I’ve Seen A Light: Thoughts on Affirmative Action

I admit to occasionally being wrong. It’s a part of my life. I’m not always going to be 100% correct. And I think I’ve been a bit wrong to think that affirmative action is on its way out. Last week, I claimed that in Oregon, we are past race. Race shouldn’t even come into question when you’re applying for a job or college. I still believe I’m right, that it shouldn’t matter, but unfortunately it does matter. Colleges and universities are better than most organizations. The people I’ve met who work at state colleges and universities are some of the most caring, progressive, and open-minded people in the book. They strive for diversity because they know that education and learning is best when we are stretched and melded together with different ideas and backgrounds. You don’t only learn in the college classroom. You learn around campus, each time you encounter a different person from a different family, different town, and different upbringing. But in the workplace, depending on the state, people are not always so enlightened. This is sad, but I worked in a school in Nampa, Idaho where our administrator clumped the “problem kids” (with low grades, lack of familial support, and poor behavior) into one category: brown. That was tough. I was shocked to hear this and realized right away that racism is not dead in America. I still hate the fact that I have to check that box “white” especially since the dang sun has burned my skin time and time again this summer. If only I’d been born with that resilient skin one of my best friends from high school got from her Mexican-American parents. She NEVER burns! But alas, I was born white. She was born a tannish color. That’s just life.

I truly believe that race shouldn’t matter anymore. I actually got schooled last year when I was talking about race and ethnicity and I was told that I was misusing the two terms. Ok, I thought. I obviously missed something in class. I still don’t understand why Jewish people have been crapped on so much. And I don’t see why people in different areas of America still hate on black and Hispanic populations. That’s just mean. I love my darker-skinned friends and neighbors. (Does that sound bad? To some, I’m sure it does, but I’m just trying to say I like everybody.)

I looked up Race on the most accurate online source, Wikipedia. Check it out.

It made me kind of sick. It reminded me too much of the movies I’ve seen about World War II and Nazi Germany. Do you remember Swing Kids when the guys had to learn the signs of the Jewish person? It always frustrated me and sort of disgusted me. Granted, I learned that some of those classifications were accurate, but because the Nazis used those signs to help weed out and eliminate an entire race, the entire practice of race classification started to disgust me.

I think my family may have had Jewish roots: the Bunns all have big noses. Unfortunately, I think I could also say that I may not know a whole lot about the “signs” of other ethnicities or races and because both of my parents were born into families with long noses and to my knowledge, none of them were Jews. (Plus, these days so many of us Americans are mutts that it’s hard to determine pinpoint our ethnic backgrounds. I may be 1/16th Irish, but when I use this as an excuse for why I celebrate St. Pattie’s Day with such verve, I usually get laughed at.)

I feel bad for being selfish and saying that I think affirmative action should be on the way out so I will again feel like I can get a job based on just merit. (Though I believe this is the way it should be, it’s pretty apparent that it’s still too early.) I started to feel this way when I read this post by Stephen Colbert.

Our country isn’t quite healed yet. Yes, we have a black president, but have you ever watched, Game Change? It’s one of my favorite political films and it shows that while Sarah Palin was gaining support for the republican campaign in 2008, supporters started to put down Barack Obama and use racial slurs to talk about him. Right now, Obama continues to lose approval from the people that stood with him for the “Change We Can Believe In.” And some of the people, either the ones who didn’t like him from the start or who just lost faith in him have started to pull race into their opinions. Race should have nothing to do with our comments about our president. To assume that his “blackness” is why the economy isn’t getting better is just wrong. You can attack his background in community planning all you want, just don’t comment on his race. Right there, that comment, shows me that our country is not really ready for an overhaul of affirmative action. It’s too soon.

If the Lincoln joke Seth MacFarlane gave at the Oscars in 2013 was still 148 years too soon, it’s definitely too soon to give up affirmative action.

