I'm a middle-class kid who's never really had to struggle with much in life and has lived in a ridiculously sheltered world surrounded by people a lot like me for the past 23 years.
I get frustrated with myself sometimes because I am who I am. And while I'll acknowledge that we are partly products of our environments, I believe people make choices, and they must be responsible for those choices.
To put a context around this strange, yet true, declaration, let me explain. I finished watching A Time to Kill a bit ago, and every time, I walk away thinking - is this war still raging in America, the one Carl Lee talks about, where race is pitted against race, and am I participating?
Growing up, all my friends, and nearly everyone in my town, were white. I went to a college with such a small minority population that it was almost impossible to meet people with different backgrounds. I look at myself and my profession, and all I see are white women everywhere.
Is this happenstance? Am I choosing a path that leads towards more people like myself? Because in my mind, that's not what I'm doing.
Why, then, at every stage in life, do I find myself in the same place, surrounded by the same people, saying and doing the same things?
1 comment:
Lana, I appreciate your honesty because for the longest time I found myself having some of the same feelings you expressed. I think that even though you seem to be in a "static" world where the demographics are anything but unpredictable, you can and will be helping to educate the ignorance that does fuel the battle of "race against race". And that's really all that racism is: ignorance. Not stupidity, but the ignorance of other cultures and the fear of the things that you do not know. So in a way, you are more of a solution to the problem than anyone because it will be you, and people like you, who help to educate and enlighten the minds of those who are seeking to escape the ignorance they find themselves in.
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