SAN DIEGO, CA—Amid the rhetoric about equality and social justice spurred on by the presidential campaigning, several of the nation's young people are asking themselves where they stand on issues of race, gender, income inequality, and other topics.
One confused young man has found his place in the fight for equality in an unlikely place: the laundromat. Benjamin Kolowski, 24, explained his personal battle to The Colon.
"When I was younger, I never really thought about these bigger social issues, you know? It was just not really in my field of vision, I guess. Well, when I finally moved out on my own, my mom wasn't around to do my laundry any more, and my roommates were really uptight about doing it, so it fell to me to wash my own clothes. That's when I uncovered the uncomfortable truth about laundry."
"Ben" Kolowski, a part-time student majoring in communications, stated that he started asking around how to properly wash one's filth from one's clothes, and everyone he spoke with told him that he needed to separate the white clothes from the dark clothes.
"I knew something was wrong right then," he said. Kolowski related that, at first, he thought people must be joking with him. "Surely, in this political climate, these people must hear the racial overtones of what they were saying."
Kolowski even researched online sources, including how-to videos, and found that they all consistently stated the need to segregate clothing by color.
"That's when I found my calling," he added.
The confused young man shared that he didn't sleep for a whole night while thinking about the "archaic" practice. "All I could think was, 'What would MLK say if he were still around?' And I wanted to change things, but what could I do?"
Kolowski explained that he awoke invigorated, and decided what he must do. The first thing he did was go straight to the nearest laundromat, and in front of everyone, he put all of his laundry—regardless of color, fabric, or care instructions—into a single washing machine. He took note of a few strange looks from other patrons, but he only smiled back at them, reassuringly.
"It felt so good to push back against the social constraints that keep us from progress," he said, not stopping the words from escaping his mouth. "I bet those people really thought hard about what they'd seen that day."
Although he admits that he's not likely to change the laundry world overnight, Kolowski, who should have been working on a term paper during our interview, stated that if he can get just one person to treat their clothing-of-color the same as their whites, he will have succeeded.
His practices seem to be changing the way he perceives the world, he shared, wiping away a tear, "You know, you might call me crazy, but I really feel like I'm seeing things in a whole new light. This shirt, for example. I used to see it as super white, and bright. Now, the more I'm learning about equality, and how all clothes are the same, no matter how they look, this white shirt is starting to look more and more like my darker clothes."