Sunday, June 17, 2012

Brittany Counts on Social Justice



AH: I think that I want to ask you about social justice, civil rights, working with youth you are obviously on the front lines about the kinds of issues that they talk about within the Charleston area. Although you are fairly new to Charleston, have you come into contact with issues that are facing Black youth here in Charleston? How do you feel, what is your role in that to possibly improve social justice, civil rights here in Charleston?

BC: I hear a lot, especially from the boys in the program about they cannot walk along, how they cannot walk from their house to a convenience store to get something to drink without often being stopped and questioned by police and they have asked me to take them to DMV so that they could get if not a permit at least a state authorized identification card so that maybe it can help a little bit, when they tell the cops that they are not doing anything, I am just going to get something to drink that is it. They suffer from racial profiling a lot and with the, all of the media attention on the Trayvon Martin case, it hit home for me, because when they were like he was walking with his Arizona tea and a Skittles in his black hoodie, I instantly saw so so many of my male students because they do that so so often. They love their Arizona drinks and they wear their hoodies not necessarily black ones, they have purples ones, it is just a part of their daily outfits even in the summer time you can count that they are going to have that hoodie and it just scary to think that it could have easily been one of my students, and it hit me hard enough as it was and just that thought made the impact, so, so much worse. And so when the College of Charleston decided to have demonstrations and marches for, to let people know the injustice that the Martin family had, was dealing with. I participated in all that I could, I discussed it with my kids to see how they felt about it, and what their families, their friends are saying about it. And they don’t, it has not necessarily hit them yet, that social injustice happens on a daily basis, it is just that when, you have to have people who are willing to bring it to the light and is often, is been referred to as a case very similar, the Emmitt Till case, and my students don’t know who Emmitt Till is, they don’t know what has happened to him and as we get into this discussion I realize that so much of African American history has been left out in their school books, in anything. I remember learning of Emmitt Till in elementary school, he is not even mentioned anymore, it is just like every year it gets less and less and eventually there is a fear that Black history will not be taught as a part of history classes at all. And so, my, the way that I see it is, how can these kids be expected to work hard to prevent something that they never knew happened in the first place. And so we focus on every week bringing something from African American history to them, whether it is something as sad and heart jerking as the Emmitt Till case, or as celebratory story, of how, of the Civil Rights Act and when it was finally passed or how African Americans have come together in times of need and that tends to be a constant throughout history, that whenever one of us is suffering, we are all suffering and we are all there to help. And through, through that, students have found newer motivation and so I feel by inspiring my students, my eight students, if they go out and they share that with one friend, that is sixteen people impacted by my work and my goal of making sure that they know that there is more to what they are being told. That it is not simply this cut and dry, this happened here and this happened here and that got us where we are today. Making sure that they know the big stories that were in the media and some of the stories that weren’t, that way they can have, they can be educated on the facts, and not just on the things that happened in schools, but the things, the problems that they may face in work and make sure that if something comes up and there is a chance of social injustice towards them, we make sure that we prepare them, so that there is nothing that person can say, without coming straight out and saying well, I am doing this because you are African American. They cannot say because you are unclean and unkempt because we train our kids to know that when they go to job, when they have a job interviews, whether it is McDonald’s, or Wal-Mart, or to be assistant in an office in the neighborhood, you are dressed as if you are going to church on Easter Sunday and it is that simple. We prepare them in all of the things that we lacked preparation for ourselves and in all other areas that we feel that because of where they live they do not get exposed to.

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