Messages
A Message From A Friend
April 25, 2012, on Facebook
A lesson in how one challenges one’s own privilege.
Hey ____,
I saw your video on the NU Collective Stories site, and I wanted to let you know that I found it very powerful. I come from a predominately white, upper-middle class community, and for the past two summers at home I have worked at a gas station. Although my employers were not cops, they displayed a very similar degree of prejudice against our “black” customers, and they were consistently suspicious of “them,” and often warned us to keep a stricter watch over “them” when “they” came in. The whole thing was completely ridiculous, and so sad. So thanks for sharing your story, and I hope to see you tonight at the ASG/Diversity Committee forum.
- ________
A Message From The First Dean of Women
“Alien illiterates … rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their sceptre. It is not fair that they should vote, nor is it fair that a plantation Negro, who can neither read nor write, whose ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own mule, should be entrusted with the ballot … The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop is their center of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment.”
- Frances WILLARD, on why alcohol was problematic
