L E A R N I N G S T A T E M E N THad you asked me, as a child, what success meant, I imagine my answer would be something like, “Mom lets me eat dessert every night.” Which, now that I think about it, is probably still part of my image of success. I mean, what kind of person gets to have dessert every night? Someone successful. Anyway, my point is that success is intertwined with happiness, with having a dream and achieving it and sitting in the knowledge that you got to where you wanted. When I started at UW, my dream was just getting there. I hadn’t planned beyond that, and I didn’t know what success would mean once I made it there. But then I found Environmental Studies.
In a 100-level class at 9:30 in the morning, I heard the words “sustainable food systems” for the first time, and I knew I needed to know more. I took ENVIR 240, the Urban Farm, and then ENVIR 495, Agroecology of Cascadia. And by the beginning of my sophomore year, I was all in on farming and food systems and feeding communities. Before the Environmental Studies program and the mentors I found through it, food was something I bought at the store; it was someone else’s job to grow it. But once I got my hands in the dirt, I realized there is an unparalleled joy to growing food not just to feed myself, but to feed the people in my community. As a woman of color, the world has never been built for me. The world has never assured me an easy go of it. I am not of the opinion that humans are inherently bad, but I am of the opinion that late-capitalist institutions are damaging and absolutely intended to strip us of our most basic joys. I have come to learn that the American Dream is a propaganda piece, a way to trick marginalized people into looking past the white supremacist patriarchy that controls their lives. The American Dream does not exist, so far as “pulling oneself up by their bootstraps” goes. If I manage to attain success in this society, it will not be because all men are treated equal. It will be because I fought tooth and nail to have a place in this world, because people like me deserve to have a place in this world. It will not be in spite of my identity, but because of it. Knowing that people of color are the most vulnerable among us, I am of the opinion that feeding them is of the utmost importance. Building equity into the food system in order to support the health of our most marginalized communities is of the utmost importance to me. Success, to me, is not something I will attain simply by working toward a singular goal. Success means breaking down the many walls that exist not only for myself, but for the people who look like me and who look nothing like me. They say we are only as strong as our weakest link, but I’d like to amend that: we are only as safe as our most vulnerable. |