DON’T ASK ME TO JUST FORGET
Thaddeus,
Nashville, TN.
I was raised poor in Louisiana where the generations of my family before me farmed and picked cotton, fished and lived off the land. Our water was rain water caught in a ground cistern and we used an outhouse for a toilet and boiled water for each night to bathe. So please don’t tell me how “privileged” I was raised. My first year of junior high, I was suddenly bussed halfway across the parish for desegregation instead of going to school with the kids I’d known since first grade. Our family cemetery started as the cemetery for a Confederate fort because it was high ground that never flooded. I cannot and will not forget the sacrifices that my ancestors made and the path that was blazed for my life. I’ve researched my genealogy back to the early 1800’s and there’s no documentation that any of them ever owned a slave. Instead, pictures show that the families as poor farm folk who led hard lives and were devoted Christians. They worked hard for what little they had. Even with more education and 12 years of military service, I, too, have had to work and scrimp to save for what I’ve accumulated over the years. I certainly don’t count myself as privileged, merely that I’ve been taught how to be happy with little and have some peace of mind with a hope for a better life on the other side of this one. I’ve learned to quit looking at what everyone else has and be thankful for what little I have. After all, it’s unlikely anybody is going to give you much. You’ve got to take some responsibility and get it for yourself.
Can we all forgive and forget?
Brent Pappas,
Cooper City, FL.
Normally, I feel it is prudent to forgive others when they wrong us, and to remember their previous actions in order to predict how they will act next and best prepare for it. Increasingly however, I have begun to feel that perhaps it would be for the best if everyone one day woke up and forgot all their preconceived notions about other cultures as well as all the injustices committed to others based upon race, gender, sexual-orientation, nationality, religion, or any other discerning cultural factor. I just wonder what the world would be like today if we could all suddenly see each other anew with no frame of reference; like starting from a blank slate. I’m not sure if this would create a world of complete racial equality or one of the opposite, but I assume the former would be established. If racial prejudice is not inherent (and while I believe trepidation about interacting with other cultures in general is, I believe that prejudice to other cultures is not), then this hypothetical scenario would naturally create a world lacking prejudice.
The key takeaway from this idea is that it can simply (though not necessarily easily) be realized. Each of us must simply try to forget all the stereotypes, notions, and stigmas surrounding other cultures and instead base our opinions solely on our own interactions with them. If we would all do this, then I believe that the world would truly become a better place.
Sometimes I forget I’m not white
Darshi Balasuriya
Long Beach, CA
I spend my days mostly in Orange County California. I live in this white world and often see myself in the reflection of those whom I love and enjoy the company of. I rarely think about color of skin or race. But occasionally I encounter treatment from others that doesn’t align with my world view. This is when the jarrign happens and forces me to see myself from the outsider’s point of view. Yes, my skin is brown, I look typically south asian. I am not white. they are not like me on the outside. We are suddenly separated from the color of our skin rather than that which I see when I look into my husband’s beautiful eyes.
I hate seeing it in people.
Jesse,
Edinburg, TX.
“What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.” According to Hansen’s Law, the second generation immigrant tends to sever themselves from the customs and traditions of their ancestors in order to achieve assimilation, but in time the “grandson” will value, that which the “son” wished to forget. What my sentence refers to is, the DESIRE I see in second generation immigrants, to belong to the “right” race.
Deconstruct race but don’t forget history.
Carol Hodgspeth,
Berkeley, CA.
Race is important to talk about, but we can’t be boxed in by it. Be critical!
Forgotten history will always be repeated
Maranda L. Glass-Shelhorse,
Grovetown, GA.
We can forgive; we must never forget. History forgotten is doomed to be repeated.
We forget history’s lessons too easily
Submitted via twitter: @CTGlo
#theracecardproject
despare, rehibilitation, sacrifice, liberation, overcome, forget
Everett Robinson
New York City, NY
Manhattan
The story behind my 6 words creates a platform for history surfers who seek wisdom and the truth to know the difference.
Right when I almost forget: Race
Muderi Aradi
Poughkeepsie, NY
Race to me is how authorities in an environment define aesthetic population differences, in ignorance to the vast continuum of intermediates that may lie outside of the smaller environment. Knowledge or acknowledgement of these intermediates would immediately add a confusion and invalidation to the narrow definitions. In a similar way, knowledge or acknowledgment of truths about vast exceptions to constructed racial stereotypes would also breach racial constructions. In slightly different words, it is a small world organizational feature that lacks a total data that would then immediately invalidate it.
Racism to me is any categorically assumptive tool that can devalue, discredit and/or eventually dehumanizes the labeled racial subject based on these hand-made definitions. In present-day America it takes the form of a national and inner-personal consciousness that places an automatic, mindless favor towards this attitude.
In my life racism is something that I am lucky to be able to forget about at times, but when it appears it feels more demoralizing than it would if I were constantly bombarded with it. My racial encounters have been particular to my extreme minority status as an ethnic African in predominantly white populations; subtle, indirect, and hard to fully comprehend past emotional response upon occurrence. From the start of elementary school, I felt structural isolation in a form of exceptionalism due to my teachers’ (shows) of surprise at my academic performance as a minority. A defining example was when I got 100% on a vocabulary test in fifth grade, and my teacher lauded, “You must have worked very hard!” In reality, I had not worked that hard at all to earn the good grade, and I perceived her disrespectful attribution of labor over intelligence. Neighbors, and parents of my close friends, would eventually repeat in this peculiar attribution. Many similar subtle racist events pervaded my experiences and those of my first generation family. I view these many events as a microcosm of how structural racism eventually conquers a group in society, and in this way view the success of structural racism as a composite of many small accumulating parts. I also perceive the most detrimental effects of racism in the gray area of ambiguity, in wondering whether my father, mother, brother or myself would have been better (and in what ways) if the proverbial fifth grade teacher hadn’t projected that we “worked very hard”.
I’m Asian I can’t forget that
Matt McDonough
Morris, MN
I chose these six words because I find that I sometimes will forget that I’m Asian just because I’ve been raised in the United States my entire life and live in an Irish-American family where we don’t really practice any traditional Korean customs. Most of my friends are white and it’s just really easy to forget that I’m not actually “white”. I guess it’s just something I need to work on remembering.
They will never let you forget.
John Johnson
Portland, OR
They will never let you forget you are black. I doesn’t matter where you go or what you do. First and foremost you will always be black. If you are at the beach you are a black man at the beach. If you are in an antique store you are a black man at an antique store. If you are hiking in the woods miles away from civilization and only one person sees you for the span of several days then you become that black guy they saw in the woods. You will never just be a guy at the beach on a sunny day. They never let you forget.
