Prior to leaving Cape Town reach co-educator wrote a paper in response to the following questions: How do you expect the experiences and knowledge gained this semester to influence your future career and life choices?; What have your learned about race and gender that you believe is important for you to know as you strive to become a more well informed global citizen?; What have you learned about yourself that you believe is important for you to know?
Rebecca has agreed to post her answers as her final entry on this blog.
Coming to Cape Town was a huge step in my life. Ever since high school I have been pretty
sure I want to be a high school teacher, and history was always my favorite
subject so I could not fathom teaching any other subject. Last year I had a small panic attack over
whether I should really be a teacher. It
took me a couple of months and volunteering with a government housing project’s
community’s center to really remember the reasons I wanted to be a teacher. After being here all semester I still want to
be a teacher, but I have realized that I may eventually want to get my
doctorate and become a professor. Being
here has made me realize that I don’t have to pick one. I can do both. I definitely learned this from talking with
Marita and the other people who are on this experience. Being in a classroom all semester and having
a positive relationship with the students, made me realize that while yes I
still see myself as being a strict teacher one day, I know that I can have fun
in the classroom also. This will also
hopefully influence the way I act at my summer job. Over the summer I am a counselor at a YMCA day camp. I
believe I just got promoted to a group leader position, which gives me much
more responsibility than last summer.
While I won’t loose my organized, strict approach (I have to pick up the
other counselor’s slack a lot) I hope to use some of the more relaxed
discipline techniques I picked up at Christel House.
I am scared of almost everything. It’s kind of the way I go about life. Even though this may not appear to be so, I now
feel confident in my ability to travel abroad more often without having
mind-numbing fears the entire time. I
want to travel around the world: Europe, India, China, South America, you name
it, I want to go. I also want to see
more of the United States. For the
longest time my grandparents lived in Florida so every year on our vacation we
would travel to see them. While I would
never trade those times, I feel like now I have more mobility to see the rest
of our country. As a nation we are very
diverse, and because I want to be a history teacher I want to be able to see
the rest of the country that I will be spending a lot of my time educating about.
One very important thing I have learned about not even race,
but about ridding the world of racism, is that we cannot ignore race. That will not make racism go away. By ignoring it, we are simply neglecting to
acknowledge the fact that we are different and that is not just ok, but
great. We can all learn so much if we
simply realize that our differences can bring us together instead of pushing us
apart. The first time I realized this
was when we visited Elowabeeni and Brittany & Erica shared their
experience, which was so radically different from the rest of ours. This was the start, but it took many more
such discussions for me to become comfortable to talk about race with people
who don’t have the same skin color as me.
Another thing I learned, or experienced, about race is how
uncomfortable it can be, being the only person of a skin color in the
room. I have ridden on buses to
Khayletshia where I am one of three white people (the others are all on our
trip), in a classroom all day where I am the only white person. I used to think well as long as no one acts
racist someone’s who black, Asian, Indian, etc. will not feel out of
place. Well fortunately I have learned how
untrue that thought could be. Being
white attracts attention almost everywhere I go in Cape Town. I can’t hide it, I am always noticed. Yet I have always felt more comfortable when
someone acknowledges my skin color instead of just pretending they don’t notice
it because I know they do. It’s
definitely a life lesson to learn, especially since I want to be a teacher.
Another thing I have learned about is white privilege. To me this was the missing piece of the
puzzle when talking about the system of meritocracy. In a social anthropology class I took I learned
that meritocracy was a myth, yet it didn’t make sense because my Dad and his
siblings had all risen from the lower class to the middle class. Learning that race is the piece of the puzzle
that makes the meritocracy a myth for so many people, really made sense to me.
Learning about gender images etc. was a really enjoyable
process for me and it didn’t make me uncomfortable like discussions of
race. I knew about gender inequalities
before coming here. I grew up in a
family of extremely strong women, which is why this wasn’t all new information. I liked seeing all the things that make me
think I need make-up to look better, or wear push-up bras etc. Some things I
still don’t mind, like looking pretty, what I mind is that the standards for
beauty are so narrow: a pretty face, impossibly skinny body, big boobs, long
hair, etc. It’s all impossible for the
average women. I grew up in a household
of extremely gorgeous women (by society’s standards) and I was always the ugly
duckling. My sister is much skinnier than
I, my Mom thinks she’s fat, my aunt and her two daughters spend more time
getting ready in one day than I would spend in an entire week. It was really crushing to my
self-esteem. My parents would always
tell me that what really mattered was how smart and talented I was, but I got
an entirely different message when I would see my Mom looking in the mirror and
being dissatisfied constantly, or when my sister was the one who always got the
compliments about her beauty and how thin she was, but I was the second
thought. Spending time with my Dad’s
family was always so much better because instead of just saying that the
important things were being smart and talented, they actually were. No one ever dressed all fancy or wore lots of
make-up. I always got books for presents
because they read and really loved them.
I will not lie and say that I can completely erase the way I
think about myself and body image, but I am more aware of what made me think
this way. Not only this but I promise
now, my daughters (or sons even though I really want girls haha) will never see
me criticizing my body because it is not fair that we make young girls in our
society feel this way. This fits in more with how this trip has influenced my
future, and this is probably the most important thing I have learned. It took me until high school to have the
confidence in myself I now have, and it took a really amazing guy friend to
show me how pretty I really am, and not by society’s standards but mine. I want my future offspring to see the beauty
in everyone starting from the day they’re born.
In connection with becoming a global citizen, I can easily
see now how people all over the world have different standards of beauty, and
if this is true than there is no one way to be beautiful. Understanding this I realize just like race
is socially constructed, so is beauty.
There may be some science to how symmetry is attractive to the human
eye, but that doesn’t explain the image of big boobs, skinny body, big butt
etc. I was looking through trip pictures
today, and I have stunning pictures of everyone. These people all mean so much to me, and are
so good, that I can’t imagine thinking of them as anything other than
beautiful, and I want to apply this to the rest of my life.
Another important thing I learned is how important it truly
is to not judge others. I used to say,
“No I’m not judging you,” when really I was in my head I just wasn’t saying
it. Here I learned a great deal about so
many different people and their lives, which I really have learned to not judge
people. It was a hard lesson to learn,
but I am definitely getting better at it.
Also it is important to not judge people, or write them off because they
are different than you. I never would
have made these amazing friends if I met them all at UCONN. I would have missed out on so much if I had
not been thrown together with them in another country.
What I have learned about myself may be more difficult for
me to write about. I have seen how
selfish and ignorant I was when I would complain about minorities receiving
preference occasionally when it would come to college acceptance or scholarships. This may be the most important lesson I have
learned all semester, In order to make the world an equal, better, place those
who have privilege need to give some of it up.
It’s a hard lesson to grapple with especially because being white, I am
privileged and I have had struggles in my life so the idea of maybe having more
of them is definitely not appealing, but it must be done. I have also learned that I am much stronger
than I ever thought. I am strong enough
to advocate for change, even if it is a quiet way, I am strong enough to stick
out from the crowd, and I am strong enough to stick up for myself when someone
treats me poorly instead of just ignoring it.
This time in Cape Town has changed my life. I cannot begin to put everything down on
paper. It all means so much to me and I
would not change anything.
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