Reflective Essay: How Racism Changed My Life

It was going to be an interesting Saturday morning, I thought, as I woke-up and greeted my mother to hear the firm influx in her voice yelling, “You will discontinue your relationship with that colored boy!” Still cracking the crust apart that adhered my eyes together throughout the night, I was in shock by this non-understanding of why color was even a concern. She never gave me an explanation and I wouldn’t dare ask why as I knew better. I was a tender 14-year-old girl when I felt the impact of racism that would go onto resonant beneath my heart throughout my life until gaining the awareness that propelled me to relearn what I was taught. While I didn’t grasp racism fully, I was like a harmonizing orchestra as to how my mother planted a negative association to African Americans in my head as a teenager. I was searching for answers when she [my mother] should have been the one answering them. I intensely desired the answers to my many questions. Why did the pigmentation of skin dictate love? Would my identity change? Why did my mother make it a habit to tell me that society wouldn’t approve of me dating Adrian [boyfriend]? At the age of 14-years-old, I was still attempting to understand my identity and who I wanted to become in this world. I was getting hijacked at …show more content…
I understood that change is possible. I was drastically fearful and embarrassed to even initiate my self-inventory. In effect, I do hold a sense of guilt of my unconscious contributions to racism throughout many years of my life. I not only conformed within my childhood to this mind-bending concept of racism, but I too conformed throughout my twenties. It was an intertangled game of being the victim and the perpetrator simultaneously. What I learned from both “the 10 c’s” and the critical race theory is that through awareness change is