Grounding Myself in the Present

As I sip on some tea and try to calm my mind until session 1 starts, I ponder how I - a "nice jewish girl" from the burbs of Chicago -  ended up here in San Fransico spending the next 4 months educating myself  on how to be an effective anti-racist organizer alongside 24 other white people from across the country.

Some images pop up in to my mind.  The toy drive I organized in first grade.  Sitting on the floor playing cards with my host family in Honduras my first summer there in 2004.  Professor Puerto’s class on U.S./Latin American relations at Occidental.  Returning to that same home in Honduras in 2006 to find that the oldest and youngest sons had died of curable diseases.  “Racism exists at Oxy” mobilization junior year, and not being sure why.  Professor Dreier’s urban policy class where he asked us to describe our childhood using class and race, showing how white and wealthy people are blind from the way race and class shape every experience and interaction.*  Witnessing operation streamline in Tuscon, Arizona where undocumented immigrants are put on trial and deported in masses.  Residents of a building I was organizing in the Lower East Side who hadn't had heat or hot water for a year.  Each experience building on the prior, showing me both how there are a whole lot of people out there in the world struggling while a select few of us have more resources that we will ever need and how these inequalities exist not because of work ethic or intelligence, but because our system is set up to benefit some and hold back others, because the U.S. is built on a system of racialized exclusion and exploitation. 

I snap back to the present, and look around at all of the beautiful people in the room.  In this moment I am feeling grateful for these experiences - albeit painful - and for all the people that helped guide me on my path that took me from the suburbs of Chicago to the hills of Los Angeles to the mountains of Honduras and Ecuador to the streets of New York City, to the fields of Connecticut and finally to where I am today.  Because where I am right now feels like right where I am supposed to be.

And now my dad will officially stop reading this blog because I ended my first post with a preposition.


*In this activity, we were asked to describe our childhood with race and class in every part of the description.  For example, "I grew up in a middle/upper predominately white town and went to a middle class predominately white school..." etc.  Then he asked who among the group sees life through this lens.  The four people of color in the class raised their hands.