As a qualitative sociologist I am drawn to stories that demonstrate social facts. Here is a story that I would like to share that underscores why I believe that we must be committed to anti-racist work and do so even in the midst of a year defined by disruption.
Once upon a time, a young woman walked into the wrong bathroom. She was exhausted from her travel from her home country to this new place. All she wanted was to wash her hands and splash cold water on her face. She was unaware of her error until someone grabbed her by the collar and yanked her backward, hard. This young woman of color was confused when her rescuer, also Black, kept pointing at the sign, which said “Colored.”
That young woman was my mother, and that was her introduction to the United States.
Confronting anti-Black racism was part of what shaped my mother’s sense of herself. But only part. She chose to become a citizen of the United States. She chose to use her subsequent training as a nurse in New York to offer reproductive health workshops on weekends to kids in Washington Heights.
She chose to mobilize and advocate for others. She saw that her choices in the present would help shape the future.
I am the daughter of an immigrant from Latin America and of a man who was the first generation in his family born in the U.S. and who was the first to go to college. I am the product of a family that like so many others actively resisted racism merely by living.
When I was a kid, my parents sent me to Fieldston, a private school in the Bronx that is affiliated with the humanistic principles of the Ethical Culture Society. I was a scholarship kid. My parents couldn’t really afford for me to go and in fact had to pull me out one year. My return was solely due to the help of Aunt Alina, my mother’s friend since nursing school, a Polish woman who was a Holocaust survivor.
