On Friday, April 27, the East African Community Cultural Center in City Heights hosted one of their bi-weekly Youth Workshops. For this workshop, the students were asked to share their experiences with identity and racism through first writing a poem about themselves, then sharing and expanding on it by talking about racism they had encountered in school. Their stories and awareness of how they are treated differently from their peers were striking to me, especially considering the ages of the youths (the girl I talked to was in fifth grade). The images are of the terms that Jesse Mills, the guest lecturer of the workshop, used to help the students start their poems and thoughts on identity, and of a drawing one student made on the back of her poem.
