How growing up in my small, predominantly white town made me who I am today.
At the end of my high school soccer year, my gift from the captains was a bottle of barbeque sauce.
Such gifts symbolize important traits of the person receiving them. My most important trait? I liked the band 5 Seconds of Summer, or 5sos, as they are more commonly known (Get it? 5sauce. Barbeque sauce).
5sos is a band of all white men from Australia who sing about being social rejects, or at least that’s what their first album was about. I was obsessed with them in high school. I’ve been to every concert in Minneapolis. I’ve also driven to Missouri to see the same show I saw the night before.
I would wear their merch to school, big t-shirts with their faces on it with X’s over their eyes, and “Rock Out with Your Socks Out” on the back. I would walk around with my white earbuds hanging from my ears, their different albums blasting so loud that people could hear the music during silent homework time.
I was not a social reject. I was a white girl who was in all the AP classes and captain on my dance team of 100 girls, all of them white, with nine white coaches. The town I grew up in had a population of about 10,000 people, all of them white. I can count on one hand the number of students of color in my grade.
The concept of social justice didn’t go beyond the topics of my history classes. None of my classmates faced differential treatment based on the color of their skin, or their ethnicity. I grew up blind to that side of life. I thought that was how everyone grew up. Families always owned two cars, and a boat, and maybe a cabin that you could maybe be lucky enough to be invited to.
I didn’t know that I was lucky to fly on a plane or be able to visit my grandparents in Florida every year. Or that my family could afford to go to my cousin’s wedding in California.
Social justice was a foreign concept to me. I had one POC friend up until coming to college, we bonded because of our shared love of soccer and academic success, and we also shared the name “Gabby” except she spelled hers with one B. I was invited to Gaby’s quinceanera when I was 15. I remember what my mom said when I told her about the party, “What are you supposed to wear to a quinceanera?”. We were hopeless.
The quinceanera made me realize that the world doesn’t look like my hometown. I had a blast.
Coming to the University of Minnesota showed me that my life had been a privileged one. One of my first interviews for a journalism class was of someone whose life was affected by the killing of George Floyd. I asked my Black friend to do an interview with me because I saw that she was active on social media about protesting and the Black Lives Matter movement.
She grew up taking the bus to school that passed the store where Floyd was killed every day. She went to multiple BLM protests during the Covid-19 pandemic. She was a Minneapolis resident from the beginning of her life and continues to be one. At that moment I felt like an outsider.
During the interview, she said that posting infographics on your Instagram story wasn’t doing anything helpful and that the people who do that are doing nothing. It just helps their peace of mind. I just smiled and agreed. But that was exactly what I was doing for social justice.
It’s hard to know where to step in all of this.
I can understand the frustration of Black and brown people who say…only caring about your pose and your posts versus actually caring about the lives of those who have been marginalized. They have a point. I might post something and then stay on my couch on TikTok.
It’s true that if I just use social media to share outrage, I am doing nothing – at least nothing meaningful for the people who suffer because of the color of their skin. I cannot pretend that racial inequities are something in my life. They are not.
But what choice do I really have at this point in my life? I’m going to college, I’m educating myself and surrounding myself with people who don’t look like the people I grew up with. I’m trying to break the white bubble I have been in.
I’m recognizing my white fragility. Yep. I am afraid of saying the wrong thing. Of being misunderstood as a racist small town woman. Sometimes I am afraid to see my white small town friends. Sometimes I don’t want to show my past because it will show all the things that make me ignorant of other people’s suffering. I always want to do more. I never want to be seen as a white savior. I am not really sure what I can do to change this, but I’m open to ideas.j
It’s all very uncomfortable. Maybe that’s the point. Or maybe that’s the starting point when you grow up as I did.
As my life grows, my opinions grow, but there is one constant. That band I like. The sauce band. Not only have I grown, but they have too. Five albums later, and they sound completely different. They look completely different. As I become more privy to the struggles of the people around me, 5sos continues to make good music that doesn’t advocate for anything. And I still love them.
*Photo from Shutterstock
