Reflective Essay

              This semester, I initially did not understand how the community service we were assigned would benefit the community we would be involved with, and I didn’t understand the purpose of oral histories. At the end of the semester, I felt like my project ended up servicing me more than the Optimist Park community. I learned so much rich history about Optimist Park and about the evolution of predominately black neighborhoods, and I’m sure if others listen to my interview with Wade Ferguson they would receive the same benefits. I still felt that the oral history doesn’t matter if you listen to it 10 years later and the people interviewed in the have been pushed out by gentrification. Our service is going to leave us and those who listen to our work with a wider perspective, while the neighborhood may still be struggling with businesses trying to push them out of their homes. I learned a lot from our experience and I do think this class advanced my own perspectives about poverty, gentrification, and homelessness, but I don’t think it changed my idea of who I am as a citizen. I believe community service and learning about community issues are important to maintain open-mindedness; however, I don’t think it is a responsibility to learn these things.

              The passages we went through gave great perspectives about homelessness and poverty, which gave me a better level of empathy. In class, we talked about getting rid of homeless people but not homelessness, which is a concept I was already familiar with but not in regards to what was going on in Charlotte. The light rail is supposed to bring a lot more businesses and companies into Charlotte and there is speculation that the Urban Ministry and other homeless shelters are going to make the area unattractive to new businesses. This argument is absolutely ridiculous and shows how business oriented corporations are, instead of having compassion for homeless people. Businesses and state government are trying to relocate the homeless shelters to inconvenient locations that are not easily accessible to homeless people in the uptown area. They are trying to hide the faces of homeless people without getting rid of the problem of homelessness. As state officials in power, they hold a responsibility to the citizens of Charlotte to do what’s best for everyone for it is literally their jobs. Though I don’t believe it is automatically the responsibilities of citizens to do community service, I believe people in power in regards to these issues, and people who are passionate about these topics should definitely put forth efforts in the right direction. An example of this would be the people involved in finding homes for the homeless such as employees at Moore Place and the program in Tennessee that focuses on housing homeless people in hopes of jumpstarting their productivity. This is a concept that I had never heard of before this class, but it makes perfect sense. For most companies, the hiring application requires stating a permanent residency and without one, it would be very difficult to be hired. It is also much easier to maintain hygiene and other physical as well as emotional needs when you have a guaranteed place of residency. Through this class, I have become more passionate about this topic and plan to at the least pay attention to the development and stability of the homeless shelters located uptown in Charlotte as well as try to vote out the people who are putting forth efforts to hinder the success of these shelters. It opened up more ideas on how to handle homelessness but I don’t necessarily feel responsible for doing this solely based on the idea that I have to because I’m a citizen.

              We also talked in depth about different perspectives on poverty. We read the Bill Gates yearly papers and I was conflicted about some of the things he said, but ultimately I learned more about how little government money we give out as foreign aid and it also made me think about American ideas of what is “poverty.”  It made me realize how quickly we are to declare someone as impoverished when in reality we are pushing these ideas of poverty on the country in conversation. Gates goes in depth about how people argue that people who are poor are always going to be poor and tries to disprove this ideology, but in reality, there has to be a scale in which to determine what poverty is, and this scale is usually determined by people on the outside. For instance, Americans look at people who are considered to be in developing countries, and declare them poor, when in reality they are all usually in the same living situations as one another. In addition, there is no scale of poverty in these countries. Yes, there is less technology, but they are rich in culture, identity and other natural resources yet we don’t consider these things on our scale of wealth. That being said, I don’t think that the government should stop aiding them in ways such as vaccinations and disease prevention information, but I think we don’t need to push our idea of wealth on them because in reality, its detrimental to their culture.  If they don’t consider it broken, don’t fix it. In regard to poverty in capitalistic America, it definitely exists as we saw in our poverty stimulation. While I don’t think all the worse things that could possibly happen in a span of 30 days happens in the real lives of every lower class American, it gave a perspective of living in poverty in America.

              On the topic of poverty, or impoverished areas, working in the Optimist Park community was very eye opening. Before we started volunteering in the neighborhood, I had a painted picture in my head that they were an impoverished neighborhood about to be pushed out because of gentrification, as a lot of the stories go. In that sense, I didn’t understand why we were going to do oral histories instead of helping with the issue of maintaining the community while it went through gentrification. After we started discussing the purpose of oral histories I felt a little better going in the project, but after interviewing Bishop Wade Ferguson, I felt like Optimist Park was servicing me. Bishop Ferguson told me about how much the neighborhood had transformed, from having liquor houses to having farmers markets. He said that there had always been residents of high professions residing in the neighborhood over time but of course the only thing people know about neighborhoods like Optimist Park is the rumors about one or two bad apples in the bunch and the gentrification that is set to happen in the neighborhood. Growing up in the suburbs and having always attended diversified schools, I have never lived or been incorporated into large Black, possibly impoverished communities such as Optimist Park. Though I always separated my ideas of the “ghetto,” a predominately black crime ridden neighborhood, versus a “hood,” strictly a predominately black neighborhood, I had never actually stepped into either of those communities and heard perspectives from within them. I feel like even as a black person, I am guilty of stereotyping these regions and perceiving certain black communities as struggling, and dangerous solely off appearance. It is so easy to do this when these images are all we see in media, and stereotypes prevail all around us; it’s easy to put (impoverished) black experiences in a box. For instance, I felt like the reading Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack overly generalizes the experience of a black person in America. If we’re not stereotyping the negative aspects of the black experience in America, were pitying people who are experiencing these circumstances. We think as citizens, we have to go in and save them, help them through servanthood, etc., but Bishop Ferguson gave me hope in knowing that not all black communities are as bad off as the media portrays them to be. They’re helping themselves, through community and the church, and the negative statistics are going down even if the media isn’t portraying that as so, and I think for that reason residents in Optimist Park serviced me more than I serviced them.

              Through my experience with this course and in Optimist Park, my idea of a citizen has not changed, but that’s not to say I didn’t learn anything from this class. The oral history project was very eye opening for me, and changed my perspective of black communities and how we should service them if we choose to do so, but I still don’t think volunteer work is a responsibility of a citizen. Responsibility usually translates to requirement and requirements become more about fulfilling your own needs rather than actually completing service. However, I think these type of classes are important because they give you the tools and resources to find out more about topics such as homelessness and poverty that you may become passionate about, which in return may influence you to participate in community service. It has also been beneficial because things such as oral histories and passages about local issues allow you to focus more on what the community actually needs, which as Wade Ferguson said, is always changing. If you decide your passion is doing community service towards a specific cause, and you feel you have a responsibility to volunteer, learn about the needs of the community and make sure you’re not just carrying out a self-fulfilling prophecy. The goal of this class may have been to challenge my idea of what a citizen is, but I think it challenged my perspectives on how to view my own community and to me, that was a lot more beneficial.