Stories...Burrows

Carolyn Burrows

Oakwood HS - Ohio
First Place - Newspaper Writing Contest
July 21 - 25, 2001

Lots to learn at Mom's work

I used to love going to work with my mom on Sunday afternoon. I remember the gleaming scientific tools and smell of disinfectant that permeated my senses as I sat in the lab looking at my finger under a microscope. My mom would be diligently working on some important thing I never fully understood. To get to this magical place, we would cross the river to the north side of my city. We would cross to the foreign country that like my mother's tasks, was something I did not understand. As soon as we crossed the bridge, I saw faces that were absent in my neighborhood. The buildings changed too. The houses had duller paint, but the people walking on the street had a darker shade of skin than those on my side of the river. The south side of my Midwestern city was ivory. The north side was ebony.

Skin color and lodgings weren't the only transformations that occurred on the other side of the river. The businesses changed too. Shop windows had harsh metal bars protecting the delicate glass beneath. The streets had more men in tattered clothes strutting down the pavement with paper bags holding forbidden refreshment. The schools were different too. The buildings themselves looked like abandoned prisons. The papers told of the school board's financial problems, the lack of teachers, the shortage of adequate textbooks, and the high dropout rate.

My mother's lab was in this foreign country. As we drove down the street sweat rolled down my forehead. This perspiration had more to do with the stares I received than with the unrelenting sun gleaming down on me. The faces questioned my presence. "What are you doing on this side?" they asked. The only thing prohibiting me from entering their world, however, was this cold stare. If they were to cross over to my side, I knew the police would pull them over under false pretenses. They would claim a faulty headlight, but the only crime they were guilty of breaking was entering the white community. My side used more than racial profiling by the police to keep the foreigners out. They kept them out through their lack of money, lack of a sound educational system, and a lack of pale skin.

How old am I? Did my mom take me to work in the 1940s? Unfortunately, I cannot claim that the first paragraphs of this column are a product of a backward time. I am a 17-year-old girl, a child o the '80s. Technically I am a minority too. If I claim my mother's heritage, I am Hispanic. My father, however, endowed me with his white, Irish skin. Although I live in a post-Civil Rights movement society, with affirmative action and politically correct slogans, the color-blind millennium has yet to dawn in my city.

There is no racial discrimination in my city. This is what I am told by my best friend as we munch on sandwiches at the lunch table. When I ask her why our schools are better than the black kids and why they remain almost entirely on their side of the river, she looks at me as if I just stated that the earth is flat. I wonder if she is giving me this look because I have ketchup on my chin. Apparently she looks at me like this because I have a social conscience in my head.

My generation seems to feel that we have solved the civil rights issue. They are too busy downing Coca-Cola and listening to the hip-hop style of all packaged, teen-age sensations. They flip through Abercrombie catalogs with the ignorance that the roots of their music belong to black rhythms from the ghetto. We haven't solved the civil rights issue, but have in fact simply put expensive make-up on it and given reconstructive surgery to its hideous face. Prejudice may seem to have lost some of its physical hatred, but it has gained a socio-economic weapon. Society no longer uses labeled drinking fountains of Jim Crow laws. Capitalism has taken stage by using money as its primary weapon with education as its most lethal secret attack.

Where's the equality? I hear news of a man dragged to his death by men acting out the silent actions of a discriminative society. I hear about the race riots going on in the city only 40 minutes away from me. I read the article reporting accusations that my community's police force uses racial profiling when making stops. We have endowed everyone with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but we cannot change the unspoken rule that one race must live on the poor side of the city. Affirmative action will be irrelevant when schools like mine allow me to have a black peer sitting next to me in the Advanced Placement History class on my side of the river. We will understand Martin Luther King's dream that all men are created equal when cities like mine become desegregated financially - not just on paper, not on government policy, but on both sides of the river.