I hope you're ready to Grove

The most interesting part of Kiese Laymon's essay which resonated the most with me was in Week 4, when he went to visit Ole Miss' William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. He described all the work they were doing and the partnerships they had with other organizations to improve the community. The most impressive praise was when he said, "The Institute is doing some of the most creative and necessary work around race in the country." Creative and necessary are words I never hear used to describe institutions, so him describing it in that way definitely built it up for me.

When he tells his friend at the Institute that he's going to the Grove, the spot where the Rebels would tailgate football games. His friend responds that while she's critical of what the school was and can be, "I still say to everyone in the country, 'You don't know to tailgate like we do.'" The energy that Laymon has been building up for the Institute through the previous paragraphs was immediately destroyed. At the end of the day, the good work that they're doing for racial reconciliation takes a back seat to tailgating.

Laymon begins repairing that disappointment by meeting the OpEd Editor at The Daily Mississippian, who is also black, and should for those two reasons presumably be more sensitive to the issue of racial conflict. Laymon broaches the conversation of him not being convinced that black students have been involved in the change that everyone was talking about. I thought, good, she'll have something really insightful and powerful to say. Instead, to my complete shock, she ripped off her hat to show that her hair was died green, and said that she's at a college, not a confederate day camp. My jaw dropped, because here is this person who I was expecting to bring out some knockout comment about how the problem is deeper than people want to admit, or that the people most victimized by racism haven't been listened to about how to change it, say that it's not her job to police racism at her school, because it's college and I guess that makes it unimportant.

As if to break my heart a second time, Kiese shows how difficult it is to get people who are directly impacted by a problem and whose mission it is to solve that problem give in to it for the most unimportant reason.