He asked.
“If you had to be any race, other than your own, during any time period in history, other than now, which race and time would you pick?”
And yes, Ron Scott got answers after he posted the query on his Facebook timeline. Some said Asian during the 16th Century, one person answered that he was just fine with his ebony skin. Oh, yes, and a man responded simply, “Klingon,” while another male replied, “Native American before white people.”
It was Ashleigh, though, that took the online conversation in an unexpected direction.
“2345, the human race has ended because of climate change. I am a tree.”
Scott, the cultural diversity and community outreach director for the Wheeling YWCA, was contemplating ideas for addressing issues within the Upper Ohio Valley to help residents understand the differences between the races. He has addressed everyone from school students to real racists, and Scott has helped move forward the conversation about equality.
“I was sitting here thinking about cultural and civics topics, and the question just came to me,” Scott explained. “After I put the question up on Facebook, I didn’t try to push it in any direction because I wanted to see where people take it. I enjoyed watching the thread, too, because people brought up some topics that I didn’t see coming. And I could tell that some of the people are still a bit guarded.
“There were some people who didn’t want to say anything that wasn’t politically correct, but most of them really did get into it,” he said. “Plus, I had someone in-box me and said they believed no one would say they wanted to be black during any time in our history. But someone did.”
Do They Know?
While his question was collecting replies, Scott wondered whether or not his Facebook friends possessed knowledge about the chosen races and time periods. The reply involving time travel back to before the European colonization of North America during the 15th Century made Scott think about his own question.
“I did find that to be very interesting because that meant they wanted to live in a time when we didn’t have electricity, and they had to hunt for their food every single day. I wondered if they considered those things about life back then before they answered because I don’t think I could have lived like that,” Scott said. “That had to be a really hard life, and then they were forced off their land.”
He also noticed something else. No one, not one of the plus-50 folks, wanted to simply change races and live as a member of that race today, Dec. 15, 2020.
Except for the tree, of course.
“Despite all of the advances that we enjoy right now, no one who replied wanted to be in the present. That really stuck out to me,” Scott said. “Medically, we are living longer than we ever have, and technologically, we can do things today that people didn’t dream about back then. Maybe they were romanticizing when they replied, and maybe it’s because of the pandemic.
“But that question and the answers are something I’ll be able to use in a program I am developing about biases that we have today,” he explained. “How different were those times in the past based on how we think of those times now, and what do we actually know about those times in our history? I just wonder if people were really educated about the times in history that they picked if they would have picked them.”
What About Ron?
Bluntly, Scott is not really sure how to answer his own question. In his position with the Wheeling YWCA, it’s his job to make people of all colors think about being a different one, but if he had the choice he offered the Facebook world, this educator, for once, is clueless.
“I think, if I had to choose, I would want to be an Incan or a Mayan around the time when they were building pyramids in South America. I don’t know much about them, and I don’t hear it talked about a lot. People talk about the pyramids that are in Egypt all the time, but not about the pyramids in South America, and they’re pretty nice, too,” Scott said. “That’s why I would want to live there and at that time in history so I could learn how they did it.”
His second answer? Scott believes it would prove interesting to live as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant of English descent during the roaring ‘20’s of the 20th Century.
“I do like to think of that time in our history because it seems like a time when things were simpler but still decadent,” he said. “It’s hard to describe, but I do wonder if that time in history was really like it was depicted in “The Great Gatsby.”
“From what I have seen and read about those times, it just appears to be so carefree, and everything was different from what it is now,” Scott added. “And who wouldn’t want to live like Gatsby did. That man had it going on.”
(Photos by Don Mew)
