Personal Narrative-African-Booty

Coming to the United States was and continues to be a blessing within itself. I constantly find myself in a nostalgic state whenever I recall the times where in tragedy, where my friends and family would refer to the United States as the promise land. This for them was Israel, a place where freedom reigned and there was a constant promise of a better life. When my mother and I came to the United States, I was just a little girl who was embarrassed to speak English and had been uprooted from the only home I ever knew. I was unaware of any form of oppression, oblivious to different nationalities and ethnicities other than the ones I had seen which were Indian and Islam. The lightest person I had ever known was a Kikuyu woman who was the talk …show more content…
A lot of the microaggressions that I had experienced in my previous school began fading, yet a new form emerged as I acquired a new name, “African-Booty-Scratcher”. My peers taunted me as they repeated that wretched insult over and over. I never understood what it meant, even to this day, but all I knew was the fact that my peers referred to me with a derogatory term simply based on the fact that I had a Kenyan Accent and followed a different set of social etiquette. Other than my mother, I never quite had someone fighting battles against racial slurs or anything remotely close, I just had to learn how to ignore those things, and surely, soon enough I became deaf to them. I believed that I lived in a perfect world and exemplary grades were my one way ticket to a prosperous …show more content…
I believe in a sense this allowed me to appreciate the fact that Kenya is part of my identity, yet at the same time, it made me feel so ashamed as there are so many things that need fixing, yet the government officials are either unable to make changes, or they are unwilling. Nonetheless, this opened my eyes to a whole new level of injustice. I began reading the Queen of Katwe after watching the film “The Last King of Scotland.” Both of these mediums hold such heartbreaking tales of the events that take place in Uganda. Watching the film, as well as reading parts of the book, have made me understand just how privileged I am. This is something that I hadn’t quite acknowledged before this life changing realization, because I always assumed that I had the least amount of privilege relative to the average person, as I was a black, poor, and a woman. Nonetheless, I have a voice, something that not many people in the same situation as me can say for themselves. I am not afraid to speak my mind, and during my stay in the United States, I have never been in a situation where death felt