Respect and Understanding

I believe it was my sophomore year, I took a white privilege class with Iris Outlaw. It was a very, the goal of the class was to be intimate. The reason why I took the class is because it was in the news and there was a gentleman who I forget the name, a student at Notre Dame basically boycotting it and saying how we should not be teaching it. And I was like, Hmm, okay, I'm going to go support this class.

So I get into the class. I'm not even sure what I expected of it. But there was one day, we were sitting, we were going around, I don't remember what the prompt was, but I remember this girl so clearly in my face, and she said to the class, it took so much strength, but she said in front of us, she said, yeah, I used to not believe in affirmative action. Yeah, I used to be at the tables yelling stuff, but if I'm being honest with you, the only black person I ever seen in my town was on TV or my milkman.

And that just blew my mind because here I am, I'm coming from a world, which arguably we can say is diverse, right? I've seen the black side of the world. I've seen the white side of the world. Even in my community, there was Hispanic. There was a lot of different voices, whether we work together or not, but I saw the different communities. And then I had this enormous amount of empathy for that world because she had not experienced what I had experienced. So, of course, her world views and her thoughts were different. And that's why I talk to people like, Notre Dame is a place where two people can come with such different views and sit in the same room. And because I had known her for her laugh, for the energy she had brought to the class, I had saw her. And I came to this conversation with respect and understanding.