Personal Narrative-Racial Conflict

I remember waking up with a bloody face. As I entered junior high, my family had moved to a town that had a racist streak. On the first day of school I made a remark identifying myself as believing in civil rights. The statement’s consequences arrived several months later when I was beaten unconscious by a fellow white student. At that time, I had never had a black friend, but the madness imposed on African Americans stormed into my world with the physical intimacy of violence.
What do we know, really, just from looking at people? We tell ourselves we can assess a spectrum of personal traits with just a glance. Often, we estimate another person’s ratio of trustworthiness to suspiciousness. Racial conflict is a case study.
Looking at people for the first time tells us next to nothing about another’s innermost thoughts or feelings. Is their scowl one of rage or a mask for fear? Are the scruffy clothes a mark of grinding poverty, or is this an affluent person floating through a day of garden work? But we …show more content…
At the subatomic level there is a continual exchange of photons and electrons between natural objects and people. We do not usually think of our bodies as permeable or malleable, but they are. As Wendell Berry has pointed out, simply eating plants and animals from farms pulls the landscape through us. The appearance of African faces illustrate hundreds of thousands of years of breathing the air of the second-largest continent on the planet, being born, birthing, living, prospering and dying in the plains, mountains, jungles and deserts. Empires rising and falling. Generations passed, families descended, countless stories played out. The dark complexion? Modern science says that dark-skinned populations correlate with the high ultraviolet radiation levels; sunlight. Romantics suggest Nature also paints creatures with endearments of shape and