Fear – an unpleasant emotion caused by being aware of danger, according to Merriam Webster. Psychology Today calls fear “a vital response to physical and emotional danger.” Everyone remembers being a kid and believing there was a monster in the closet. When we grow up, terror stays with us, but the causes change. Years later, we fear things we see in horror movies, crazy people with axes, kidnapping and much more mundane things, such as a bad test score. Sometimes fear becomes concentrated on a place. As children, we fear the closet. Brookside teens, we fear Troost Avenue.

The majority of our private school seems to be middle class and Caucasian. Most of us live in Brookside, an incredibly safe, sheltered place with an ice cream parlor, or other middle class neighborhoods. Because of this, most of us fear “bad” areas. We dread driving on Troost and avoid it if at all possible.

The odd thing about the fear of Troost is no one recognizes the fear for what it is: prejudice. The unspoken assumption seems to be if people live in a poorer area, they are automatically dangerous to be around, so much so that we don’t even want to drive down a street where they live. STA girls always talk about how Troost is scary, but seem to ignore the problems underlying our fear.

Troost is a high crime area and can be dangerous, but that does not mean going there will guarantee a violent demise. There’s no reason not to be cautious, but know your biases may be influencing you. Until you go there, you will never know what Troost is really like. Find activities going on around Troost and go to them with your friends and family. You may find your assumptions were wrong and not be afraid anymore.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to being afraid of childish things, like the closet monster. My monsters always turned out to be made of piles of clothes or toys. But maybe our fears now aren’t so different from fears of the bogey man. Just like when we were kids, the only way to make the monsters go away is to confront them. Most of the time, they turn out to be nothing but illusion.