Shooting an Elephant in Spanish Harlem, New York City
Walking down the streets of New York City, you feel a strange senseof whiteness-not because you are necessarily even white. But walking, lostin Spanish Harlem, New York City, wearing new clothes and carrying a fatwallet, you feel white. It is hard not to feel middle class, naive, abouttaken advantage of, as one wanders the unfamiliar streets of the city.Music plays from the apartments above the winding metal stairs, some withyellow condemned signs across them. The brown and lurking individualsstare at you, painfully aware you are lost and that they cannot speak your
You, an individual walking in Spanish Harlem in New York City, you whom areinevitably not part of the community by the way you walk, talk, and dress,are no longer yourself, in all of your complexities. Rather one wishes one could suddenly become fluent in thelanguage of the streets, and blend in with the sights and smells of theworld around, like a kind of human chameleon of culture as well as skin. People shout the usual comments,what are you doing here, where did you get such nice clothes, what yourbutt looks like in those fancy jeans. One wishes that one could simply wander into a bodega and converse inSpanish, and suddenly have a place back home where one sends the dollarsone earns, where a family can eat for a week on even the minimum wage inAmerica. One almost wishes one could know what it is like to be adishwasher, to be stared at as an alien in fine stores. ' But a confrontation is inevitable. on is inevitable in such surroundings. Your face flushes, even though thereis a part of you that wants to scream, hey, my life isn't all it seems,isn't all you might think it is cracked up to be. Maybe you escape and maybe you don't shoot that proverbial elephantor get shot at in body. But the soul hurts every step of the walk. You are simply asymbol, not unlike the people around you become symbols on the eveningnews, of something larger and also somehow smaller than their individualselves. One despises theprivilege that led to the money lurking in one's wallet, the fancy studentID with the sleepy, smiling picture that proclaims 'my life will not alwaysbe like this.
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Acceptance Essays
