Assignment 0

I am a white female that lives in the North Country in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. I do not like to say that I am white, or for that matter if I were African American or Native American I still would not want to say my race. I have never identified with being white and until my freshman year at college when I had to write a paper on my race and background did I ask my mom what our heritage is. I more identify with my small community and the farming people of that area. I am shaped in a lot of ways by the fact that I grew up on a dairy farm and have worked it all my life. There has been a farm in my family since the 1900’s or earlier and I know more about farming than where my ancestors came from, because that is what is important to me.

I feel like a person of the community or insider, when I can go to most places and now someone. That was one of the things my friends commented about when I took them to my home for a weekend. I knew many people and they knew me, but this has been the way it has always been for me in my community. I never thought about how connected I was to my community until I went to NYC.

One time that I felt like an outsider was when I went to NYC and stayed with two of my friends for a week. Everyone seemed like they were in a rush to get somewhere, meet someone, talk to someone and had no time to tell me if I was heading in the right direction. I felt out of place because I could not identify with many places in NYC, everyone was so close to each other, and had little space to move around and no one seemed to know each other. With both my experiences of being an insider and an outsider I have learned to appreciate the community I grew up in because for a while I struggled without it.

I am studying history because I want to find out about the past and in my high school some of the events in history I was interested in the teacher did not talk about so I started to take classes to find of the answers. I have also taken many classes about African history and have taken a class and internship on a farm in Gorom II, Senegal. I also felt very much apart of the community around me because of all my host family did to introduce us to their community.

One course that I learned a lot from was an intro to African literature and we talked a lot about the African community and how different people identify with that community. I am taking this course because I wanted to see how African Americans are seen in the literature as well as the literature they write themselves. I am taking a civil rights movement course this semester as well as last semester I took African American history to 1865. I wanted both the history as well as the literature that shows what the African American people were doing and going thru.