A CONVERSATION ACROSS GENERATIONS What does racial equity demand of us?
FOR MANY OF US, it can be a rare opportunity to talk about race across generations outside of our own families, who often share our racial identities. Conversations Across Generations (CXG) is a GCIsupported program at the Alaska Humanities Forum that is a series of transformative intergenerational conversations about racial identity and experiences of racism in Alaska. Susan Soule and Charitie Ropati are about as different as it can get. Susan grew up Jewish in Brooklyn, New York. She is now 78 and living in Anchorage. Charitie, who is Yup’ik and Samoan, grew up in Anchorage and is now 19 years old, going to school in New York City at Columbia University. Through CXG, they began a dialogue exploring the experiences that shaped the way they each think about race. Below is an excerpt from their conversation.
Charitie: A lot of what I learned was from the matriarchs in my life. My grandmother and my mother taught me a lot. I also learned a lot in school. In school I came to realize not only how unethical or unfair the education system is, but really how violent an environment it can be for Native and Polynesian students. We were learning a history that we didn’t really see ourselves in. My mom played such a big role in teaching me about all the things we face on a dayto-day basis. She prepared me for what it is like to go to the store or to school when my mom is visibly Native and my dad is visibly Samoan. We are treated very differently. I
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think that the houseless population in Anchorage is a good indicator of that. For Native peoples to be homeless on land that was once ours is just so jarring. Whenever I talk about my identity, especially what it means to be Samoan and Yup’ik, I just talk about how a lot of the experiences that I had in school, they were really violent, really shaped who I am. Whenever I didn’t know what to do, I was like, how do I solve this? How do I navigate this space? How do I cope? How do I cope with a society that is very anti-Indigenous and doesn’t want to acknowledge the atrocities Native people have gone through?
Finding a community, not only within my family, but with other Native women, finding community with other women of color here [at Columbia] and meeting other amazing Black and Indigenous scholars made me realize things will be okay, you know? Susan: Well, obviously I’m White. In terms of my experience with racism, it has always been of being with people to whom racism was inflicted. I was always a witness, rather than being personally impacted by it. On the other hand... sometimes I would— after meeting people that I was going to have to know for a while—I would somehow subtly let them know that I was Jewish. Because I thought if I did not, they might say something that would embarrass them if they didn’t know. So, I mean, what was that about, looking after their feelings? I never thought about it much growing up, but religious identity was very present. I didn’t ever really feel the discrimination but I know my parents did. Later in life I was struck by the fact that my parents didn’t have any non-Jewish friends and I asked them about it and they said it was because we always get hurt in the end. My parents were very much of the generation that was traumatized by what the Nazis did to Jews. That affected them in ways that it didn’t affect me.
