It is me that has changed. It finally hit me this past semester that my students are going through what I did at Claremont. Instead of providing them with an environment where they were free to develop and express some form of nationalism so that they could draw their own conclusions, I was trying to make them bypass where I had been so that we could all begin from the same place. I wanted to spare them what I went through, but I couldn't. Every person of color in this society will have to confront many of these emotions at sometime in their life.
Society sees and acts through race.
Eventually, we all have to make sense of our ethnicity and its place in our lives. For many, making sense of it means becoming somewhat culturally nationalistic. Now I don't think that all of the assumptions underlying cultural nationalism as a political stance are true. I'm not sure that in the long-run cultural nationalism will be the best tack to take for achieving a better society. On some level, because the world works from simplistic beliefs about race and culture it is vital that we make sense of our place in that world from within those beliefs before we deconstruct them into oblivion.