My boyfriend is African American, and the very few times we’ve been pulled over we’ve received a lot of unpleasant attitudes from cops. It makes me fearful that I might lose him. Every time we get pulled over I end up holding his hand because I’m terrified. He’s not as scared of it as I am. Women are also minorities, and most people don’t realize that the oppression women faced in back in, say, the 1850’s still goes on. I am a woman and I identify as a woman, and I’ve experienced oppression on my sex itself.
"Equality is important to me because I want everyone to have an equal opportunity at everything."
I don’t want race to matter, and I don’t want gender to matter. It’s just funny because a lot of people just don’t care about people when they really should. It’s continuously happening, and is not as obvious as it may have been in the past. Oppression is not just stuck back in the 70’s, it’s a continuous thing, and that stuff still happens today. I have definitely witnessed discrimination and racism first hand. Something my mom used to tell me was, “if we were all blind would racism even be a thing?” We wouldn’t know, and because of that I like to imagine a world where we’re all blind to each other’s race. It wouldn’t be a thing if we were all unaware.
Celeste Meade