Ilo Takamatsu’s Reflection:
Last semester in an English class, I wrote an essay on a novel published in the early 1700s, titled Fantomina. I didn’t think that essay would be anything more than another product of the last two weeks of the semester, which I spent running on three hours of sleep and a few Red Bulls a day, but it ended up playing a major role in a realization I had during my internship. That realization was about the amount of effort that actually goes into the promotion and wide acceptance of “other” or minority groups.
For years, I’ve considered myself a feminist, although there wasn’t much I personally had to do or learn; people on the internet did everything, from teaching me about feminism to advocating for it. This made it easy for me to write that essay on Fantomina. I already knew all the personal issues, all the things to say and not say when it came to gender equality. During my internship, I realized that I’d taken that for granted. I might know how to uplift women who were treated unfairly in eighteenth-century stories, but I know almost nothing about other groups I haven’t been surrounded by. I grew up around privilege, and I go to a college that could be the dictionary definition of it.
Where I’m going with this is that I hit a huge obstacle when researching and writing an advertisement asking Dallas professionals to mentor underserved students, and I was unable to recognize how my language failed to be uplifting when it came to a topic I previously knew nothing about. I messed up, I panicked, and that’s when I realized that the reason I was able to write so clearly about feminism in Fantomina was not because I was just good at recognizing equality; it was because I have had the opportunity to learn how to recognize feminism.
This was a major personal realization for me, and I’ve developed an itch to research more, to know more, and to write more, specifically about groups and communities that I have had no proximity to before. All in all, this internship has interacted with my English studies by creating an appreciation for the advocates behind many mainstream ideas that have made it easy for me to write essays as if the knowledge were my own. My current goal is not to be ashamed of my ignorance, because shame does nothing to add to what effort is capable of. I want to learn how to learn and to apply that knowledge to the situations I come across, not just know about one topic.
I’ll be actively looking for opportunities in English classes to learn and write about things outside my current little knowledge bubble during my last year at SMU.