What do I Want??

What do I want? While attending the NSPA convention this year, I learned much about the future benefits of journalism and how to better my writing not only as an editor, but also as a student that’s interested in journalism. However, in one of the sessions, I learned that you can use open ended questions or questions that require the person being questioned to interpret which makes stories much more interesting. For example, one of those questions was “What do you want?”

So the question lies..what do I want?

I want racial equality.

I think that these past few years, there has been good evidence to support that there has been troubles sustaining racial equality. There have been many examples where “white privilege” or the idea of “white supremacy” became quite an issue. This remark of “white supremacy” was an act that had pointed out white people and how they had better power and well… better everything. 

I think that we can closely relate the topic of racial equality with racism. An example of an injustice for racial equality will take us back to 2020. During the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, the public had experienced one of the most powerful movements, the Black Lives Matter movement, or BLM. The movement had begun when a 46-year-old Black American man by the name of George Floyd had been reported to have bought cigarettes with a counterfeit 20 dollar bill. When police officer Derek Chauvin reported to the scene, things only went downhill. A video went viral of security footage of Chauvin with his knee to Floyd’s neck. This then created the heartbreaking “I can’t breathe” and “Justice for George Floyd” viral hashtags. 

According to Harpersbazaar, “a woman’s studies scholar” by the name of Peggy McIntosh, also senior associate and founder of the National SEED Project, described some examples of White privilege that occur on a daily basis. One example of which was “If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.” Based on experience, this is actually true. Here at Animo Jefferson and the neighborhood around it, we don’t see many white people in the school or around us, mostly Latinos or Black Americans living in this area due to poverty. However, if you go to another such place like Beverly Hills, we see that there are indeed more White Americans there and they have much better houses and better budgets to buy the house they desire. 

The National SEED project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) is a community and organization whose goal is to see a change in the world and its racial injustices. So, that concludes:

What do I want?

A new change, Racial Equality.