College Life: A Shame of Pride

Today, I’m ashamed that someone was proud of me.

Felicia and I had just seen Black Panther (which I’ll talk about in another post) and were walking out of the theater toward my car. During the movie, it began to snow a lot, so afterwards I had to brush the snow off of my car. Next to me, a woman who had just came from the same showing as us was doing the same thing I was doing. We struck up a conversation about how some kids in her family had never seen snow because they were from Florida and when they visited here it had never snowed for them, how she had a friend from Africa who marveled at snow when she saw it for the first time, and how one of the first presents my dad ever got my mom was a brush for her car. I also offered to help her brush her car off, but she said she was fine and didn’t need the help – which I knew would be her answer because she seemed like she had a good handle on what she was doing.

Felicia (my girlfriend, for those of you who don’t know) said she was incredibly proud of me for offering to do that and being so friendly with her, me being a young white college student and her being a middle-aged black woman.

Oh, yeah, I guess I didn’t mention that when describing her, did I?

I didn’t have to talk to her when she struck up the conversation; I didn’t have to treat her like a human being. I had every choice to not treat her the way I did and see her as different from myself (not just due to the color of her skin but also her age), but I didn’t; for that, Felicia was a little proud of me.

Felicia’s admiration of me quickly changed into a discontent: the pride Felicia had for me transformed into a shame of her pride, a shame of the fact that the world we live in has reduced our standards so far that treating our neighbor as our neighbor deserves admiration. That’s what we should do in the first place; we should treat every other human being we see as another human being, and nothing less. Instead, we brush off the prejudiced actions of hate that are seen so often as typical human behavior, normalizing them to where we are desensitized, and heap mountains of praise upon those who have the decency to treat others – those that look the same or those that look different from us – with a single shred of respect. That is the sad reality in which we live.

It pains me that we feel pride for ourselves and others when human decency actually occurs. We don’t praise people for not stealing a pack of gum when checking out at a gas station because it’s not a normal thing to do. We shouldn’t have to be proud of people who are doing the right thing. We should just do the right thing. That may seem naïve and idealistic and too optimistic for our present reality, but it’s the truth. Can we please just see each other as fellow human beings and try to help each other make the world as good of a place as we possibly can?