Evil is Always Unspectacular ~ 2021

~ daddy doesnt ~

"Good evening everyone." Noah smiles gently at the crowd. She didn't know this was a political party. She wasn't aware she'd be making a speech tonight. She wasn't even aware her father supported this type of movement. Black Lives Matter. And maybe it was a career move for him but she didn't care. This room was filled with people with privilege, they needed to understand that. "I didn't prepare a speech." She laughs gently, the room joining, "I didn't know I was speaking tonight. But it's a privilege to stand here and be an Ally." Noah nods, licking her lips.

"I'm a teacher. I teach. I thrive on educating people. My first year of teaching, I taught kindergarten. We were learning the color's of the rainbow, using a crayon box. And this little boy, this five year old little boy, he raised his hand and asked a very scary question for me. He had asked, 'Miss C? How come I'm white and Johnny's not.'" She let that question hang in the air for a moment, "I didn't know how to respond. I didn't know what to say. This five year old kid asked a question I hadn't asked myself till I was at least sixteen."

"Johnny was one of four black kids in the entire school. He was the youngest. He was popular. All the girls after him." That got a laugh out of the crowd, "Truth is, children acknowledge the difference of the people around them. They know that a white kid isn't the same as a black kid. But they are children. They have yet to understand racism. Yet to understand how a person can get judged not because of their actions but just because of how they look. Your children have a whole world out there. They can change it. They have that power. Those kids are the ones who stand up for each other. Teach each other. I might help them learn the alphabet but they are the ones who sing it on the swing set with their best friend because they have homework due the next day on the letters and they want to make sure the people they care about succeed with them."

"The problem with working in a private school is most of the parents are closed minded. I got fired for telling that kid that Johnny was black because he had a black mommy and daddy and that he was white because he had a white mommy and daddy. That it didn't matter the color of your skin because no one deserves to be judged based upon how they look. That it's not okay to draw conclusions on a person based upon their appearance. I compared skin color to the color of hair. Told him that he was no more special than Sarah because he had brown hair and she had red."

"And when I talked to his parents two days later after school, they told me that skin color and hair color are nothing close to being the same, and I told them they were right. Because for some reason it was okay to discriminate against a person because of the color of their skin but it wasn't okay to discriminate against a person for the color of their hair. I got slapped. Hard. Called stupid. Told I hadn't seen enough of the world. That the only reason I believed that was because I was Mexican. That I was trying to brainwash their kid. I went home that night and I cried. I was a barely twenty year old teacher, who had lost her first job."

"My father, your senator, he told me to give up. Use the degrees I had gotten myself for something better, something better paying, more rewarding, worth my time. I got where he was coming from but not really. I knew owed that man everything. He adopted a Latina spitfire of a teenage girl with a boat load of trauma and he helped her. But that came with a cost. I didn't realize my privilege. My daddy had money, no one would mess with me. But in that moment, when I was sobbing on my bed, I came to the same realization most of you have tonight. I was the next generation up to change the world. My children would grow up in the world I brought them into and I wanted that world to be the best one I could make for them."