Friday, June 15, 2012

Sara Daise on Living in the South



AH: ....are you planning on staying in Carolina, in the South, or are you looking to go elsewhere for job opportunities?

SD: Right now I am applying for jobs in Charleston; I want to stay here for at least a year. My dream college is UC Berkley, I want to study Africana Studies there, I want to live elsewhere, but I also want to come back because I think that if I am honest and truthful with myself about what I want to do, which is, that is to inspire and motivate and mobilize the Black community and mobilize Black youth that I cannot just turn my back on the South, although sometimes living here, this is so devastating and I always think that the problem is people who are open minded people who are optimistic people who can make a change we say that we cannot stay in the South, we have to leave, but if we all leave then it will stay like this or if we all leave and never come back. So I want to come back eventually.

AH: Could you just expand on what you mean about it is devastating to live in the South?

SD: I was writing a paper in my speech class last semester about nutrition, in South Carolina, or rather just the effect of nutrition on development on cognitive development and such and I, one of my sources said that the national report card put South Carolina at the bottom, so it used to be, that we could say, that at least we are ahead of Mississippi, but we are not, we are not the bottom, when I was talking to my mother about Trayvon Martin, she said that she read another study that said that South Carolina ranks 49th, with 50 being the highest in most confrontational state, which goes hand in hand, if we are the most, if we are the dumbest of course we are confrontational. And it is harsh to say, but just talking to anybody it is so bad and I think that there are so many people who are so closed minded and I cannot honestly say that I know how to make it better. I always heard that you have to be the change you want to see and I definitely heard that working with education and working with young people, you won’t even get to see the impact that you have you just have trust that you had an impact and so I am sure that I won’t just be able to look up and see that everything is great now, but I think that there are so many problems in the South that don’t have to be and I think that is what is most devastating, just closed minded people. People who do not want to look at the complexities of human it does not just have to be black and white people are just gray. And growing up in Beaufort and seeing people who never made it out and I use the term never made it out because that is what I want to do, but some people don’t even feel like that, they want to be there forever, and that is not necessarily bad, but some people just don’t have any ambition, don’t have anything greater that they want to see. They do not know anything outside of Beaufort and I know that it is similar for people who grew up in Charleston, they do not know that the world is bigger nor do they have any desire to see the bigger world and that is probably a problem everywhere, but because this is where I grew up, I am aware of it.

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