Long story short I found out through the grapevine that in a class on race that a friend of mine took they dissected a Yelp review of a Latin American restaurant... the random wacky part was that it was a review that I wrote. The class concluded that I was pretty darn racist. Now, I know I'm not perfect but I'm certainly not racist. I find myself having prejudiced thoughts every so often just like everyone else, we can't turn off what we've been socialized our whole lives to think overnight.

I re-read the review and could see where they might have drawn the conclusions from but if a review of a French hole-in-the-wall said the same things (that the service was expectedly slow and that I wasn't sure what meats/fish was in one of the dishes) nobody would have batted an eye. But what still has me fuming isn't the fact that some things I wrote were twisted around, it's the fact that in colleges across the country there are people sitting in classrooms doing exercises like that every day but the lesson on one subpopulation doesn't necessarily transfer to another one. Plenty of people who are aware aware of prejudice towards Black or Asian people still run around calling people who are homeless derogatory names without a second thought.

How do we get that lesson to naturally transfer so we can teach it once, instead of a lesson on Black people, disabled people, homeless people, gay people, non-english speaking people, old people, Asian people, transgender people, poor people...? The root of the message is the same: everyone is valuable and everyone's experience is just as valid as yours and mine. Why is it so much harder to understand that when the thing that makes someone different is the fact that they don't have a place to call home?