2013 - Carnegie Mellon University

She looked at me and said, “You’re black.”
Then she turned to my soul and said, “You’re black.”
“Yeah, I know” I said.
My soul nodded, “yeah,” it said, “I know.”
My soul and I had stumbled over what to fill out on the
application in the ethnicity category.
There was no category for half black-half white. I didn’t
want to be the pedantic kid who checked other, refusing to define
herself as one ethnicity, righteously protesting categorization.
Because I don’t care. I know I’m black; when you mix two colors
together, the darker one wins out.
My soul, however, tried to mask its surprise. It didn’t
know it was black. But why? It wasn’t that it thought it was white.
It thought it was self. It thought it was special, different, unique,
indefinable. Obviously not. It was black. How could it go this long
without knowing?
I had grown up in a very diverse environment. Everyone
had labels like, black, white, Hispanic, Indian or Asian. On our first
day of school we had tags to tell people our names. My sticker said,
“Hello, My name is Sarah.” My skin said, “Hello, I’m black.” We
didn’t wear our name tags the second day and everyone forgot, but
we kept our ethnicity on, so that no one would have to ask. I knew
people saw that I was black and because of it, knew things about
me. They knew my ancestors we slaves. They knew they struggled
and fought for freedom. They also assumed things about me. At
first, the assumptions could shove me down. I would trip, their
words like gravel, tearing into my palms and knees and peeling my
skin back until it began to sting and foam blood. Eventually I grew
calluses, hardly feeling it at all.
My soul never grew calluses. It did not know that everything
being said applied to it. Not that everything was offensive,
but it meant that people would rather group all black souls togeth-
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dealt with it for so long that I just shrugged it off.
But this isn’t my problem.
This is a problem that affects countless children and teens across
the board. I had a positive influence that kept me on a better path.
Most kids don’t.
Ostracization and abuse in the home are some of the most
common causes of young suicide, drug use and alcohol addiction.
They drive us to feel detached and less important. Self-worth goes
out the window. Virtue and Scruples follow suit. Albeit this is not
always the case, but it is usually the case that leads to death, disownment,
abandonment and ultimately more hatred. I often wonder
what would have happened if someone looked blindly at a teenager
before they ended up in the obituaries, if they ignored their
race, previous actions, social class etc. and looked at their character.
Nothing more and nothing less. That defines us as human beings.
We can talk about race and parenting and claim that they are what
identify us. For that and that alone I call bullcrap. Our upbringings
and our intellects and our ethics and our religions and our
ethnicities and our passions and our disabilities and our talents all
boil together and produce one thing: they produce character; they
produce hearts. We can judge and jeer and love and praise as much
as we want, but they matter for less than nothing if we cannot do so
justly. Character defines, and any other attributes merely help. The
next time you see someone looking at a sunset, make a decision.
How will I judge or praise or love or despise this person? Will it be
based on the body or will it be based on the heart; the world we live
in, or the world we want to live in?
High School Prose, 1st Place
My Soul and I
By: Sarah Ryan