In which I am offered a small fellowship, and my co-worker hates on our fair city

So one of the schools to which I have been admitted, which shall remain nameless, is offering me an extra $2000 a year to attend their program. I cannot begin to speculate on why they did this--did my chat with one of their faculty not sound enthusiastic enough? Or would they have given me this even if I were already itching to go there? Maybe I just sounded like a kid who needed two grand worth of Manchego added to my life, annually. This last bit is true for sure. But no, it will not impact my decision. For seriously, guys? Unless you're really piling on the cash, better to go with something really cool, like special library VIP card (jump to the head of the queue, both physically and when requesting new books! return things whenever the heck you feel like, although i guess grad students already get that. GET DVD's THAT ACTUALLY WORK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. think of the possibilities!).

And word got around at work about admissions, and everyone's having little chats with me about how exciting things are right now, which is really very nice of them to care. And one of the attorneys stops by today and asks whether I know where I'm going yet, and I say no, and I list off the places I have to visit, and she evaluates each of them in turn as nice cities, except for one: "oh, you're not going to Rochester." Well, probably not, I say, but I think she's misunderstood: it'd be my first choice to live in as a city, it's just probably not the best program I've been accepted to, and it's the one place my boyfriend refuses to move. Her jaw drops, and she looks to my other co-worker for back-up, but alas: this one's best friend from college lives near Park Ave., and "I have a soft spot for Rochester."

"Ah, sure," says the attorney, "Park Ave. But there's really just that tiny wedge of the city that's livable. And it's so segregated, there are such problems with race..." And I acknowledge that there are surely problems, and I contradict some of what she's said, but I ignore the central irony of her two statements together, and she digs deeper and deeper, until she's actually commenting on the demeanor of people of color in downtown Rochester (apparently they ALL look downtrodden? WTF?)...and then of course she remembers that I'm from there and she apologizes, and I'm like whatevs, and I go back to work. But it sort of got under my skin, and I guess that's what blogs are for, right?

I mean, I guess what's bothering me is that this woman lives in a tiny village that has "no problems with race," because VERY NEARLY EVERYONE IS WHITE. And she works in a small, small city with such towering problems with race that are simultaneously so covert, so cloaked in liberal bullshit and feel-good colorblindness and oh-yeah-that-guy-that-just-got-shot-by-the-police-well-guess-what-color-he-was-but-everyone's-too-polite-to-notice-that. And yet she's taking shots at this city, and dismissing the work that people have done to make it a better and more just place, the lives of actual people who either choose to live there, or simply do live there and sometimes like it, and ugh! As my mom pointed out to me around Christmastime after I made a quick crack at her expense, it's really easy to point fingers and call things out, and it's really hard to actually improve things. And yeah, institutional racism in Rochester? A REAL BIG problem. But calling people Uncle Toms? Dismissing this entire city full of lives and dreams and folks? Yeah, no, not the way to fix it. Do I know how to fix it? Absolutely not. Do I stay on Howard Eagle's mailing list in hopes of finding out someday? You betcha.