Angelreana - Race (01/21/18)

I was born in and grew up in Rolla, Missouri, a small rural town of 19,000 people. Although Rolla contains MS&T (a university), which is majority international students and minority populations, the Rolla public school system (and Rolla in general) was extremely white and undiverse. I'd say 90% white, and the 2010 census said 4% Black/African American and 6% Asian. I had a really hard time with bullying because I was Asian growing up. The "typical" things -- "why are you so smart," "why are your eyes so small," "I bet you only eat rice," "Asians eat dogs," "Asians can't be tall," Asians this and Asians that. These people would continuously tell me this--from 1st grade to freshman year. It caused me to have this guard over myself--to be complacent, to laugh off the comments, to be quiet. And the most disappointing thing was that no one came to my aid--none of my friends stood up for me. None of my schools or teachers ever addressed victims of racially-targeted bullying. Racial equality was never emphasized, those who considered themselves LGBTQ+ were ostracized and never talked to, people openly drove around with the Confederate flag hanging on the back of their pickup trucks, and a girl in my English class freshman year refused to research her assigned topic/perspective that was pro-gun control for our debates because she was so against it. Her parents even called the school, so we had to get new topics. All of these things made up my childhood. I thought all of these things were normal and okay, because they were all that I knew. But I didn't realize that I was this sort of pawn--I didn't realize that through my "friends'" continuous racist comments, they were actually indirectly showing me that they didn't actually consider me as an equal and therefore as an actual friend. I remember once that my white "friend" Emily, whose dad was ironically a pastor, told me in 8th grade that she couldn't see my eyes in a class photo we had taken, "like always." I came home and cried. And my dad actually got mad at me, he said that I needed to toughen up. I felt that this wasn't fair.