SJRA Meets Y.U.C

Today, I would say that we mainly focused on racism and white supremacy in America. This is a topic that I am very passionate about because I am a minority and I am at a disadvantage in our that system. This is also a topic that I am not very informed about outside of personal experience. Racism is still well and alive today in our society. It really annoys me when people try to use multiple ignorant excuses to say that racism no longer exists. This is not true. Different people of color are at a constant disadvantage and they don't have access to the same human rights as white people. 

During the lecture, we touched on the subject of reverse racism which I believe does not exist. Yes, people of color can be prejudice to whites but we cannot be racist because we do not benefit from, or control the system. Many people do not understand this or refuse to accept it. Our lecturer, Tony, had a lot to say about the elite people of color who have made it to the top 1 percent and how they perpetuate the system. I disagreed with him on this because there is no way that if I hypothetically made it to the top, knowing my struggle as an African female, there is no way I would be perpetuating the system, as long as I recognized that the system is broken. I'm not sure if sentence made sense but that's how I feel. I'm not supposed to just stay at the bottom in order to not support the system. 

street art in south philly

After the morning session, we took a sight visit to the Youth Uniting for Change in south Philadelphia. It was amazing visiting these young people because they are about my age and are actively fighting for education rights. We saw that one of their schools had bars and locks across their windows which proved that they were being treated like criminals. Not coincidentally, the majority of students at these type of schools are minorities and people of color and it proves that the system sets many P.O.C to fail. We visited a really beautiful park near their school and played a really cool game where everyone spoke about what injustices they were passionate about. People in my class spoke on LGBT activism or political activism. I found that to be very inspirational. I know for sure that when I come back to California, I will try to take my passions more seriously and share them with people and be more active with the injustices happening around me. I talk a lot about how I hate the food quality in my school but it takes actually guts to do something about it and that's what I'm going to do. The teenagers I met today didn't find excuses to not fight for what they believe in and neither should I.