Thank you to all of the students who submitted to ERASE Racism's 2021 Raise Your Voice Essay Contest and to SCOPE for their generous sponsorship. We're excited to share the winning essays with you and hope you'll join us wishing a special congratulations to the winners, four high school seniors from Commack High School, Hewlett-Woodmere High School, Malverne Senior High School, and West Hempstead High School.
Asha Brown – West Hempstead High School in West Hempstead, NY
The first time I am called a "nigga" I am in the 3rd grade. All brown skin, pink and white beads in my hair, toothy smile...nigga. That day I learned that before anything, I'm black, before I'm a child, before I'm a girl, before I am smart, happy, funny, or talented, I am black. That day, the boy who had called me slur faced little consequences. He told my principal that he had just heard the word in a song.
Annika Duhaney – Malverne Senior High School in Malverne, NY
Even as a kid, you could pick up on it. It was subtle, but noticeable enough for six year old me to catch on. I didn't need to ask if it was happening. The evidence surrounded me. I'd see it in my neighborhood, in the streets I'd bike with my sister, and in my mother's frustrated grimace as she was caught mid school-morning-drive by yet another red light. Attending school made it even more apparent, a mere detail becoming an undeniable realization. Only people of color lived beyond that stoplight. By second grade, all of those odd details began to pile up; you'd see the roads coated in cracks, the smaller houses, the park forever dilapidated, the grounds covered in litter and the swing chains rusted. As apparent as it seemed to me, this fact was completely ignored at school, as if the racial segregation was only to be understood, not to be discussed...
Gabriela Persantez – Hewlett-Woodmere High School in Hewlett, NY
The America we know today is one that was built on foundations of racism, discrimination, and white privilege. The racial disparity that continues to exist today is a result of the racist policies put into place before the civil rights movement that still live on to this day. Teaching about racism and the racist policies that our country was built upon to children starting at the elementary level is crucial to ensuring the next generations are educated on the real history of our country. Teaching students about the slavery that occurred right here on Long Island and using examples such as the housing discrimination in Levittown and how red-lining was a disgracefully common practice in our own backyards, will help students realize how much discrimination effects the futures of people of color...
Lakxshanna Raveendran – Commack High School in Commack, NY
As I learned about the Middle East in my world history class, I was stunned when a peer said, "Who cares if they get bombed, they're all terrorists anyway." Many Long Island schools are trapped in "bubbles". Harmful rhetorics and racist sentiments are constantly repeated without intervention in our classrooms, bouncing back at students who then absorb them. Our schools are echo chambers: students learn biased narratives of history which reinforce stereotypical ideas and misconceptions about our society. Unfortunately, the predominantly white racial makeup of our schools has also created learning environments where students of color are treated as peripheral, as their narratives and histories have been ignored in our curricula.