Received on February 12, 2021

Javier Mina’s article on “Racial Awareness in the BT Community” was excellent and hopefully opens the way for more thought, discussion, and action. I was especially interested in the comments by Sophia Ragan who is currently at Georgia State University. She stated that “she liked to think of herself as “woke” in high school, but “it wasn’t until [she] started going to protests and spending more time downtown, that [she] really began to hear and understand the stories of black people and people of color.”

You know, before the Black Lives Matter movement this summer, I thought I somewhat understood the “black experience’ in this country. I grew up in Midtown, Atlanta; I went to a high school with a half-black student body. I knew and went to school with one of Martin Luther King’s children; my parents marched for civil rights, and I have grandchildren that are mixed race.

Well, that’s what I thought…I was wrong. As the atrocities against people of color unfolded, as I watched a video of a little boy playing in his driveway and then hiding from a police car as it rode by, as I witnessed the difference in police presence at the Capital for the BLM march and the Trump march/riot, I realized I don’t know anything. So, how do I change that?

When dealing with race or religious differences, the BT community is in a bubble and does not experience or is exposed to these issues daily, and we never will be because of where we live and go to school, so that makes “walking in some else’s shoes” harder to do.

So what is the answer when our school is predominately upper-middle-class and white? I agree that posters and lectures are not enough; it is a good start, but do you students have ideas? Maybe you could organize among yourselves, bring your concerns and ideas to the Social Justice Committee. Did you even know that there is a Social Justice Committee at BT? (made up only of teachers at this time)

I believe that as a human race we will never attain complete racial and religious justice, however, I hope we will, but that will take constant work on our part. It will take us being willing to listen, willing to change, and willing to forgive ourselves and start over when we fall short. And lord knows, I fall short every day; I just have to try again.

Blessings,
Ms. Conway