Experiencing Race

I always thought my friend Megan was just like me. We were born and raised in a little town in rural Colorado; we both were living somewhere within the lower middle class, and had hard-working parents; we shared a multitude of likes and dislikes. To me, Megan was never black, she was just Megan. We had so much in common that we must have similar backgrounds. The concept of racism in the present day was alien to me; I learned about racism in school as a part of history, as if it belonged in the past.

That all changed with the 1992 Los Angeles riots. All of the sudden, I became acutely aware that others saw something different about Megan and me. When I was out in public with her and her family, I started to notice looks others would give us. “What’s that white girl doing with those black folks,” their looks seemed to say. “Doesn’t she know what’s going on?” Suddenly, the background I had believed connected us looked more like a façade, hiding the tensions that those like Megan had faced being a minority in a predominantly white community.

As I became aware of our differences, I also became aware that a prejudice that I believed was solely in the past, and its production of hate and violence. Even within the latest generation, there are tensions and challenges with race, privilege, and power. In conversations about prejudice, it is often said we must ignore the things that make us different and embrace the things that make us the same. To me, that is like being colorblind. In order to promote change, we shouldn’t ignore our differences; we must see what makes us the same and different.