Speaking Out About Race

About two years ago, I was part of a group of students who visited Jacksonville’s city council. A lot of us had personally experienced crime and violence in our community, and we were expecting to see our representatives doing something about these problems.

But what we found in our local government was shocking. Not one of the city council members seemed to have any idea what it was like to live in a community that’s affected by drugs and gang violence. They kept talking about the need for more policing—an idea we felt was the wrong approach. It occurred to us that these lawmakers might do a better job coming up with solutions if they had input from young people who were living with these challenges.

That’s what led me to found Hear the Youth, an organization dedicated to giving teens of color a platform to share their stories and express their needs to community leaders. We’ve been able to make significant steps toward improving the lives of Jacksonville’s youth. For example, many students of color don’t have computers at home, and that makes it really hard for them to succeed academically. Through our conversations with the school superintendent, we were able to get the district to partner with Sprint to provide free Wi-Fi for thousands of students so they could access the internet. We worked with the city to have teenagers appointed to Jacksonville’s Safety and Crime Reduction Commission  so our experiences can help guide decision making. Hear the Youth has also worked with the company that provides our school lunches to reduce the stigma involved with students getting free lunch.

Challenging the status quo isn’t easy. One area where we have consistently run into a roadblock is the name of my high school. For more than 90 years, my school has been named Robert E. Lee High School, after a famous Confederate general. The school’s student body is about 60 percent Black, and for years, we have been pushing for the school to be renamed. And for years, the school’s alumni and administrators adamantly resisted any consideration of changing it.

However, the death of George Floyd—and the new awareness of just how much still needs to be fixed when it comes to race—seems to have made many leaders in our community more receptive to change. More than 5,000 people have signed the petition that Hear the Youth circulated calling for the school to change its name. As a result, the school district has officially started the process of giving the institution where we learn, eat, and study each day a name its student body can be proud of.

So never take your first “no’’ as the final verdict in your activism journey. After all, if we’d given up on our high school after being told “no” for the first, second, and even third time, we would’ve never reached this point.

West Orange, New Jersey,  where I grew up, is a very diverse town: It’s about 43 percent white, 28 percent Black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent Asian. But it’s wrong to think that inclusion automatically follows from diversity.

In my experience, there are serious inequities and a lack of inclusion in West Orange. The schools are a perfect example of this. Students of color are underrepresented in the district’s Gifted & Talented Programs and its AP courses. You can see inequity in the condition of the elementary schools too: Those in predominantly white and upper-middle-class areas have new playground equipment, while the schools in mostly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods don’t.

For a long time, the school board has refused to acknowledge these inequities. Most people don’t want to have conversations that make them uncomfortable. But owning up to problems doesn’t make you a bad school as long as you have the intention of fixing them.

After the death of George Floyd, I knew we had to seize this moment to try to tackle these broader problems in my town. That’s why I’m part of a small group of students that founded the West Orange Youth Caucus. We’ve organized protests, but we’re also trying to take very concrete actions to promote change.

We’ve been talking to the mayor, other town officials, and the police chief. We’re gathering signatures on a petition calling for a town ban on the use of rubber bullets and tear gas. And we’re carefully reviewing town ordinances, looking for language that could allow for racial profiling, and suggesting revisions. We’re also pressing the school board to acknowledge longtime educational inequities and correct them.

Overall, our goal is to press the town to make the changes that young people feel we need. We know that right now we have the town’s attention, and we’re trying to take advantage of that. Usually, when something tragic like the death of George Floyd happens, it’s a month of awareness, and then it goes away. I hope it will be different this time around.

Katy, Texas, where I grew up, is an affluent suburb of Houston, and it’s part of one of the most racially and ethnically diverse counties in the country. Most people here would like to think that diversity means that racism doesn’t exist here. But growing up as an Asian American and the child of Chinese immigrants, that was not my experience.

In elementary school when I brought chicken and bok choy dumplings to school for lunch, kids would say, “What’s that weird smell?” It made me feel bad, and I stopped bringing in food from home. In middle school, classmates would ask if I would eat their dog or whether I could see through my slanted eyes when I smiled. Some white kids called me “chink.”

Eventually, I told my parents to talk to me in English instead of Mandarin at school events so my friends wouldn’t mock me the next day in class.

All these microaggressions created in me an intense sense of shame for my background, making me reject my own culture for years before finding pride in it as a teenager.

And then came the killing of George Floyd, which shook the foundations of Katy. Floyd’s death sparked many difficult and uncomfortable conversations among families of all kinds of backgrounds. Suddenly, I saw a lot of my non-Black friends of color speak out on social media about injustices, and I’m positive that these conversations pushed many white members of the community to finally acknowledge their privilege and realize the many microaggressions they had participated in or observed.

Believing that no community is too small to make our voices heard, my friends and I organized a protest for racial justice in Katy. The turnout was both incredible and overwhelming. We expected a few hundred students to show up, but we ended up with approximately 1,300 people—both adults and students.

