Academy of Our Lady unpacks racism, peer to peer

Story and photos by Beth Donze, Clarion Herald; artwork in banner photo above by Nha Nguyen, Academy of Our Lady senior

Last month, students at the Academy of Our Lady in Marrero sat in the safety of their classrooms to describe how the color of their skin had been turned against them.

During the discussion session conducted for juniors, one student recalled how her classmates would compare her dark complexion to “a burned biscuit” in elementary school.

Another junior told of how her African-American mother, a skilled massage therapist, was passed over for a promotion because the owner wanted a white face to front his business, even though the chosen employee had far less experience.

The Honduran-born parents of another student regularly suffered the humiliation of being called “illegals” and other slurs.

“It just hurts seeing my family judged like that,” the student said. “Judge them for the person they are, not on where they come from.”

The peer-to-peer sessions were planned and facilitated by Sisters in Unity, a new group of Academy of Our Lady students who  spent the first few weeks of the school year visiting grades 9-12 to open up conversations on the difficult topic of racism. 

Formed over the summer in response to the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests that swept the nation, its goal is to create a safe place in which students can articulate their opinions, respect their differences and celebrate the things they have in common as a school community of diverse young women.

“We want to make Academy of Our Lady a loving and welcoming place,” said Lacey Johnson, student council president and senior rep for Sisters in Unity. “We’re a welcoming school already, but subjects like these are things that people don’t want to talk about – but they are things that need to be talked about, addressed and corrected.”

The language of race

The peer leaders began by defining terms used in the arena of race relations. “Microaggression” – the “indirect, subtle or unintentional” ways in which a person makes someone from a marginalized group feel the pangs of discrimination – can include such seemingly benign statements as, “When I look at you, I don’t see color,” and “There’s only one race – the human race.” 

Comments like these unwittingly cast the recipient’s racial or ethnic background as a negative and strips the person of his or her individuality, the juniors said.

“It’s completely OK to see someone’s color, but it’s not OK to discriminate against them for their color,” one student said.

Other microaggressive statements are: “As a woman, I know what you’re going through as a racial minority” (a false equivalency); and, “I’m not racist; I have friends who are black” (as though all people of a given race belong to some monolithic group).

“If you have two black friends and one of them hasn’t dealt with that much discrimination and the other one has, you can’t just trust that this (statement) won’t hurt a person of color, because in their world, there might be much more going on,” a student observed.

Oftentimes, microaggression rears its ugly head in the form of backhanded compliments. One young woman said she recently was told, “You’re pretty, for a black girl.”

“That’s not OK at all,” she told her classmates. “What? Am I not pretty in general?”

Another African-American junior said some of her public school friends called her “white-washed” for attending a Catholic school and not “acting black.”

“That made me think: How do I ‘act black’? You can’t act a color!” she said. “But I am black, so it doesn’t make sense to call me ‘white-washed’ just because I go to a Catholic school. I guess people feel that certain mannerisms and properness just belong to white people, but everybody can be educated.”

The opposite of ‘color blind’

The Academy of Our Lady juniors also were invited to share their encounters with “colorism,” a form of discrimination in which non-white persons who have lighter skin tones are treated more favorably than those with darker skin. Stories bubbled up, such as the deferential way one student’s mother – a blonde, green-eyed Hispanic woman – was treated by strangers, in stark contrast to the skepticism endured by darker-skinned people of Hispanic background.

One African-American student recalled how colorism came into play when she announced her desire to portray the cartoon character Penny Proud in an elementary school skit.

“My friends said, ‘How can you be Penny when you’re not light skinned?’” she said.

That story reminded another junior of how society’s preoccupation with skin shade – a reality in her life for as long as she could remember – had changed what it deemed to be “acceptable” just over the course of her 16 years of life.

“Now, all of a sudden, my dark skin is beautiful,” she said. “I’ve always known that, but now people want to embrace it more than before. A lot of childhood trauma came with (colorism) – a lot of emotions and insecurities – because why couldn’t you embrace my skin color back then? Why didn’t you accept me then?”

Media messaging mixed

When the students were asked if they and their families had ever been stereotyped, the stories poured out. One junior recalled how a friend had been teased for using “Daddy’s money” to buy a car, when the friend had actually purchased it with money she had earned herself.

Another student teared up at the memory of how her father and brother, a black architecture student, had been profiled at a home renovation site they were visiting as part of the brother’s coursework.

“They weren’t picking up anything, they weren’t stealing anything, but a lady across the street thought my dad and my brother were stealing things, and she was about to call someone,” she said.

Perpetuating these racial and ethnic stereotypes is a mediascape eager to keep ignorance and division in place, the young women said. Print media was taken to task for using Photoshop to enhance the appearance of models in magazines, which one student said “strips away who they are as a person” and sets impossible standards for young people.

“That good hair thing – there’s no ‘good hair!’” she said. “If your hair is nappy, that doesn’t mean your hair is ‘bad.’ Your hair doesn’t have to be curly and loose. You don’t have to have green eyes. I’m not saying that people with green eyes aren’t pretty, but your dark eyes are fine!”

Class members observed how television shows that had a mixture of white and black actors tended to portray the black cast member as “the loud one,” such as the character of Helen in the series “Drake and Josh.”

“Even when the black character is the protagonist, a lot of times their story isn’t about them being a real person; a lot of times it’s a story about their struggle,” one student said. “(Their struggle) is important, obviously, because you want to showcase that and not ignore it, but there’s not a lot of representation of black people in the media without it being about just their struggle, and it kind of takes away the fact that they’re a person.”

Another student noted that she and her peers had been raised on a steady diet of high school-themed shows that reinforced stereotype after stereotype – the stark divisions among “the jocks,” “the nerds,” “the band kids” and other groups. As a result, the student admitted to almost dreading entering high school in real life.

“But when you come (to Academy of Our Lady) – and I’m sure y’all have seen it, too – the older you get, the more unified you get,” she said. “We feel like sisters.”

Ignorance is ‘a choice’

The discussion questions, each one researched and road-tested over the summer by the Sisters in Unity group, also probed participants’ brushes with systemic racism and pondered the effectiveness – or lack thereof – of global protests demanding racial equality.

“I feel like our generation is going to be the generation that changes this,” one student said, observing that peaceful protests are “good,” but that the message of equal treatment under the law had been diluted and lost over time. Students of color noted that some white people cannot fully grasp the daily fears they have that their own fathers and brothers could have been in the position of George Floyd and others who died unnecessarily at the hands of police.

Class members left with renewed determination to not let older generations off the hook in efforts to undo racism. They said ignorance – denying that racism still exists – is a choice, especially with information now at everyone’s fingertips. One junior quoted Benjamin Franklin: “Everyone is born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” 

“Your grandparents may have grown up in a generation that normalized and accepted racism to the point where they didn’t see anything wrong with it,” one student said, “but don’t not hold them accountable for being OK with it now, just because it’s how they grew up.”

An in-service on diversity will be held later in the school year with Academy of Our Lady’s eighth graders.

The Academy of Our Lady is eager to share its student-created discussion template with other interested high schools in the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Inquiries can be directed to Lisa May, moderator of Sisters in Unity, at lmay@theacademyofourlady.org. The sharing sessions also featured three short YouTube videos illustrating white privilege, racial profiling and “The Doll Test,” in which Italian children of different races were offered black and white dolls and were asked to point to the one that was “pretty,” “nice” and “good.” 

bdonze@clarionherald.org