Leo Yoonsmith, Period 6, 3/23/23

 

• Socio-political Consciousness

• What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and/or power?

• How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and 30

• .others?

This summer, I went to a summer camp dedicated to helping a younger lgbtq camp and going out and learning more about yourself. We would always have these afternoon seminars, where we would talk about something incredibly openly, and everyone would contribute, hopefully finding something they learned about themselves. This particular day, we talked about the topic of racism. One of the counselors was African American, and was leading the conversation. He talked about the experiences that he had, where people were subliminally racist to him, and how that had made him feel. It's disgusting that people have to live with discrimination impacting many conversations they have with supposed friends every day. Not only that, but as we recalled experiences that we had with people close to us being racist, and everyone was talking about how they had stood up and voiced their opinion about how that wasn’t okay, my mind drifted to a time in my gym where my peers were being very discriminatory in a manner they seemingly couldn't understand was wrong, and I had just chastised them slightly and disregarded it. After that, many different variations of that conversation that had happened throughout the school year flooded my head, and I was shocked to see how much I had failed. From then on, I decided that I wouldn’t hesitate to call any level of discrimination out as I saw important, equally for me as for anyone else who would have been impacted by the wrong.