Rose moved to the United States from Jamaica at the age of 14. She has lived in New York City since and has flourished both academically and socially. She commented on how she learned about discrimination in the classroom:
I remember in high school one time I had this teacher and she was Black-American and apparently there is this long-standing rivalry between Black-Americans, Black-American people and Caribbean people that I didn’t really know about, and so she would make these comments all the time about the Jamaican people in her class and she said, uhm, someone had said that they were rich in Jamaica and then she had said that that was not possible because no one in Jamaica is rich and if we were we wouldn’t be here. And then she went on to make further comments about how we all drank the same contaminated water and how her image of Jamaicans is that we dance bare-feet in grass skirts… I was really shocked that a teacher would say that because… like I expect my teachers to be very professional and not bring in personal prejudices into their teaching. Uhm, and I was also a little angry about that just because it was so ignorant and offensive, but, I got over it.”
