Hello!

I am a white American woman completing her social science undergraduate degree at Minerva University, a global undergraduate university dedicated to reimagining higher education. I am passionate about reducing instances that stem from racial othering, whether it be police brutality, discrimination embedded within our laws and policies, or narratives that dehumanize minority groups.

 

I grew up in the midwest of the United States in a middle-class catholic home. My interest in other cultures started young– my parents enrolled my siblings and me in Spanish immersion schooling, which I continued until university. My parents adopted my little sister from Guatemala when I was five years old, motivating my family to engage with Latin American cultures and languages. Her presence in my life also made me more conscious from a young age of my whiteness– I noticed how my peers would react with surprise and confusion when I introduced her as my sister, in contrast to how they would react when introduced to my brothers. It ingrained a sense of defensiveness in me– I was hyper-aware of adverse reactions and judgments, and I felt a sense of responsibility to shield her from them. 

 

Throughout my teenage years and into adulthood, I have engaged with various social causes, from anti-human trafficking, refugee relief, education for young girls, and anti-racism. As part of my university program, I have also lived in five different cities, ranging from four to 12 months. These include San Francisco, Seoul, Hyderabad, London, and Berlin. I have had the opportunity to engage deeply with local communities' problems by learning from and with individuals and organizations seeking to address them. This includes the SF Collaborative Against Human Trafficking (SFCAHT), Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), and Vidura Education, an education venture in India seeking to improve education for young girls from rural communities. 

 

During my sophomore year at university, I encountered the topic of othering for the first time when reading Endangered/Endangering: Schematic. Racism and White Paranoia by Judith Butler. The article enlightened me to the implicit role that schemas have in judging bodies based on race. I credit it for raising my white consciousness, and the seed was planted in my mind that perhaps I could create something that does for a more general audience what that article did for me. 

 

Over the past two years, as I've begun working on my undergraduate capstone project, my focus has narrowed to racial othering. My interest in racial othering was further spurred by the George Floyd incident in 2020. I found myself scrambling to find a way to meaningfully contribute to the Black Lives Matter movement and how to do justice to the identities of activist and ally. That summer, I participated in the anti-racist curriculum working group at Minerva, which included analyzing Minerva's curriculum for anti-racist opportunities, such as class syllabi, assignments, workshops, and conceptual frameworks. I helped develop recommended guidelines and revisions that were presented to the Senior Team. This led me to the role of anti-racist course revision assistant for the social sciences the following summer, during which I revised social science curricula through the lens of DEI. 

 

I believe in the value of addressing social issues at the intersection of social science and the humanities. Education is the most powerful tool we have to raise white consciousness. The arts are a tool to bridge the gap between academics and the public to communicate scholarship on racial othering and theory in a digestible and engaging manner. I also believe that approaching this issue from the angle of schema formation and formal and informal rules provides an opportunity to raise white consciousness via curiosity and self-reflection rather than defensiveness. I find othering to be a valuable framework to understand injustice and inequality both for its transferability and explanatory properties. I also appreciate its intrinsic ability to examine social issues on multiple levels. 

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The creation of this project has necessitated a consistent identification and interrogation of my personal biases, which I know will be a never-ending process; my schemas of race reflect the structurally racist society in which I live. However, it is a process that I am privileged to engage in as I support people of color in their anti-racist efforts and continue to educate other white people on our shared responsibilities and opportunities to create more belonging within our communities.