Week 10: all good things must end – Detroit Community-Engaged Research Program

Week 10: all good things must end

Looking back on this summer, it’s hard to believe two and a half months have gone by and it’s coming to a close. I’ve learned a lot about food access in Detroit, but I think I’ve learned more about myself, and my relationships with people. More than anything, I’ve been given the opportunity to look at race outside of the classroom and unpack my understanding of it, or more accurately, lack thereof. Before this program I had very few friends that weren’t white, fairly wealthy, and whose parents didn’t go to college. Obviously, these are not qualifying characteristics of a person, however they do shape the conversations and perceptions people have. In Ann Arbor, the question was never “are you going to college?” but rather, “where are you going to college?” In Ann Arbor, we talked about privilege and racial tensions in this country, but I don’t remember talking about it with any peers who weren’t white. In Ann Arbor, we pride ourselves on being progressive and forward-thinking, however we are also in a bubble and often exclude people from our conversations and city. Though it is not, to my understanding, intentional, over the course of this program I’ve learned how people often feel the need to censor themselves in different spaces, and that is due to pre-determined ideas of how a person should act and what he or she should say.

I think my perceptions have changed solely by becoming friends with the people in this program. One instance in my work actually sums up what I’m thinking quite well: one day Maddy and I were administering surveys at a pop-up market in Macomb, and this bright-eyed woman full of energy came and talked to us for a while. She told us how her mom died and through her grieving she gained a lot of weight and became very unhealthy. Two years later she decided she had to do something about it–she started educating herself about food and health by reading books, watching documentaries, and hearing from various experts. She is now a vegan and has been for five years. She told us that since becoming vegan she’s had friends come up to her and tell her “oh I could never do that it’s too…” and they’d pick their adjective of choice to finish the sentence. But she responded with “I’m a vegan and a member of the NRA. You can be both.” That really surprised me because the two don’t tend to go together, but she had a really interesting point. She told us more about her life and I could tell our political and social views were not the same, but we felt entirely the same way about the food industry and the issues with it.

The reason she made her big transition into veganism was because someone close to her suffered and passed, and she told me that if she had known then what she knows now about food for medicine, she would have told her mom to eat a “plant-strong” diet. This got me thinking; if she had people close to her who were of different backgrounds, people of different races, religions, socioeconomic classes, immigrants, etc., she might develop a relationship strong enough with one of them that would cause her to change some of her viewpoints. More generally speaking, it is easier to ignore injustice when the ones suffering are not in your circle. By segregating ourselves, through federal housing policies, educational opportunities, income inequality, etc. we distance ourselves from “the other.” We start to see majority-black cities, like Detroit, as dangerous and broken. We start to see immigrants as uneducated and therefore less intelligent. We socialize ourselves to forget that black lives DO matter and that NO human being is illegal.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that for those of us who come from privilege, and almost all of us do in some way, it’s important to observe, listen to, and learn from people different than us. It was important for me to experience living in Detroit this summer, so that my prejudices and fears could be undone. It was important for the woman in Macomb to have had a strong relationship with her mother, so that losing her was a strong enough force to breakthrough what she had been taught to believe all her life. It is important for people to have opportunities to develop these personal relationships with people of different backgrounds. Now, I’m not saying we all have to hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but it’s time to start seeing each other as people and educating ourselves on the full story and history of what makes people, cities, and systems what they are today, so we can actually better them through­­ change.

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