Essay Contest Grand Winner: My Perspective on Racial Issues in the US
This year contained a quick succession of particularly devastating occurrences that combined to affect all of us in complex ways. Wise Ink Creative Publishing, a publisher that believes that writing can change the world, put together an essay competition in partnership with youth lit mag The Blue Marble Review to draw insights from young people as they moved social justice conversations forward. The following essay is from grand prize winner Audrey Zheng, whose personal essay on how cultural ideas of Americanness affect individual responses to racism struck us as a vulnerable criticism of white supremacist institutions and a vibrant call to meet discrimination with our eyes wide open.
Audrey Zheng is sixteen years old and a junior in high school.
During my fifth-grade colonial fair, the slavery exhibit had the longest line. To learn about the Middle Passage, we curled up in a cardboard box; two boys shook us back and forth until we giggled and tumbled out. The Atlantic slave trade occurred in a time that did not exist to us, so nobody thought of the Black bodies falling to the ocean floor. We had stripped the evil out of history and replaced it with sugary ignorance. We did not know that our thoughtless play was that same evil, rippling across time.
I always assumed that racism only manifested itself in brief moments of malice. Sometimes, my classmates would pull at the edges of their eyelids and speak in a mock Chinese accent. This hurt, but it was rare, an occasional prick. I never thought to look at racism from outside my perspective. I never considered that its effects could be as debilitating as a shard lodged in the flesh.
As a second-generation American with a vaguely Asian accent, I always had the sense that I was foreign to the land I was born in. Nobody assumes that a white person is foreign, regardless of how many generations their family has been in the US. Because this was not a luxury afforded to me, I overcompensated by staunchly defending everything I saw as American. When Kaepernick knelt to the National Anthem, I hurried to voice my offense. Subconsciously, I viewed Americanness as whiteness. By trying to defend America, I was defending white privilege.
One night after George Floyd was killed, my parents and I watched news footage of the mass protests. I didn’t realize the extent to which Floyd’s death had moved me until my dad commented that “change has to come from both sides.” In other words, he thought that Black communities should focus on improving themselves before expecting others to shed their prejudices. I was hit with the heavy realization that ignorance runs through the very veins of this country, igniting bigotry wherever it goes. And I wasn’t exempt—I realized that just as racism is present throughout our systems, it was present in me too.
When I heard my dad make that comment, a comment that is far too often repeated by TV anchors or lawmakers, I suddenly felt ashamed. I knew now that racism was not limited to isolated jabs but systemic. I had been fortunate—in the years since that fifth-grade fair, since I’d first watched Kaepernick take a knee, I’d learned about redlining, the racial motivations behind the War on Drugs, and the eternally exploited loophole in the thirteenth amendment. Without that knowledge, it would have been impossible for me to understand the struggles that Black communities face today. I would have had the exact same view as my dad.
Many years ago, in a time that will forever belong to me, I curled up in a cardboard box and laughed as I tumbled about. Soon, my classmates and I will become adults. Some of us will have children of our own. I can only hope that when that time arrives, we will no longer laugh at our own ignorance.
Read essays from other winners:
Khatera Torkmany, “The World Is Far from Perfect”
S. Rupsha Mitra, “Contemplating Corona Times”
Quynh Van, “Hate Crimes and Covid”
Ekoja Solomon, “Living in Current Times with Limited Resources”