Social Injustice

S O C I A L     I N J U S T I C E. It’s the “hot topic” right now. Every news channel, every social media post, every conversation between friends and family seems to be dripping with tension, heaviness, concern, and opinion. It seems like 2020 is a year of a lot of different dilemmas, and people are searching for truth. 

What should we do when there is a global pandemic in the new millenia? 

What is real and what is a distraction during this election year? 

How do we use our voice to right the injustices that we see and experience? 

So many questions. 

Along with many of you I’ve been doing some hard work, searching my belief systems, my thoughts, my choices, my truths. It is important work. It is hard work. 

Growing up I lived in many different types of low income settings, some of which included trailer parks and apartment buildings that were riddled with drugs, domestic violence, and crime. These (mostly white) neighborhoods were toxic and chaotic, yet somehow brought comfort because it was there that I saw other homes that looked broken like mine.

It was in these homes that I was tortured, neglected, enslaved to a lifestyle of being raised by addicted parents who would do whatever they needed to do to try to feel better, often to the detriment of my body and my mind. It was in these neighborhoods that I made friends with other kids who were similar or worse off than I was. It was growing up like this, that my life would be shaped, filtered, and ultimately launched from. 

Our neighborhood regularly had intoxicated/high people walking about. Screams from neighboring houses were a common experience, and police were often dispatched for various reasons. However, in my neighborhood, no one was afraid to die at the hands of the police, and quite frankly, there were hardly ever any arrests. In the middle of my own personal hell, I was never questioned by the police, by a teacher, by a nurse or physician at the hospital as they attended to my broken bones, my scars, my fractures. They never commented or asked questions about my free lunch status, the dirtiness or lack of clothing, or my starved frame. They didn’t ask me why I was crippled with fear and hid in the background, trying not to be noticed. Every system F A I L E D me. 

I escaped my childhood hell when I was 16 and left home. As I sat with my guidance counselor in school and we began to explore what “options” I had, hitting dead end after dead end. I still remember the day that she looked at me, with tears in her eyes, and told me that if I became pregnant than I would have so many more options. Another failed system. 

At the age of 18, I went to college and was introduced to many new ideas that I had never heard before. I remember sitting in my sociology class and hearing the professor discuss “white privilege” for the first time. After growing up the way that I had, I struggled to listen to any “authority figure” and when she demanded we go to a protest and march for affirmative action for a grade in her class, she lost me. How could I have been privileged? What was the truth?

Over the course of my next 15 years, I started to be able to unpack all of my very real, very American experiences. See, in this country there are endless amounts of experiences, lenses to see through, personal truths, failures, and wins that make up the “American dream”. And there are two sides to every story. My experience is that “white privilege” probably did affect me, but not how most would expect. Had I not been white, in a white neighborhood perhaps my parents would have been arrested. Perhaps when I went to the hospital, I would not have been believed to be a clumsy girl who fell down the stairs again. Perhaps if I had not been white,then someone would have noticed that I wasn’t just “shy” in the back of the classroom. If I had not been white, perhaps innocence would not have been presumed. Perhaps. 

What makes my story, and every story, both beautiful and painful is that we ALL get to give voice to our version of truth and our personal accounts. Then these stories rub against our neighbors, producing togetherness or isolation based on their reactions. That last paragraph is uncomfortable. Uncomfortable to write, and probably uncomfortable to read. In the midst of that friction, most people, like myself, are looking to belong and find others to affirm our experiences as valid and worthy. But worthy of what?

I spent a LOT of years looking for affirmation from the world, hoping this would allow my victim status to somehow experience a love that would heal or change me. And no matter how many people felt sorry for my story, it didn’t matter, healing wasn’t coming.  I thought I would be broken forever.

U N T I L. . .