my hate for my ethnocentrism is growing.

lately i am being ripped from the sad, sad box i've lived in for a ridiculous amount of my life. it's happened in multiple ways. i'd like to write this out, so that maybe someone else can be ripped from their own box.

for my women's lit class, we were assigned to read the 2007 nobel prize acceptance speech for doris lessing. i cannot tell you how thankful i am that dr. priya menon assigned this to us. in her acceptance speech, lessing didn't talk about herself, her accomplishments, or her immediate desires. she spoke about the desires of others. she spoke about the people of zimbabwe, who hunger for books. yes, they hunger for food, they live in povery, but still, a hunger remains for books. as i read about this hunger for books that these starving children had, i was stunned. and ashamed to even say i was stunned. i imagined if i were starving, i wouldn't be concerned with books.

but do you know why i imagined that? because i've never known a life without food, or a life without books. i am far more blessed than i realize and reading her acceptance speech reminds of that, in a beautifully humbling way. she speaks of men who learned to read from jam jars. i remember as a child, i first started learning to read by trying to read signs to my mother in the car, or her first reading signs we passed to me, and me repeating. but then, as i got older, i got books. i grew up in a home that was covered in books. right now, i have so many picky likes and dislikes within literature and i am almost ashamed of that too. maybe i just need to be thankful i have books at all.

moving on, also in women's lit class, we are currently reading and discussing the book the god of small things, which has also had an impact on me. it's an amazing novel, but i'd like to speak more specifically to the issue of how we perceive places and how they really are. the novel is set in india, kerala to be exact, and my teacher is native to that land. as we read, she tends to express to us what the place is like, from the perspective of a native.

today she told us something very very interesting to me -- kerala has a 100% literacy rate. i immediately was, again, surprised. stunned, i could say again. our nation is given these videos of children starving to death from "india" and we assume that these people live in a third-world slum that is horrible for them. while many areas may not offer their residents wealth that they need, kerala has something that a sad amount of americans don't have, and that's literacy.

lastly, a documentary that i watched twice last week has had a wonderful impact on me. the documentary is titled traces of the trade and it follows a family who can trace their lineage back to dewolf, the largest slave owner in the united states. the family members get together, some meeting for the first time, to go on a pilgrimage of sorts that takes them to bristol, where dewolf lived, to guyana, where dewolf bought slaves, then to cuba, where dewolf had slaves living and working for him. throughout the film, the family has to come to terms with the background that their family has and the shocking things that their ancestor did that gave them wealth. though the documentary notes that the family members do not benefit directly from dewolf, they must realize that having that family name has brought them large amounts of wealth, and that the ancestors of the slaves that dewolf owned are still, today, living in poverty, or at least in hard circumstances.

the documentary basically touches on the truth of white privelege and knocks down the attitude that "slavery happened years ago and doesn't really mean much today." i am thankful for watching it, because i grew up in montgomery, in a largely racist home. it's taken a lot for me to shed this attitude, but i believe i am finally working towards it, and this documentary helped. i truly suggest it.

so what now? i guess realization of my ignorance is the first step, a step i'm taking. i'm thankful that in women's lit we are studying a variety of cultures, which is broadening my understanding of our world. i hope to study post-colonialism, so that maybe studying that will further open my eyes to culture the world over and the negative effects that have resulted from many things. it's important for me to know the injustices that have occurred in ages past, so that i can hopefully be somewhat of an activist now.

in our judgment of other places, we need to be ashamed. myself first and foremost. we need to learn about places before our mouths hang open in shock when we realize that a place that isn't the united states has priorities we should fervently envy. we desperately need to realize that the united states is just another part of big, vast, beautiful world, instead of falsely believing that we are the beauty of the world in its entirety.