Post Colonialism

Today I had an interesting experience at my tutoring job at McLain High School in North Tulsa. I was assigned to monitor EOI tests with a few other volunteers from the community. McLain is a primarily black school, and its students are most often the lowest performers in the district. Anyway, today I was able to talk with 4 older members of the community, all black, and all who have grown up facing adversity because of the color of their skin. I couldn't help while I was sitting at a table with all of them, feeling a strong sense of guilt over the color of my own skin, and an inherent inability to relate to them. They discussed topics such as the Tulsa race riot, segregation and in turn the ill effects of integration, along with prominent civil rights leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. They talked about their inability to find a sense of identity without a real place to call home, much like we discussed in class. I was telling Amelia about this after I got back from the school, and we both agreed that there is this sense of guilt that we as white people have been instilled to feel for our race's injustices against black Americans, even if we ourselves haven't committed anything worth feeling guilty about. I enjoyed listening to them, and they really enlightened me to a lot of things, but I couldn't escape this feeling.