Guess who has no idea on what’s appropriate for a college admission’s essay? This girl! I started writing and remembered this post from a couple of years ago, and updated and edited it, and this is roughly what I handed in.  I’m sure it could be better, especially now that I’m re-reading it after I applied, ha! But this is what I’m going to spend the next 6 years studying, and on a very basic level, the why. I’m really looking forward to this next big step.

 

When I was little I grew up in the city. My cousins and best friend lived a block over. Our other best friends lived 2 houses down, and even shared my last name. They were black, we were white, and we jokingly told people we were related.

 

Our family car for awhile was a red Pinto with a white stripe around it. It had no heat, so my brother and I cuddled in the backseat with a big, comfy quilt as we drove my dad to work each morning. The dashboard was cracked because one time my dad got mad and pounded his fist on it. Sometimes it wouldn’t start, so my dad and the neighbors would push it down the road, coast it down the block to a big hill where it would pick up enough speed that he could jump in and drive it.

 

One time I had my red sled stolen off our porch.

One time a bullet went through my bedroom window.

One time my dad waved his shotgun out the window to stop someone from breaking into our woody wagon.

One time my brother won a bike race with some other boys and one of them punched him.

 

We became part of a movement known as white flight. A few years ago, the racial and wealth disparity of that city and its neighboring city became the subject of a fairly well-known book.

 

I drove by our old neighborhood not too long ago. It looks mostly the same. Maybe a little dingier. But that’s probably memory speaking. I think it was always shabby, and I just didn’t know.

 

I didn’t know pushing a Pinto to start it was unusual. I thought it was great fun. I didn’t know most people didn’t huddle under their living room window to peek at the drug bust going on across the street.  I thought it was an adventure to have police officers use our house to hide and watch.

 

After my brother got beat up, my grandpa gave us the money for a security deposit and we moved to a small town nearby. It was rich. And really white. The kind of white that didn’t visit the city I just moved from. We rented an apartment from a friend of a friend. 2 bedroom, 700 sq ft, 5 people. For 5 years.

 

I look back now at the racial interactions I had at my new school. We had a fair amount of foreign exchange students and so of course I thought I knew what was what about diversity. I think about how accepting the general population was to those exotic students, come from foreign lands, (well, except for the soccer player from Bulgaria; the guys loved his skills, the girls loved his looks, but no one loved that he didn’t shower or wear deodorant), but the 2 Hispanic migrant kids who were there for half the year, every year, who I think had trouble with English, we pretty much ignored. I think about how, for a long time there was only one black boy, and the rich white boys called him names. And I just stood there, ashamed. Aware of my insecurity, my just-trying-to-fit-in-ness, and I said nothing.

 

And the churches I grew up in were white and fairly rich, and we went there to fix ourselves. To be better people. To remind us that Jesus died for us, so we needed to live out of that gratefulness and not sin. The Christianity that formed me consciously in the ways of Evangelicalism also formed me unconsciously in the ways of white supremacy. I was taught to demonize anyone who was not like us.

 

Not only was I taught to be uninterested in anyone different, I was steeped in the greatness of America. I inhaled history books and biographies. I live in Virginia now largely as a result of my love for American history.

 

And yet that understanding of faith and history left me ignorant.

 

The only thing I learned about the black church was that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. committed adultery. The only thing I learned about black history was that our problems were all in the past, and we’re all equal now. I never learned about the term ‘intersectionality’. I didn’t know the historical roots of the poverty and racial issues I saw as a child. Society fed me the lie that black people were dangerous and the church served up the spiritual justification for it.

 

It has only been over the past couple of years that I’ve come to realize that although I was handed a legacy of white supremacy, I do not have to hold onto it. And in my letting go of it, I can work to help others dismantle it.

 

I am choosing to major in Comprehensive Liberal Studies because I want to study more in-depth the history of America, and how systemic injustices, predicated on the belief of Anglo-Saxon superiority, work to uphold this empire we live in. I want to study the effect that Empire has on the non-white people of this country and even around the world.

 

I was thrilled to look through the course catalog and see courses like American Protest Literature, Readings in Criminal Justice, and Globalization and Empire in American History which line up perfectly with my interests. I am also really pleased that VWC is a Christian-based institution because a large part of America as empire involves the role of the Bible and Christianity, and I am just as interested in exploring the role of white supremacy in the church.

 

I have a deep love for history, and I’ve spent the last few years untangling my own history of faith and culture. As I’ve done so, I’ve come to appreciate more fully the way history weaves itself into every subject, and how necessary the untangling of those threads are in order to seek a more just society.

 

Click here for to download an 8×10 version of the poster up above.

 

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