Attend a Meeting

When asked to attend a meeting on the subject of gender, race, sexuality, or some other topic, I decided to go and see the spoken word poet, Michael Reyes. He is a part of the Social Justice series and has been featured on HBO and PBS and has travelled both internationally and nationally using his poetry as a way to talk about history and other important topics to him. He began his presentation by asking the group to call out 15 different words and then one to end with and he used those words to come up with a poem on the spot.  The topics of most of his poems for the night were identity and diversity. He told the group that “As a person of color” he is always searching for opportunities and ways to find his own identity.

 

 Reyes talked a lot about his life in Chicago. He described as a place that is violent, has drugs, HIV, and Child abuse, but is also a place to create your own reality and be who you want to be. He was questioned all the time on who he wanted be, because no one thought he could make it as a full time poet. They all doubted his decision. He described the idea of internal racism. That concept is when you hate the person you are so much that it makes it easier to kill someone who looks like you. That lead into his next conversation on how statistically, most of the murders that occur are done by someone who looks like the victim.

 

Another big topic that he mentioned in his poems was the sphere of influence. He said that when we do things for others, it should not be about instant gratification. He said that we should focus more on the spheres of influences, or the people that we can affect. Each of us has our own sphere of influence and just making an impression on one person in our sphere can cause them to make an influence on one person in their own sphere and so on. He also focused a lot on the idea of happiness and how it is different to every person. He said that if you can see the beauty in the world, then you don’t need money to make you happy. For this he used the example of feeding the ducks with his god daughter.

Being that this was a presentation on diversity, and identity, it seemed fitting that he would use a poem about how he feels about being Latino. He described them as being a cosmic people.  They were mixed with almost every type of person out there in the past. They had a Spanish influence, but were also affected by slave trade and colonization, and other forms of movement as well. He was very proud of who he was and where he came from. He was not afraid to show it at all. He was proud of coming from a ghetto and emphasized that if we didn’t have ghettos, we wouldn’t have jazz of many other contributions that many people love today. He talked about how the word ghetto has and identity. It is political; they have murals, and food that is popular in them. He emphasized the difference between a ghetto and a slum and said that through the negative things, the best work is found and ended his message by saying that wherever there is oppression, there is some kind of beautiful works around it.

When entering into this presentation, I felt nervous. Not that I wouldn’t be accepted, but just that I would be categorized wrong. I am not in a minority group at all, besides being a woman. I have never lived in a hard situation, such a slum, or in poverty and I am not part of the GLBTQ community. I wasn’t sure if showing up to this meeting would cause people to misread me or misjudge me for it. When I got there, I realized that no one really cared who showed up. They were just happy that the word was getting around that people were interested in hearing him speak. The people there were all very kind and did not treat me different or exclude me at all. The culture that Michael Reyes talked about was completely different from what I was raised in and understand. I could never deal with knowing that people get murdered outside your door or that you may not know when you will get your next meal. I have always lived a sheltered life and that is becoming more and more obvious as I get out more on my own in college. This matters because it shows how everyone is raised differently and it is these situations that shape us into the people we become. You always hear the saying “we are the products of our surroundings” and this became more evident listening to Reyes speak.

 He had a passion for speaking and wanted people to know about the struggles of the poor people of Chicago, yet he proved that he was able to overcome his obstacles and make something of himself. A meeting like this exists, in my opinion, to show us that we may all come from different places or see ourselves differently, but we can still come together as one community. That is what I learned about my community. As I sat there listening to everyone laughing as one and genuinely enjoying themselves, I saw that even though not one person in that room can say that they had exactly the same experiences as Michael Reyes, they still understood what he was talking about and where he was coming from enough to appreciate what he was saying. It was eye opening to see that we truly are a community here at Tech and that everyone respects and appreciates on another so much.