Where I Come From

 My name is Cassie Duren (They/Them), and I’m a second year student majoring in music and Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies. I work as a CAVE Community Advocate and something I’m really passionate about is looking at the way queer identity interacts and transforms - and is transformed by - other identities such as race and disability.

Where I Come From

I spent most of my life, and all of my life as  I can remember it, living in the same small town before I came to PLU. I went to a small elementary school named Evaline, where I was the fifth generation in my family to go there, and was part of a graduating class of seven. My family lived on five acres of land purchased from other family members for a family discount, in the house of  great-grandparents I never met. My extended family owned the forty acres of woods around us, which I spent hours exploring as a kid before much of it had to be logged; learning that many of the trees around us had a disease that was killing them was not the most grief I’d felt during my childhood, but it was certainly high on the list. I graduated from the high school I transferred to after Evaline with a class of 60 people.

Now, let’s change the narrative.

I spent all of my life as I can remember it living as a white person in a rural area populated almost entirely by white people, though there were a few Hispanic and Latinx families as well. I lived between two very small, poor, and white towns on what I now know is Chehalis and Cowlitz Native land, where the ideas are 20 years behind and no slur was considered too edgy for the white, heteronormative, able-bodied teen population to use. My immediate and extended family have “owned” our stolen land for generations, until much of it was logged and sold for profit to people who undoubtedly want to build more houses for the lower middle class conservative white families who want a “safe place” (read: conservative white community) to raise their kids. Everyone may be poor, but when land is put up for sale it is almost always sold quickly - if it isn’t quietly sold to family or close friends, that is. For colonizers who stole the land we live on, we’re strangely good at passing it between ourselves as if it’s always been our own.

Acknowledging the racism I could see in my family was probably one of the most upsetting things I ever had to do, but that made the experience no less important for me to engage in. Due to where I was raised and the family I’m a part of I was allowed the privilege of not having to learn about or understand racial issues. As a result I only started learning about all of this when I  came to PLU. My main learning tool has consistently been my silence - to be quiet and listen, and think critically about what I heard and learned. I also learned that it's okay to feel uncomfortable - something I’d technically already known, but had never acknowledged in this context. Quite frankly, if learning about racism as a white person doesn’t make you uncomfortable I’m not sure I want to know what would. The third tool is also a reminder - learning about racism will not only reveal to you some of your own racism that you need to fight to get rid of, but will also reveal to you the racism of others, including those close to you who claim they’re not racist and genuinely believe it.

This is where I come from, and my time at PLU has brought me to where I am today. I am continuing to listen to and learn from the people around me, and I’m continuing to allow myself to feel the discomfort that comes from growth. As I recognize the racism that has become ingrained in my family and has affected my own view of the world, I work to call it out and change it, and I know that’s something I’ll continue doing for the rest of my life.

I’d like to leave you with a couple open questions to answer for yourself: Where do you come from? And, keeping that in mind, where do you want to go from here?