{"id":117,"date":"2022-05-12T16:06:19","date_gmt":"2022-05-12T20:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/?p=117"},"modified":"2022-05-20T15:06:22","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T19:06:22","slug":"michelle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/michelle\/","title":{"rendered":"Michelle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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by Thais Lawson ’24<\/em><\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
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When I ask her about where she\u2019s from, Michelle spends a lot of time detailing San Francisco\u2019s highway system. She tells me where each one begins and ends, which part of the city they run through, whether she thinks they\u2019re useful to the city\u2019s residents or not. The overpass she now lives next to used to designate the boundary of a Red Line district.\u00a0 Crossing under it is \u201charrowing\u201d due to the painfully narrow sidewalk, which lacks a protective railing.\u00a0 And the erratic drivers.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Michelle\u2019s father\u2019s family is originally from New Orleans but was displaced by a highway, eminent domain taking the house her great-grandfather built. The highway\u2019s middle lane now runs through where it used to stand. I was surprised to hear that her family was from a historic black creole district. Michelle tells me that her father\u2019s family is black creole. She identifies as white. She has curly, blonde hair (she tells me it\u2019s brunette, I say that I don\u2019t understand the distinctions white people make between blonde and not-blonde, she asks me if I\u2019m just looking to pigeonhole her as a dumb Cali blonde, I tell her that today I\u2019m a journalist and I morally cannot misrepresent her like that, she grins and tells me that I can go ahead and do so if it\u2019ll make for a better story), fair skin, and blue eyes. Michelle remembers multiple times in her childhood when strangers attempted to \u201crescue\u201d her from her father, who has much darker skin than she does. No, she didn\u2019t ever appreciate the thought:\u00a0 Her dad wears reflective safety vests and stops to take ridiculously zoomed-in pictures of birds. Human traffickers and pimps do not.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Yes, people are annoying. No, of course she doesn\u2019t hate them. I\u2019m referring to the people who see her as different from her father, she\u2019s moved on and means people in general. Diversity is more than culture and skin color, diversity is the person in her class she avoids talking to because they stand too close and won\u2019t stop making \u201cyour mom\u201d jokes. No, of course she doesn\u2019t hate them. She thinks they\u2019re wonderfully annoying \u2014 she can\u2019t be around them, but every day after class she sees them walk off screech-laughing with a couple of friends.\u00a0<\/span>Yes, all three of them annoy her, but they clearly love one another. Who is she to say that they\u2019re being human the wrong way? Anyway, she\u2019s just spent ten minutes rambling about San Francisco\u2019s highways, so I\u2019m probably annoyed about how boring this interview is. Nah, I\u2019m not annoyed. I like the way she\u2019s being human.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Thais Lawson ’24 When I ask her about where she\u2019s from, Michelle spends a lot of time detailing San Francisco\u2019s highway system. She tells me where each one begins and ends, which part of the city they run through, whether she thinks they\u2019re useful to the city\u2019s residents or not. The overpass she now…Read more Michelle<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3782,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction-profiles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3782"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":515,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions\/515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/writers-on-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}