My website, Debunking Dixie, was a result of two factors coming together in an unexpected, but very rewarding, way: my childhood experiences and my academic interests. Growing up on a plantation as an African American is a humbling experience. However, that didn’t become apparent to me until I became much older. I remember my brother and I used to lay in bed at night, lights out and our eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he’d ask what if we saw the ghosts of slaves tapping on the window. “Stop!” I’d shout “that's so creepy.” Even though I knew ghosts didn’t exist, something about the thought seriously rubbed me the wrong way. Looking back now, my cries to change the subject must’ve been motivated more by heartache than fear. Whenever he asked the question, I’d picture a ghost that looked like me, just with ragged clothes and a slimmer frame. In hindsight, I now realize the significance of this image. Even as a child, I knew that I would’ve been enslaved, perhaps working on the very spot I was sleeping at that night, had I been born earlier — and I didn’t know how to make sense of that thought. I still don’t; I’ll never know how someone can be cruel enough to claim ownership of another human being. But I knew it was wrong, and I knew I’d gotten “lucky” by avoiding the horrors of slavery.

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The other factor, my academic interests, was also at play when deciding on this topic for my website. During the winter of my freshman year, I decided to take a course purely based on my interests, even if it wouldn't fulfill any of my major requirements. After combing the LSA Course Guide, I decided to take History 262: History of the American South. This class was the first time I learned about my experiences on the plantation of my childhood in an academic setting (well, technically high school history classes touched on the topic, but they were always woefully inadequate and any discussion of the “real issues” was hamstrung by the school’s desire to mitigate any conflict in the classroom). The topic stayed on my mind into the following semester, when I enrolled in a creative writing course. For that final project, we had to write a short story, and mine was set on a slave plantation during the Reconstruction Era. This website, then, grew as an elaboration of one of a series of experiments testing different ways to explore the short story I wrote for that course.

My first experiment was a preface for the short story, called Homecoming, explaining why I was interested in the subject matter (particularly, the story’s setting). Truthfully, I only chose this experiment due to not fully understanding what was and wasn’t possible with this assignment. While I want readers to know why I chose the topic, I didn’t realize I’d have a chance to explain that regardless of the experiment I chose (since it would ultimately be paired with this reflection component). Similarly, I hoped a preface would allow me to explain the moral of the story, which was that even if everything is perfect, it’s still normal to desire change. All too often, it seems, we read something that doesn’t register the desired impact the author was aiming for. I wanted to stop that from happening because I was concerned that I wasn’t explicit enough about this in the original piece. I was hoping to achieve this by explaining my back story (including why I’m interested) and then the message of the piece, before tying them together. In the end, however, I decided that this experiment didn’t offer anything new to the conversation. Anyone who truly cares about my own thoughts can read this reflection, but the format I went with in the end (research paper) has mass appeal. You don’t need to be concerned with my thoughts to enjoy it — you only need to be interested in the time period. In short, despite being personally satisfied with the result, I didn’t go with experiment #1 because I figured the potential audience was much smaller than the one I wanted to reach.

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My second experiment was much more creative than the first (the preface). For my second experiment, I was planning on creating a short film based on the short story I wrote for my creative writing class. My interest in this genre goes back to high school. In 10th grade, I entered a state-wide competition to create a promotional video for an organization I was a part of. Luckily, I won the competition, and my interest in filmmaking grew. In 11th grade, I entered a short film into a film festival. The movie — which, in hindsight, wasn’t great — didn’t place in the festival. Still, I enjoyed the creative process of storyboarding, scripting, casting, shooting, and (for some reason, my favorite part) editing. To me, creating a film is a lot like writing, only it gives me (the author when writing, the director when shooting) much more control. In a book, readers are free to take the text and create whichever world they want. In a short film, I’m able to create the world for them. In my case, short films allow me to take extra steps to ensure the film’s moral is acknowledged, whereas in a book I have to rely on the reader picking it up. In this experiment, I cited the film “Gone with the Wind” as a negative model. That’s because this movie is famous for its romanticization of the South: Blacks and Whites lived and worked happily side-by-side, and the real issues were brushed under the rug and glossed over. And while my film certainly wouldn’t be engaging in this type of revisionist history, it also wasn’t explicitly addressing these issues. Ultimately, I worried that I wasn’t doing any good by creating a film, since, for most people, it would simply be entertainment. That’s how I finally chose my website’s topic: a historical paper debunking myths about the South.

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Being a writer means that I am able to impact people outside of my immediate surroundings. I’ve done this before — one employee in the state’s Emergency Manager department even emailed me to let me know he printed out one of my articles and hung it in his office — and I hope my website will do the same. I wasn’t even aware of many of these myths until taking History of the American South (as I said previously, my high school didn’t do the best job with teaching history), so I’m confident that many of my readers will be similarly unfamiliar. Additionally, I feel that the impact of slavery and segregation are still plaguing our nation, and will continue to afflict us in the future. For that reason, it’s important to have a solid understanding of the dynamics that shaped our country’s past because only then can we understand how they will continue to shape its future. This essay-format offers the best way to achieve this goal, because I can rebuke these misconceptions with direct links to my sources, allowing readers to further explore the content if my analysis isn’t enough. In order to make the site more visually appealing, my website is full of freely usable images that are relevant to the text. Ultimately, I chose this topic and this format because I felt that it would allow me to make the largest positive impact.

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If it hasn’t been made evident already, I’m most motivated when I think my writing will create a positive change, which is why I enjoy writing for The Michigan Daily as much as I do. This feeling isn’t unique to my own writing — as an editor, I react similarly to other people's writing when I believe it’ll make a difference. For example, over this past Thanksgiving Break, the organizers of the #StopSpencer campaign (an effort to stop Richard Spencer from speaking at the University of Michigan), published an article titled “Call to Action 4 Instructors.” The piece was short, and it urged professors to boycott teaching (or at least excuse students who were participating in protests and therefore couldn't attend class). The piece was one of my section’s most read articles of the semester. Even though I didn’t write it, it made me excited about the positive potential of writing because it allowed communities to organize across the university in an effort to create a more inclusive campus. Despite all of this, I’m not interested in pursuing journalism as a career. This is because I don’t think it’s necessarily the writing itself that interests me. Instead, I believe it’s the potential for impact that writing has; however, this potential is also present in other fields. So far, I’ve only been able to have this impact through my writing, but in the future I hope to have a job that allows for an equivalent social impact as writing has the potential for. Specifically, I want to help make organizations more inclusive. In that regard, this assignment is closely related to my future ambitions, as it’s impossible to understand present day race-relations without having a firm understanding of the history behind it.