Personal Narrative: My Sophomore Year In High School

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Growing up I attended schools where white was the minority. One day towards the end of my sophomore year in high school, we were reviewing for the state exam we had to take in a few weeks. Our teacher excused himself from the room and one of the school security guards came in to watch us while we worked. We were working silently on our questions that were focused on the Holocaust. Suddenly someone behind me asked loud enough for everyone to hear “Samantha was your grandfather a Nazi?” I was completely blindsided. I had never really spoken to this person before. I calmly explained to him that my family was in the United States when the war started. All of a sudden, someone else asked “So did your family own slaves?” After I explained that this too was false, I found some people looking at me with skepticism, the security guard being one of them. These were questions that I had grown accustomed to over the years. I was used to some of my …show more content…

While walking through the halls with a classmate I had gotten to know very well, she asked me if I was going on the trip and if I would like to room with her. I told her that I was not attending because my family could not afford it this year. “What do you mean you can’t afford it? You’re white.” I knew that coming from a home with two working parents left me more privileged than many of the students in my school. Did she mean that because I came from a higher income home that I should be able to afford this trip? Or did she mean that I should be able to afford this trip because I was white? After straight out telling her my family is not rich she said “Well I guess not, otherwise you’d be in a fancy private school and not here with kids like us.” After that whenever someone asked me about the trip, I said I wasn’t going because I didn’t want to spend the trip with kids I didn’t like. This was more accepting than the

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