http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/860001.html
"When no one wanted to sit next to me,
I hated myself," she writes.
"When no one invited me
to birthday parties,
I sat in a room and
cried about who I am.
I would stand for hours
on the rim of the bathtub,
looking at the mirror,
making faces and trying
to find the part of me
that was defective.
I never found anything other
than the different skin color.
I dreamed of being white."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/860001.html
Holon teen wins prize with racism essay
By Or Kashti
Kasa Geto, a 12th-grade student from Holon
whose family immigrated from Ethiopia in 1991,
looked a bit surprised by the tumult that
erupted at Tel Aviv University yesterday
in the first moments of the Dan David Prize
ceremony.
But Geto, one of three first-place winners
of the "Name Your Hero" essay competition
for Israeli high school students,
took a deep breath and plunged into
her tale of the racism she faced as
an Ethiopian and about the
self-hatred she felt as a result.
"Martin Luther King's story
is the story of my life,"
said Geto.
"I thought I would be likely
to be damaged by the essay,
that I wasn't sure I was ready
to expose my weak points like this.
But then I realized that this is
also the struggle of my cousin,
of my siblings, who also dream
the dream of integration,
experience the same racism -
and don't talk about it."
The Unit for Science-Oriented Youth
at Tel Aviv University has been working
with the Dan David Prize to run the
essay competition for the past two years.
This year,
senior faculty members at the
university selected the best 12
essays out of some 500 submissions,
and selected Geto's as
one of the top three
(who tied for first place).
Each of the three receives NIS 10,000;
Geto suggested that the prize money go to Tebeka,
an advocacy group for the legal rights of the
Ethiopian Israeli community.
In the winning essay,
Geto writes that she heard about the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the
first time this year,
"after a lecture that my cousin
and I gave about the racism of
the 21st century,
the same racism that's kicking
and breathing from the past and
that screams into the present."
'Scared to look in the mirror'
After describing the American
civil rights activist briefly,
Geto writes:
"Without my Amharic name
and the color of my skin,
many would have thought
that I was born in Israel ...
For two years I have been
lecturing about racism toward
my ethnic group.
Many say that it can't be
that primitive discrimination,
which stems from ignorance,
still exists.
If that's the case, you tell me:
How is it that for years I was
scared to look in the mirror?
How is it that only after so
much pain I was prepared to
accept myself as black?
How could it be that today,
in the 21st century,
the gates of schools in
Israel slam shut in the
faces of Ethiopian children?"
Since immigrating to Israel,
the Geto family has lived in
a trailer site near Acre,
in Nahariya and in Holon,
where they have been
since 1996.
"My neighborhood was a
neighborhood of whites,"
writes Geto.
"We were the first Ethiopian
family in the neighborhood,
and I was apparently the first
Ethiopian girl in the class
and in the school."
"When no one wanted to sit next to me,
I hated myself," she writes.
"When no one invited me
to birthday parties,
I sat in a room and
cried about who I am.
I would stand for hours
on the rim of the bathtub,
looking at the mirror,
making faces and trying
to find the part of me
that was defective.
I never found anything other
than the different skin color.
I dreamed of being white."
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