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I looked out the window, silently comparing the scenery to that which I was used to seeing back home in a suburb of Los Angeles. My Grandpa had picked me up from the airport and we were on our way driving to where he lived in Omaha, Nebraska. He is an old man that is always trying to learn more. He is constantly reading more and more about our world and is always adding to his already vast knowledge of our world. My Grandpa was sitting next to me driving, listening to his audiobook about a sioux native american tribe. This is a fairly standard thing for him to do as he drives. He has a particular interest in native american history because his job requires him to work closely with certain tribes in his area. There is a larger native american population in Nebraska as well so many similar social issues to those that I had been introduced to in California involving hispanics and african-americans were happening there except against Native Americans. Eventually after we had been sitting, listening, for a while, my grandpa began to talk to me about a time he saw a native american couple on a bus getting harassed by a white man. The reason that this really bothered me is that he said this with a laugh. At the time, as a 12 year old, I got most of my information simply from listening to what was told to me. This went against the way I was being raised in my house by my mom. Her teachings that I should be open and care about people regardless of race was being challenged in my young teen mind by my grandpa watching and laughing at open and blatant racism. At first his comment caught me off guard but as I continued to think about his comment as our drive continued I realized that this was because of he was of an older generation that grew up with this being a normal occurrence. At the time though, I still did not quite understand why he had not changed with the rest of society. I now know that this is because he does not critically analyze the way our society works. I didn’t realize at the time that he is part of the problem with our society. By not standing up for the couple being harassed, he is just as much of the problem as the man doing the harassing. He was unintentionally reinforcing the idea that it is ok to treat people unequally while seeming like he only shared a story. Since hearing that on our car ride, my mind was constantly off making more and more comparing and contrasting comparisons between the part of the nation I was seeing and the part that I was used to living in. We continued to go through poor towns and cornfields and saw more and more areas that did not seem moral. Even my young mind could tell the strong correlation between the poorest neighborhoods and the ethnicities of the people standing outside. Looking back on it, I now realize that the issues that I was witnessing were social justice issues that were much more prevalent here. Since that moment a long time ago, my thoughts on a lot of what I continue to witness when I visit the midwest have changed drastically. While the way that my grandpa and others from his area of the country act when it comes to these social justice issues is not just, they are not each individually to blame for things being the way that they are. Instead, my experience with a relative so close to me has shown me that this falls on all of those who internalized this oppression and made it a mainstream occurrence in our society. As far as he knows, the experience I had with my grandpa was just him telling me about something he saw that he thought was funny. It has meant more to me because it is the moment I first really realized how internalized racism and other forms of social injustices are.