The evening of May 29th I sat in my living room with my mom, watching CNN as a Black Lives Matter protest became violent in downtown Atlanta. I watched as Atlanta landmarks began to crumble. The CNN building was crowded with protestors met by police as cars around Centennial Olympic Park were set ablaze. Just seven miles away from the chaos, I was sheltered at home with my parents and my brother. 

Just a year ago…graduating from Atlanta Girls’ School in our suffragette-esque white dresses (I’m on the far right)

I did not grow up in Atlanta, but moved here at the beginning of high school where I attended a local, private all girls’ school. I was incredibly fortunate to have had the experience of single gender education. For one, my school was very small (only 35 people in my graduating class!) and it gave me a close knit and welcoming community to join after moving to Georgia. But it also allowed me to break out of my shell. I was given the opportunity to join student government, lead clubs, and teach classes, all initiatives I would not have had the confidence to undertake had I attended a larger co-ed school. I was also introduced to new areas of social justice, and I became more interested in issues surrounding girls’ education and women’s healthcare.

My positive experiences at an all girls’ school are ultimately what inspired me to apply to the DukeEngage New York program and to work more in depth with women’s issues. My educational upbringing seems especially relevant to the work that I will be doing this summer at The Lower Eastside Girls Club (LEGC) of NY. I am very excited to work with an organization that sees the power in all women’s education and continues to provide support for their students during the current covid-19 crisis.

However, given the circumstances of the country, my excitement is met with deep reflection. The protests in Atlanta and many other cities around the nation brought the tragic realities of police brutality, unconscious bias, and systemic racism into the spotlight. Like many others, I am coming to terms with the fact that I reaped benefits from a system that oppresses the Black community. Even though I am not white, I have great privilege in my family’s socioeconomic class, the primarily white communities in which I grew up, and the education I was afforded.

I am taking this time of unrest as an opportunity to educate myself so that I can become a better informed citizen and so that I can better understand a large part of the student community I will be working with at LEGC. Some resources I’ve found particularly eye-opening in the past couple of weeks are: Hasan Minhaj’s call to the Asian community on Patriot Act, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Roxane Gay’s Remember, No One Is Coming to Save Us, and Stacey Abrams’s opinion piece in the New York Times about the importance of voting.

While education is not the ultimate solution to the nation’s deep rooted issues, it certainly is one pathway towards empowerment. Over the next eight weeks I hope to fully immerse myself in LEGC’s mission to connect girls to successful futures, using discussions of current events to guide my work.