Despite the success of the protest, we realized we need more than a four-hour event to enact real change in our community, so we founded Katy4Justice. Through this student group, we hope to uplift the voices of youth who’ve experienced discrimination and to bring attention to issues that have remained under the rug for far too long. One of our main goals is a push for an antiracist curriculum in Katy’s schools. We helped launched a petition to the Texas Board of Education, calling for the state education standards to be updated to include more details about Texas’s history of racial oppression and violence toward Black people. More than 13,500 people have signed the petition so far. We are planning a series of student blog posts about their experiences of racial discrimination in Katy’s schools.

Asian Americans have a particular role to play in this moment. We have long been stereotyped as smart, hardworking, and submissive—a so-called “model minority.” We must acknowledge that this has created among many Asian Americans a false sense of superiority over other people of color, and we must reject that. Asian Americans are responsible for raising children who are outspoken about racial injustice. We need to remember that one of the Minneapolis police officers who stood by and watched as George Floyd was killed was Tou Thao, an Asian American. We must be accountable; we must be better.

My father likes to remind me of the time that I told him racism didn’t exist anymore. I was about 10 years old, and I thought racism meant slavery or police officers turning a hose on civil rights protesters. Needless to say, I was naive.

My first experiences of racism came in sixth grade, with the reactions of white parents to my all-Black soccer team. One time, a parent said we were using “prison moves” while we played. After every incident like that, my parents and coaches would tell us: “There are people who don’t want to see us win because of the color of our skin, but we have to keep winning.”

In sixth grade, I switched from an all-Black public school to a predominantly white private school, and I began to conform to some unspoken white standard. I straightened my hair twice a month, spoke differently than I did at home, and tried not to talk about my old school. I saw the two schools as two different worlds that weren’t supposed to mix. To be honest, I still see it that way. Atlanta is a beautiful and diverse city, but it’s still segregated. There aren’t “whites only” signs anymore, but a 20-minute ride on the freeway can take you from mansions and malls with Gucci stores to underfunded schools and Dollar Generals.

I spend most of my time at school, and I love it, but it’s exhausting to be one of the few Black students. There are some things that I’ve always understood that my white peers have never been taught. I remember discussing the novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in eighth grade, and I had to explain what lynching was to my classmates. In 10th grade, I had to explain the horrors of the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which white doctors intentionally allowed Black men to suffer from syphilis rather than treat them. There have been moments when a white student has said something that was insensitive, ignorant, or naive, and the few Black students would share a silent look and maybe talk about it after class.

I have wonderful friends, but as the only Black person in my friend group,
I still feel like an outsider sometimes. When I saw the news about George Floyd, I broke down, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to a single friend, simply because they were white. I knew they’d tell me they cared, but they also couldn’t understand what it’s like to be Black in America.

I know it’s my duty to lean into that discomfort. I’m in a very white space, and I can’t be afraid to educate those around me about the hate in this country. That means following the news, attending rallies, and signing petitions. I spent a lot of time this fall encouraging students to register to vote, and I’ve also started volunteering in predominantly Black neighborhoods. We’re living in a country where there’s hate and bigotry in almost every headline, but it’s my job to spread compassion through my words and my actions.

I’m from Franklin, Tennessee,  and like most people in my town, I’m white. Franklin is a prosperous suburb of Nashville, and it’s one of those places where if a kid asks for the skin-colored crayon, the teacher automatically gives them the peach one, ignoring the fact that skin tones come in many different colors. Most people here live in a bubble, trying to ignore that racism is real—or maybe they’re so used to being racist themselves that they’re blind to it.

I’m lucky to have grown up seeing this problem. When I was in elementary school, my best friend was a girl who had been adopted from Ethiopia. I saw people treat her differently, and it confused me. Then I realized they were treating her differently because she was Black, and I began to understand that this was racism at work.

But it was George Floyd’s death that really launched my activism. After it happened, I went over to my friend Jade’s house. Jade is a person of color, and she was absolutely heartbroken by the video of Floyd’s death. We sat on her bed and together watched dozens of videos about racism on TikTok. A few days later, we participated in a protest. But going to the protest just made us realize how much more work needed to be done. So Jade and I began reaching out on Twitter to other young people in Nashville. That’s how we connected with the four other girls with whom we created Teens4Equality and planned another massive rally against police violence. More than 10,000 people turned out for our five-hour march through Nashville.

A lot of white people are uncomfortable with the idea of Black Lives Matter. I often hear them counter that “all lives matter.” Of course all lives matter. But all lives can’t matter until Black lives matter too. For me, joining the Black Lives Matter movement felt like the right thing to do. As a white person, I need to use my voice to call attention to and amplify the voices of people who are unheard or ignored.

My message to the people who look like me is to pop the bubble that most of us live in and stop ignoring racism. White people need to acknowledge what’s happening and help the Black community fight racism. It’s our job to tear down the terrible, long reign of white supremacy that our ancestors have left for us. After all, which side of history do you all want to be on?