Racial Enlightenment or Lackthereof

A peek into how education shapes young minds and hinders older ones.

Cyn Bord
Age of Awareness
Published in
5 min readMay 28, 2020

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

When I was 13 years old, I attended a predominantly white, Catholic school that bolstered English and Reading. In one particular English class, my Catholic nun schoolteacher presented two scenarios:

The first scenario went like this — “You’re walking alone at night on a dim street. Down the road, you see a black man. He’s taller than you and is wearing tattered jeans and a wifebeater.”

She asked us what we would do. My thirteen-year-old mind first went to the physical reaction of crossing to the opposite side of the road. I didn’t know why. I didn’t question it. It was just instinctual. She doesn’t ask anyone to respond with what they would do out loud.

She then presented us with the second scenario — “You’re walking alone at night on a dim street. Down the road, you see a tall man wearing tattered jeans and a wifebeater.”

She didn’t have to finish what she was going to say. I understood that the first man was black and the second man was white. I didn’t feel the need to cross to the other side of the road in the second scenario.

Still, she asked us what we would do. We didn’t have to reply out loud. The room was silent but my thoughts rang…

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