I’m reading the The Help at work and it’s making me homesick.  I’m often surrounded by a group of individuals who believe the attitudes portrayed in that story are from ancient times.  They have never witnessed that type of behavior outside of news stories and performance art.  I still fondly remember my grandmother’s black maid Dorothy and the role she played in my family.  My grandparents were truly from another era and they weren’t bad people.  Their life-long employee got job security and a pretty decent retirement plan.  More than I’m getting out my current employment opportunities. 

Everything is accelerated on the coasts and it’s easy to forget there are parts of middle America 20 years behind some of the social progress we claim.  I’m relatively young and yet I feel connected to a section of history millennials consider fiction.  The whole idea of inter-sectional feminism is that some social progress is harder to attain than others.  Their mistake is assuming we can ever compare individual experiences.  If you want to statistically state that a black woman has it harder than a white woman I would need you to define your parameters. There are definitely times when that assumption isn’t true.

History repeats itself and I feel like I’m from the future as much as the past most times.  I believe trying to break down microcosms of prejudice in our culture is just giving more attention to the negativity than it deserves.  The media wants us to harbor fear and anger because all advertising is meant to make you feel bad about yourself.  The most powerful thing you can do as an American is spend money.  Instead of arguing about who has it worse let’s just start buying things from people we like.  It might not feel like a big deal but the places with regular customers are the businesses that succeed.  Local businesses breed better cultures and the best places are where we can build futures.