true justice.
But perhaps most importantly, I've learned that there's a lot I can't know. I can academically understand that life in our society is more difficult for people of color, but I will never be able to truly understand that experience, simply because I will never live it. Our society was built for my success at the expense of others. And though no one alone can change that, we can unify to work toward goals of equality and peace. We can acknowledge and even embrace the differences. We can have honest, open conversations about them.
I've spoken my voice. I'm ready to listen.
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