I visited both the Southern Sudanese Community Center and the East African Community Cultural Center in City Heights last week on Tuesday, April 24th and Friday, April 27th for Tutoring Hours and the Youth Workshop, respectively.
Both were lively spaces where I got to interact with students (mostly from middle school to high school ages) and folks who work and/or volunteer in the space. One of the things that stood out to me was how vocal students were about sharing their experiences with racism from their teachers and peers. This came about through an activity the facilitator, Jesse Mills, had us participate as a segway into the topic of “Institutional Racism and African American Intra-Racial Relations.” The poem students created spoke to their identities of religion, immigration status, nationality, race and how these things do or do not line up with how they perceive themselves (or not).
**The poster drawings were from a previous workshop session (Friday, April 13) from when students watched Black Panther and then did an activity where they imagined what their future world/society could look like. I chose to include this because I really liked their ideas and especially the ones “money doesn’t exist” and “men can’t be in power, it’s illegal”.