Yes, I’ve read that in 2050, I will in fact be the minority in America. I will be one of “the others.” But what does that even mean? I trust that in the end game, the majority won’t play a “Mockingjay rebels” move on us and try to subject me and the rest of “the others” to the same crap we put them through for hundreds of years. I think perhaps it will take that census for our nation to realize and appreciate that we are in fact a melting pot. We are all people made of the same atomic material. Most of us have the same general makeup and yet we are all different. Even doppelgangers don’t look that alike. Honestly, they look similar, but not identical. (Vampire Diaries so screwed up on this one.)

We, these brilliant citizens of the United States of America, are still on the journey to become truly enlightened and progressive people. I would like it if we one day could move beyond the race card and actually live up to the (positive) reputation we have in other parts of the world as a superpower, land of the free, a wonderful country. Though I know that not everyone thinks this of us, there are many people in Ukraine that believe that America is the land of milk and honey. People in Britain, on the other hand, think we’re a messed up bunch. I suppose that both countries are correct, if only we could work together to find a middle ground then we could be a mediocre country that didn’t fight so much.

Tata for now.

Rece

Dear President Obama

Sharece Michelle Bunn
Dayton, Oregon 97114

July 19, 2012

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

Hey. How’s it going? I’m writing not to just say hello or tell you what I think of your policies or the campaign, but to ask you for a job. I know. You’re concerned about the way things are headed and you’re not even sure if you’re going to have a job at the end of the year. For record, I am going to vote for you. I voted for you the first time and I want to see you finish the work you started.

Now, back to the real reason I’m writing. I need a job. That’s right. I, like the other 12.7 million Americans, am out of work. Why am I special? You ask. Well, President Obama. I’m a regular girl with a really great education, a plethora of varied job experiences, and about $60,000 in school debt to my name. I know that some really great people are working to pass legislation to help lower the student debt situation but it requires the 10/10 rule. I’ve been out of undergrad for seven years. That should have been plenty of time to pay off my debt except that I really listened in my history courses in college and I followed the path so many great men and women followed in the 1960s. I joined the Peace Corps and went to Ukraine for twenty-six months. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the experience, but when I came home to the states, I wanted to spend time with my family and my family just doesn’t live in the part of America where there are a lot of jobs for returned Peace Corps Volunteers with English degrees. I did what any smart person would do. I moved in with my parents are started working at the low-income school I attended as a child as an instructional assistant. You see, even though I spent two years teaching in Ukraine with the Peace Corps, in Oregon, I wasn’t a real teacher. I had to assist in every classroom even though many of the teachers made me write my own lesson plans and lead small groups without their permission. I wasn’t allowed to work as a teacher in Oregon. It was ok. I went to graduate school at the University of Oregon to study journalism. I studied it all. I grew frustrated by the ethics class that showed me that some of my fellow students would let tragedies happen so they could get the story. I changed my focus and worked to take as many social media, public relations, and other aspects of communications as I could before I graduated. It worked. I took a lot of classes.

Then I started working on my final project paper that was about my small town in Oregon. I moved back to Dayton where I worked at the school again and researched and wrote every day after school. By the time I graduated in December, I felt connected to the school again. I’m not the type of person who gives up or leaves in the middle of a project. I needed to finish my challenging year. You see, I worked in a self-contained classroom with children with autism and other severe disabilities. I wasn’t trained in this field, but I was curious about it. I wanted to learn what was going on in their heads and how I could help and make things better. It was a challenge and I still don’t know everything about how to help people with autism, but I think that year helped me grow stronger in my mind and heart. As that year was ending, I got recruited to join Peace Corps Response in Ukraine. I went to Ukraine where I worked at Ternopil National Pedagogical University. It was a great and very challenging year. I accomplished a lot and felt that I was again making a difference. I started looking for jobs at the end of that year, but my search really began when I landed in the US. I have since applied for over fifty jobs. I have not been hired yet. How is it that a well-educated, middle-class white girl with three years of service to her country can’t find a job? I really don’t get this. That’s why I’m writing to you. Like I said, I’m a well-educated, middle-class white girl and I need a job. Preferably, I would like to work in the communications department, but honestly, I would take any job you could give me.

Thanks a lot, Obama.

Sincerely,

Sharece M. Bunn