-- Flannery O'Connor
She sat forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half filled. Everybody was white. "I see we have the bus to ourselves," she said. Julian cringed.
I remember being enrolled in a particular anthropology class my first transfer semester here at Quinnipiac University. The course of the class included rich materials from all over the world, having us study cultures I would have never have dreamed existed showing me how narrow minded my, what I thought "open- mind" to have been. A particular culture was being taught while an issue of slavery was brought up on the side that sparked a spontaneous and interesting point of view. "Raise your hand if you were born during this time period and you would have owned slaves in this area" My professor had said. Immediately my arm without initial realizing twitched upward, judgment stopping myself. Why did I want to stop myself? Why didn't I just let it continue rising up for the entire class to see? It was because although I am of this time period and view slavery and any type of racial/discriminatory comment or statement to be unacceptable, if I were born and raised in a different time period and location that the one I was born into, I am sure that more than likely, such as in the South, if I lived on a plantation I would have owned slaves because it was a "normal societal" thing to do.
Reading O'Connor's story had be reflecting back to that incident in class. I disliked Julian's mother so much for her racial and discrimination against people of darker skin color. And how it was "a shame" for kids to have been born half white and half black. I'm pretty sure even in the outlining of this story I wrote some irrelevant comment around that scene and said, "this woman is so dumb" or something like that. But at the end of the story, when she is viewed in the light and Julian sees his mother in a state of smallness, in a state beneath the authoritative rank she (thought) she held, a type of sympathy almost and pity washed over not only that of her son, but of myself as the reader. I felt bad for her. She wanted to give the kid a nickel. When I read that I knew something bad was going to black flash. It was an immediate insult to the black woman and her child. As though they needed chump change from the bottom of someones' bag. Do they look homeless or something? No. But I can only imagine that that was how they felt.
It wasn't until the end that I fully sympathized with Julian's mother. She was born in a different time period--circling back to my first paragraph. She was born into this mindset that the blacks were of lower rank than her and she was of a different rank entirely and when someone is exposed like that from a young age, drilled into their heads as they grow into their teens and still instilled into adulthood, it is very hard to break from a mindset and thought process that has always been. And that's why I chose the quote at the top of the page. "She sat forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half filled.
Everybody was white. "I see we have the bus to ourselves," she said.
Julian cringed" (O'Connor 3). In her mind it will always be the whites and the blacks and we cannot hate her for it. At least, I cannot hate her for it. Although her attitude made me not only disappointed but also upset, it is not her fault that her elders brought her up this way. None of us have any control over what gets instilled into our brains as defining what's "right" and what's "wrong". It's how she was raised. And I should think it very difficult to grow out of something that you have been your whole life.
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