Reflection on Grace Paley’s Traveling
Grace Paley’s “traveling” explores the author’s encounters with racial discrimination during the year 1927. This piece of writing is with reference to the author’s bus ride to Virginia with her mother and sister, where their statuses as ‘strangers’ separated them from the rest of the passengers. As Paley and her family seated them selves on the back rows of the vehicle, they noticed that ‘the darker people who had got on in New York rose from their seats…and moved to the back of the bus.” Immediately there was tension; because Paley, her mother, and her sister refused to move up from the back of the bus, to where they ‘belong’. Growing up in Bangkok, Thailand, I have had similar experiences as the ones stated in Paley’s essay. Although it is never brought up, racial discrimination is prevalent within Thai culture, a culture once heavy in skintone bias. Having tanner skin was equated with out-door labour and living in the countryside. Having fairer skin was equated with beauty, prestige, and growing up in the city. This aversion to darker skin is embedded in Thai society, and I think that it is steadily dissolving due to the increasing representation of darker skinned individuals. This has made people come to embrace their own natural beauty.
