Wearing the Kente Graduation Stole KNOWLEDGE Symbol, on my graduation day from at home and the field, came with irony from those around me..
A 10-minute yelling argument with my REDACTED at my house (when I didn't know my family was in the living room) to the “He likes Black women” comment I heard outside my school’s gym from a fellow graduate - There is no difference between conservative and liberal spaces. It is undulated racism. The racism that is instilled into every American, by the status quo.
I have seen firsthand when I was a high schooler, the racist comments online on the club’s page to microaggressions calmly thrown around from friends and students to me. I have seen how the club is looked at from the outside. I have seen, with my own two eyes, how students will take food from the club and not participate/listen in. I have also seen a white student take food and leave immediately, he was on the board and I took his place to do actual leadership work. I have no ill will to former club members, that left on their own terms.
At graduation, a white kid could wear the sash with no intention of representing the values it holds - is seen as nothing and a joke. However, when someone (I) wears it: It's seen as radical, insane for a non-Black student to wear it, with no recognition of the solidarity (I a Mexican-Chinese) student to be active (for a couple of years, in the club) to be wearing it, and seen simply as weird. At first: Walking to the gym, at the gym (outside and inside), and walking to the field - I felt weird because I was in two unwelcoming spaces. Later, I snapped back into reality, at the field, to reality and wore it with pride (as intended), with solidarity in mind.
How do I know that it is “normal” for an American to be racist and that ideas are unnaturally instilled? Besides the studying behind that? Just do the research (this is not a research article, fuck y’all I am not doing the work for you - this time). I grew up in a n0Rm@l household and after growing out of it, I still found myself (as a sophomore) feeling out of place and weird about being at the meetings (I wonder why). It’s not like the club only allowed Black students, it’s a club for a community of Black students and a shining light of an education center open to all. I opened myself up to learn and explore a space that others speak ill of - because I began to understand that it is an unnatural belief system that was holding me down (from sophomore to unlearning it in my junior year).