America

            As a child growing in North Carolina, I never could quite understand the extreme pride some of my fellow peers and their parents and families took in their “southern heritage,” a euphemism for their ancestors’ willingness to fight, kill, and die to preserve the institution of slavery throughout the South. As a man in my 30s, I still don’t, but now there’s an accompanying contempt.

            Sitting in a theater, watching an exhibition about our first President George Washington and the decisions and struggles he faced, in and outside what apparently would become a famous war tent, my eyes filled with tears. This experiment. The ideals. My pride in this country has everything to do with what America can stand for, what it could stand for. The values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution reveal a hope for a future that has not yet come to fruition.

            Racism is plainly the systematic allocation of resources based on the premise of race. I choose where to invest my extracurricular energy with this in mind. I serve in capacities in which I can contribute to the processes in which major resources are allocated to fight and resist racism. I commit a great deal of time to learning how to be a better and more effective communicator and educator so that I can fight and resist racism. Anyone and everyone for whom hundreds of thousands of dollars, e.g. federally-funded PhD graduate students, and anyone and everyone for whom hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time in a single grant should be allies in this fight, particularly and all the more so if they are not persons of color from underrepresented communities in America. The fact is a contributing reason for which many graduate students and professors have their spots is because the competition for those spots was not what it could have been were it not for the fact that millions of people, especially black Americans, were restricted from participating in occupations associated with socio-economic mobility. Racism, one of America’s defining and original sins, unsurprisingly has had devastating effects on all succeeding generations with a clear benefit to white Americans and to those Americans and immigrants who white Americans deem legitimate and worthy.