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Being a Woman of Color Never Changes

By bmnobles

Before going abroad I didn't really know anyone in my group, I had met one guy Max one time last year. Thus, I was pretty nervous that I wouldn't fit in or find people in my group that I really clicked with. On the day of our at-school abroad orientation, something really stuck out to me. At the end of the GW Programs specific orientation, the person leading the orientation said "Oh, and if you're a minority student or a woman you should probably look up how your host country treats those groups of people". I sat there astonished, not only that the possibility of my oppression (being both a woman and a person of color) was treated with such nonchalance, but that when I then took the time to look around the room, we were few and far between. That was when I realized that I, simply by existing and doing the things that I love and am passionate about, am revolutionary.

Most of the professors and staff who run our GW-UAM program are much older, white, wealthy, and very conservative. While I noticed this, I tried not to judge a book by it's cover. But I am the only person of color in our group, to top it off I'm more visibly black than anything else and I have been singled out for this identity several times. How uncomfortable I am in this situation has been exploited and I am often made a spectacle of during group gatherings both in public and in private. During my time here I have watched Native American culture be openly mocked in my place of learning, while having to keep quiet that I am Apache Native American.

I don't think that my new community has really altered my identity at all, they have more solidified it. This is not to say that I'm not friends with any one else in my group, but this is to say that it doesn't matter where I am, being a woman of color means the same thing. Being here I have heard the n-word used against me more times than I had in my whole life in the states. Yet the privileged white people that I am surrounded with react in the same ways that they do to the less-overt systemic racism of the United States. As the most liberal politically active university in the US I expected that I could depend on my fellow students to stand up for me, for other people in underprivileged positions when they saw harm being done. But they all stand stagnant, hoping that someone else will do the work for them.

However, that generally means that oppressed communities, oppressed peoples, oppressed identities are often forced to do the work themselves. Even though our presence is required when the privileged are under fire.