It was my self-empowered journey to cultural and self awareness in part that drove me towards becoming a sister of the fastest growing multicultural sorority in the nation. My other reasons, for there are several, fit mostly under the umbrella of an extreme desire to understand the world and the people around me…a “desire for everything all at once” as I attempted to describe it on the day I emerged a beautiful butterfly of Theta Nu Xi Multicultural Sorority, Inc.
I still sustain this desire and it’s the reason why I question everything under the sun…sometimes to the great disdain of the lesser mental bodies around me. I had the great opportunity to be part of a huge multicultural project funded by the University of Virginia in 2007-2008 where several classes of around 100 students were challenged to think outside the boxes of their own lives and conditioning. We engaged in activities each week that drew us further and further away from our comfort zones with ableism, classism, racism, sexism, sexuality, privilege and age, to name a few. In 2008 I was awarded the opportunity to assist teaching with the project.
The foundation of the project lie in the belief that we must always question ourselves because stereotyping and categorizing people is innate to the human brain. Without questioning our thoughts and assumptions we’d never come to recognize the sometimes narrow, dangerous, and exclusive processes of thinking that lead us into making certain choices. Out of all of the activities of this project, one stuck with me the most. More than racism and sexism, of which I am a direct victim of, our exploration of privilege has a special place in my mind.
As an advocate of social responsibility, I’ve always believed that it is our duty as people to understand our own privileges as they pertain to us and as they either directly or indirectly involve others. Growing up, we are often taught how to avoid hurting others directly and intentionally and how to understand pain when it is afflicted upon us. The important lesson often left out of this is how to gauge the effect that we may have on others involuntarily. We are not taught to recognize the systems that we may be a part of even though we may not claim any specific affiliation to them. Awareness should always be the goal and it is a hefty one being that probably could never begin to conceptualize the magnificence of the universe in a brain that weighs a mere 8 pounds.
I understand that this sort of topic bears a lot of weight on the core of the people attempting to tackle it, especially for the first time. Sometimes in order to be culturally aware we have to break down our own habitual ways of thinking, the things that we are used to doing every single day without second guessing. After being involved with this project, I thought about how others might perceive me differently. This isn’t about being concerned with what people think about you so much as it is about recognizing how the ways people perceive you play into situations that either benefit you or place you at a disadvantage and… cultivating an active awareness of this.
For example, my chosen racial identity is black (to keep this example simple; notice I did not say African-American). It is very often that I am not viewed to be a black woman because of how “white” I talk, how smart I am, how professionally I carry myself, my taste in clothing, or how light my skin is. Mind you, any assumptions about how black women should do these things are stereotypes applied to me and other black women by others (either self-labeled Blacks or non-Blacks).
While in a hair salon this past weekend with several dark skinned women, I was complimented for being “gorgeous for a black girl” and having “good hair” because it didn’t require as much attention as another dark skinned woman’s thicker hair did. Because I am aware of how being light-skinned and having a partially Caucasian background works to my advantage in a lot of situations, I did not take this to be a compliment. I acknowledged it for the purely racist and inconsiderate statement it was. The statement was a product of the assumption that lighter is more beautiful than darker and having thick, difficult to manage hair (often a trait of Black womens’ hair) is not synonymous with having “good hair” (although it might still be beautiful).
Grimaces filled the room, even on the faces of women who had treated me politely in prior visits, and I understood exactly then that this is the stuff hatred, war, and genocide is made of. Without asserting my own agenda, I had become the object of jealousy in this salon because while this dark skinned woman had thought she was giving me a nice compliment, she was actually putting down every other woman in the salon who didn’t look like me (while also making a blanket statement about anyone with a darker skin tone). The woman “complimenting” me clearly had no idea that her statement was racist and exclusive. What’s more startling is that the women affected by it probably had no idea either. For all they knew they just felt contempt towards me… the problem here is that they did not stop to ask themselves, “Why do I feel this?” And this, my friends, is the gateway to the devil’s playground – a lack of question asking, self-exploration, and natural kindness towards your fellow man.
In lieu of this motif's resurfacing, I dug up some of the material I kept from UVA’s Multicultural Education project. Two works in particular have always struck a chord with me, so…I’m sharing them with you. See the following 2 posts for further information.
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