Cheryl Pruitt: A Story of Struggle
According to Cheryl Pruitt, All of us are surrounded by insidious air of prejudices and stereotypes. Most of us do not realize that the biases we hold for people not only harm society in general but may also invoke an emotional storm in a person enduring them. In present-day society, we are deafened by the biases of gender, backwardness, fetishism, color, caste, and we do not even realize how many dreams and great minds give in to these atrocities every day. The vainest and the most sickening prejudices are that of gender and color. Society sets different expectations for both men and women. Men are expected to be muscular, athletic, and virtually ‘stone-hearted’ whereas women are stereotyped to be weak, kind, and subservient. Being a black woman has always been challenging because these aspects of our outlook can remain silently influential on our behavior. Even after we have rejected them, and they represent an incongruous reality of grim emotions of fear, disgust, hate, and condescension towards other human beings.
However, several people in the world do not surrender to these challenges. Such people take into account that these challenges are not meant to destroy one but to strengthen one. An example of the people who faced these adversities with the heart of a lion and also became a pillar of support to other people in the community is Cheryl Pruitt.
Cheryl Pruitt was born in 1963. During this era, the world had not grown out of the psychological harms of World War II. Life for the black was very different then than it is now. World War II had led to an increase in the incorporation of women in the workforce and the breadwinning spheres of traditionally patriarchal society. Though this was a significant step to the progression of women, this also meant the women were now in a more vulnerable position to face the hardships inflicted onto them by the world. Cheryl opened her eyes in an environment that was trying to ‘unlearn’ the wrong, conventional practices that had diseased the roots of the society for years. Around the time of her birth, America was going through the second wave of feminism. This wave gave a boost to the oppressed women of society. She knew the importance of education in the character building and advancement of a person, so she pursued an academic career in the esteemed colleges of Rust College for a Bachelor’s degree and the University of Memphis for her doctorate.
When Cheryl Pruitt had to choose a career for herself, we could not think of a better job but an educator. It is no brainer that you won’t become enormously successful unless you face an immensely difficult situation. Although Cheryl faced all these problems very bravely, I sometimes wonder how she was able to draw strength from such moments, how anyone does so! It may sound cliché, but I think the more frequent and the more difficult the problems of life are, the stronger is the person who has suffered them.
