After getting removed from campus and moving into a house of my own in Carrboro, I continued to realize my privilege. My housemates and I completely furnished our house for less than $1000, considering we had furniture donations from relatives and had friends help us move in as to avoid payment to a moving company. It felt like home. It felt like something I could call “mine.” I am a 19-year-old college student who lives in her own house without a real job. What did I do to deserve this life? Short answer, nothing. More and more as I made the walk from my house to Epilogue on Franklin Street, the amount of homelessness that I saw increased. “This can’t be an issue in this town,” I said to myself. “I thought this was only an issue in bigger cities, surely not in somewhere like Chapel Hill.” First off, privilege check Grace. The reason you’ve never seen it is because you haven’t been looking for it, it’s always been there. The more I saw, the more my heart broke for those around me and I continued with that same question: What did I do to deserve this?
The answer, still, is nothing. One night, my roommate and I sat down and got angry at the state of our world. We yelled and cried about racial reconciliation, homelessness rates, and how those two statistics are intertwined. After a night of screaming at the universe about how unfair it has been to those people, we wanted to answer the question “How can we help?” Instantly, I took to the internet to find any kind of quick-fix answer. Spoiler alert, there’s no quick fix for these things. So, I shifted from my computer to my calculator. I compiled the amount of money that we would’ve spent on Halloween candy for trick-or-treaters and came up with a plan for how we can re-purpose that money.
Over the course of two weeks, I read numerous articles titled “What I Wish I Would’ve Had When I Was Homeless” and “Why Homeless Winters Were The Hardest.” With the money that my housemates and I put together, we decided to make bags to pass out to the homeless in Carrboro and Chapel Hill. This included things like hand sanitizer, masks, t-shirts, socks, etc., and we will be passing them out on Halloween day on Franklin Street.
Now that you have an idea of how you can give back, let’s get to the real meat of this issue. I thought that, by doing this small act, I would somehow magically feel better about my privilege or that I would suddenly be comfortable with it. However, I realized that I would never want to be in a place of comfort within my privilege, because that means I haven’t tried hard enough to right the wrongs of it. I had to learn that doing these small acts to make myself feel better means that my heart still needs work. Though my heart was focused on the good of the people that we will help, a part of me was hoping that I would help myself some as well, that these acts would illuminate a sign that says “Good Person” or “Your Ally” over my head. Another spoiler alert, our hearts cannot continue to work selfishly in that way if we want to stand beside and uplift those on the margins of society. All we can do is hear the cry of the oppressed, the marginalized, those who for so long have not been heard, and decide to do something about it — not because it will make us look good, but because we see the truth in the unfair and broken system we live under.
I implore you to complete small acts of kindness as my housemates and I did. This doesn’t have to be pooling together money, it could be giving a smile to those you normally would try to direct your gaze away from. It could be fixing the go-to of “sorry, I don’t have any cash” by carrying around a few ones in your wallet. It could even be choosing to be present in conversation with those on the streets and letting them know that you will not allow them to go unseen and unheard.