Growing up means watching things crumble. The tooth fairy stops coming; parents’ flaws are revealed; magic becomes tricks of the eye. Being the self-assured, all-knowing 18-year-old I am, I thought I was done watching things crumble. But after spending my first quarter at Stanford, one last thing has crumbled: my hometown pride.
The place I call home consists of block parties, fathers who wear suits on the train to their skyscraper jobs, golden retrievers and leafy green streets — an idyllic island of affluence mere minutes away from plights of urban poverty. At the corner of the village green in my northern suburb of Chicago lies a plaque commemorating where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in 1965. He addressed 10,000 people that summer on the failure to end housing discrimination. In my hometown, everyone was white, Christian and affluent because real estate agents would not even show properties to non-white, non-Christian buyers. From his podium, he tried to appeal to the white audience: “Every white person does great injury to his child if he allows that child to grow up in a world that is two-thirds colored and yet live in conditions where that child does not come into person-to-person contact with colored people.”
His message was not received. My hometown remains 92 percent white. Until I attended a middle school outside of my public school system, a school with more diversity, everyone in my life looked like me and shared my background. My town failed Martin Luther King Jr.
This fall, I went from living in this town that could be the poster child for segregationist America’s 1950s suburban paradise to immersing myself in Stanford — Stanford, where my next-door neighbors are from different countries, where my dorm mates speak different languages and where I participate in classroom discussions influenced by 20 different perspectives and narratives instead of just one. And while Stanford still is not perfect when it comes to diversity, it has shown me the richness a diverse community possesses that a homogeneous community will always lack.
How can I be proud of my hometown when it is an emblem of the perpetuation of the systematic segregation and oppression of minorities? How can I have hometown pride for a place that failed to listen to Martin Luther King Jr.? After experiencing the synergy of perspectives present in a diverse community, how can I have pride for a town where everyone is the same? I can’t.
I do not mean to condemn my home — I would not trade my dreamy childhood and the amazing friendships I had for anything. But this MLK Day, I am reflecting on how I have lived in in a world that did not realize his dream. Yet.
Contact Grace Scullion at gscull ‘at’ stanford.edu.