Our Hyphenated Identities: Matthew's Story
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Meet Matthew DiPesa. Matthew is a senior in the Commonwealth Honors College majoring in journalism and minoring in political science. Matthew hails from Scituate, Massachusetts—a town lucky to have the designation as being the most Irish town in America. But Matthew feels rather unlucky about the fact. This is his story:
Matthew’s family has been living in Scituate for three generations, ever since his great-grandparents emigrated from Galway, Ireland. Scituate is a town of a little under 19,000, 96 percent of which identify as white. Growing up, Matthew says, white was all he ever really knew and that “when you live with people that only look like you, it leads to serious misconceptions about those different from you.”
Coming to UMass changed that for Matthew. “In Scituate, there’s a pressure to do what everyone else is doing and dress the way everyone else is dressing and like the things everyone else liked. Once I came to UMass, it was not like that. I was exposed to so many different people with different passions and interests.” Matthew admits that his time at UMass has been spent unlearning all the misconceptions that were around him back home.
I first got in contact with Matthew a week ago when he blindly emailed me saying he appreciated my blog series and enjoyed my writing. Shocked, since I thought only my mother really read my blogs, we met for coffee and chatted about my writing, his writing and projects, and his story (which he didn’t think he had one, but I believe everyone has a story—it’s just about asking the right questions).
During our conversation, Matthew expressed deep frustration over the lack of awareness among people and change in the world: “There needs to be something that’s desperately changed about how we all live with each other. I just feel like I’m not doing enough.” But I believe that just by reaching out to me, he is doing enough for what one individual can do. He’s choosing to learn, to educate himself, to grow, and that’s all one can ask of a person. In his email to me, he wrote: “The value of the work you're doing is that, through telling the stories of different individuals, you can show people that even with our different appearances, labels, and categories, there are similarities and connections that all people share. When people become aware of these similarities across different races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, etc., I believe it can have the effect of dismantling and destroying prejudices.”
Matthew is doing his own work in connecting people across campus through his Honors Thesis. He hopes to learn more about peoples’ perspectives and ideas on social media—its effects and its future—through conversations with different people across the university. His thesis is still in its initial stages, but I know his passion and eagerness will get him far.