It wasn’t until I was encouraged to reflect on my cultural enlightenment from being a UMASS student that I realized how fortunate I was to have been raised in Dorchester. In highschool, I was part of a program called METCO, which allowed inner city kids in Boston to travel to suburbs to study. I attended school in Brookline. Because of that, I grew up around a wide variety of ethnicities and received an education that ranged to be representative of different populations.

My school was very liberal and used a lot of its time and resources to shed light on historical and educational discrepancies. My US history course teacher made sure to tell both sides of the story and express that the textbook had a tendency to white wash history and therefore would fill in the gaps, whether that included brutality or affluence. I also took an African American history course in my senior year and throughout my years was in a seminar for Black and Latinx students. We had student body assemblies for minority and lgbtqia+ communities every year, with panels from professionals and student and faculty participation. I also had the opportunity to travel with a group called “The Floating Doctors” through a program at Brookline High. We traveled with medical staff to remote indigenous villages and were able to see the ways that other cultures lived and their liveliness. We weren’t there with a sense of pity or believing ourselves to be saviors but just to inform them about health practices and learn about their ways of life without assessing whether it was “wrong” or “right.”

Something that was along the lines of all of this at the university was in Sut Jhally’s Race, Inequality and Representation course. It’s a course that I highly recommend for cultural and historical insight. He touches on a lot of Black History that wouldn’t usually be known among students who don’t have prior experience with the topic. I even learned some things that I didn’t know about Black History, like how Martin Luther King wasn’t pursued and heavily pursued by the FBI until he opposed the Vietnam war and started speaking on issues of class.

By Kaitlyn Harris