Assignment 3 - Rachel Burns

I've never been out of this country and I have never been west of Kentucky. I've lived within a 1 mile radius of Jacobson Park my whole life and my family doesn't like to travel. Nevertheless, I have been other places besides good ol' Lexington, Kentucky. My dad is from New York so we, as a family, take a trip up there about once or twice a year. We don't have a lot of money, but occasionally, we find ourselves able to take a trip to Disney World or Washington, DC or Gatlinburg. But this summer, I found a way to end up in Michigan for six weeks over the summer without my family and it really opened my eyes to different cultural identities.

This past summer, I went to Ann Arbor, Michigan and stayed 6 weeks at the University of Michigan with 26 other rising juniors in a huge house on campus. After a long and stressful application process that took writing 4 essays (that I somehow completed in 1 night) and an even more stressful interview (that I ended up crying at in front of my interviewer), I (somehow) was selected out of 1000 applicants across the world to take part in this program. We took classes with professors learning about African American history and issues facing the African American community today.

I always felt like because I was mixed, I could never relate to the black side of me. I was always shot down for saying that I was black. I felt like I had to act a certain way and talk a certain way and dress a certain way to fit in. And I thought no one understood that; until I went to Michigan.

When I got to Michigan, I was very shy. I didn't talk to anybody, I mostly stayed by myself, and I was the one person in the back just laughing at the jokes other people made. I was just there. But 2 weeks in, I had to give a speech about any topic I wanted and I chose bullying. I was bullied very heavily in middle school and it led me to do some stupid things later on. I shared this very personal story with a group of 26 strangers and by the end of it, half the room was crying along with me. I realized that other people shared this same experience I had because of their skin color and because of who they were and it made me think differently about who I was. We were all scared of being black. We were all scared of acting the way we wanted, talking the way we wanted, dressing the way we wanted, because we didn't want others to fit us into a negative stereotype that isn't true. My speech then turned into a forum where everyone was talking about their experiences and by the end, everyone in the room was crying. It was the most moving event of my whole life and I finally felt like I had found a group I belonged in.

To this day, I still think about that moment in Michigan and it makes me look at everyone different now; not as a certain race or a certain religion or particular feature on your body, but as a person who has had struggles, a person who has had trouble fitting in at one point or another, a person who has a had a lifetime of hardships but hides it behind a simple smile. It makes me want to know more people and travel to more places to hear these stories. I will never forget that day in Michigan where, for once, I was proud of who I am.