Turning Lemons Into Lemonade: How This PA High School Is Destroying the Hate
An open forum was held at a suburban Pennsylvania high school, which serves over 1,700 students, to address racial division brought to light by a racially insensitive Instagram post and develop solutions to move toward unity. During the dynamic dialogue, students and staff discussed the lack of education on racism, the difficulty discussing issues on race relations, and how to handle situations which involve people making racist and/or microaggressive comments.
According to Microaggressions: Power, Privilege, and Everyday Life, a Tumblr blog that posts visual representations of microaggressions:
[microaggressions] are never meant to hurt--acts done with little conscious awareness of their meanings and effects. Instead, their slow accumulation during a childhood and over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience, making explanation and communication with someone who does not share this identity particularly difficult. Social others are microaggressed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.
In an attempt to gain visual representations of the microaggression these students face, they were asked the following questions:
Can you think of a recent experience when you benefitted or suffered from people having a stereotype about you? What was said? Write it down.
If you have not had an experience, what makes such experiences rare?
These questions were used to uncover the students’ privilege and socially constructed identities in an effort to make visible the ways in which everyday microaggressions reinforce difference. Ultimately, the students’ experiences were recorded and photographed to create the campaign, “Destroy the Hate.”