A student's fight for equality

I wasn't quite sure how it happened either. How did a white girl from Monroeville become a member in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Chapter at SRU?

When I tried to express my excitement after being asked by the president of N.A.A.C.P., Obianuju Anyaogu, to attend that first meeting in September, my roommate joked, "I didn't know I had a black roommate."

It seemed strange to me that the color of my skin mattered when it came to being an advocate for equality.

I'd like to say statements like the previous one were a rarity, but they were plentiful, and hope for change would evidently have to start with me.

My education about race began early in childhood. From a young age, I knew my grandfather was a racist.

It didn't much affect me at first, but as I got older, I always felt pressured to keep my opinions to myself. It wasn't uncommon for my grandfather to use the "N-word" around my sister and me.

As recently as this summer when I told my grandfather about not getting a job near school, his first reaction was, "Well, let me ask you this: Was the interviewer. was she black?"

His ignorance never failed to shock me.

I loved my grandfather, but there's still right and wrong.

When I attended Temple University in Philadelphia my freshmen year of college, one would imagine that I'd thrive in all the liberation.

Yet I spent my first semester mostly confined within the walls of my dorm room, never venturing much anywhere.

To this day, I'm not sure what I was scared of-scared of getting older, scared of life or scared of finding out what others thought was true.

But my hesitation toward unfamiliarity would quickly be breached.

During the summer before my sophomore year of college, I wanted more than 16 credits and needed a job.

Working meant that I left the security of campus, took public transportation and explored finding equilibrium between school and work.

What I saw in the city of Philadelphia-a city much known for its poverty, crime and dirtiness-was so removed from the context of my own life.

There was poverty, even when people were working hard.

They were the eyes on the subway that, when locked with mine, offered a look of compassion and understanding because they could sense my exhaustion.

It's not that I never saw struggle or a genuine work ethic, as I'm confident that struggle is constant in the lives of many, but it was a fight that inspired me to find my own.

Growing up, I had everything I needed.

I was the girl who quit her job because she didn't want to work even one day during the school week.

Seeing what it meant to work for everything made me knowledgeable of that fact, which I'd often ignored, and of how wrong people-like my grandfather-were in their convictions of race.

Going to college was expected of me in my household, nowhere near going above and beyond. The black women I worked with were resilient, to say the least.

Contrary to what my grandfather believed, they were far from lazy.

The high school I attended was predominantly white. Everyone was well aware that the school had only five black students.

The school was newly renovated by my sophomore year.

There were qualified educators, numerous extracurricular activities and technology resources to access anytime we needed.

Schenley High School in Oakland, Pittsburgh, doesn't have the same opportunities.

A black male I met while at Temple, who'd become one of my best friends, attended Schenley just prior to its closing in 2008.

He told me how at times, his teachers would inform the class that there was no paper. Textbooks were not issued to every student and therefore, they were expected to share.

It blew my mind.

How could one be successful in school without paper and books, and then be expected to succeed at the next level?

It wasn't until college that I learned the depths of slavery and racism.

What I learned made me sad.

People had been taken, exploited and treated like less than human.

It made me disgusted and ashamed of being human-being human meaning being capable of such acts.

I wondered, when it was all over, how the black community accepted its suffering and began to pick up the pieces.

The ramifications of that suffering don't fade out.

Without a complete understanding of the losses, the pain caused and the unequivocal wrongdoing, the past is surely capable of leaking into the future.

By being white and, consequently, a member in an organization such as N.A.A.C.P., I wanted to encourage others that the fight for equality obligates everyone.

Equality has to veer sharply from the expectations of a spectator.

For the meantime, I'm a minority in a room full of black students, hoping that my experiences shatter the belief that one must be black in order to advocate for the equal treatment of all people.

Yet, I'm certain that one day, the terms "minority" and "majority" will have escaped our agendas, as there will only be an understanding of what it means to be a part of the human race.

It's this belief that keeps me certain that change is more than attainable: What the future needs isn't justice as in vindication, but justice as in understanding that this is who we were, this is how we learned from our mistakes and this is what we're doing to ensure it never happens again.

And that's why I'm a white girl from Monroeville on N.A.A.C.P.