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Showing posts from November, 2014

#BlackLivesMatter

My suite mates, friends, and I are sitting in our common room doing work and hanging out when we started talking about the grand jury's decision in Ferguson. We all frantically started looking up the decision, the responses, and to see what's next. We anxiously plugged a laptop in to replay President Obama's statement about the decision. We were at least mildly disappointed with the statement, but ultimately we understood why he had the pressure on him to give a speech as neutral as he did. Nevertheless, I followed twitter, I checked a live report scanner on Reddit, and I read news articles with live updates. Chaos ensued, and it felt like the world is watching. It felt so unfair, so crazy. Did we expect this was going to happen though? It didn't make the pain feel less urgent, it didn't make it go away. Then someone we knew contacted us. All she wrote to me was, "hey girl you up for a protest," and I was ready to help. Over the next few hours, plans unf

Planting Seeds

One of the things I learned when I went to church throughout high school was that the best we can do with our activism is to plant seeds. We can't demand that people come around and become super devout and passionate about what we care about as soon as we tell them. We can't expect to change people's lives by spending a week with them. I've kept that in mind over the years at Rice. When I site-led an Alternative Spring Break my sophomore year, I didn't want my group members to think we were going to save the students we meet and somehow dramatically raise their grades and lift them out of poverty and dangerous neighborhoods. We were there really to learn and to plant seeds. To plant seeds of these inklings of ideas that people out there care about low-income inner-city children who deserve a safe and good education from loving educators. To plant seeds that college and success are possible. To plant seeds that hard work can pay off, although not always as likely i