Letters From the Editors urna Mukherjee Hi, I’m Aurna. I am the fact check editor of this magazine. I make sure that the information in feature articles, graphics, and all else are true and factually relevant. Currently, I’m a freshman at LASA (Liberal Arts and Science Academy) High School. I have one dog who I begged for about 10 years to have, and finally got after calling many dog breeders whilst impersonating my mother. I also love singing, and have been doing it for as long as I can remember; in fact, I sing so much that my parents often spam me on Hangouts telling me to be quiet so they can focus on their meetings. As much as I read over this, I realize how privileged I am to have well to do parents who are with me every step of the way. I know this was not the case for my parents; my mother had a limited period of time to find a job after getting a scholarship to the University of Illinois at Urbana, and my father had to work to achieve a Master of Business Administration degree at UC Berkeley. Had my parents not been exposed to the career opportunities they needed, my life would have been drastically different, which is why I think it is important to highlight the struggle of colored people to avail of career opportunities.
edanth Ramanathan My name is Vedanth Ramanathan, and I’m a freshman at LASA High School in Austin, Texas. Throughout my childhood in Austin, I’ve always been blessed with a nice place to live and go to school, but I never realized that not everyone had that until I reached my teen years. As I started to see the racial structures in society I started questioning why certain things were the way they were, and started thinking of ideas in which they could be fixed. That’s why in our group, we decided to explore the roots of Austin’s history of racial inequality through different perspectives. When I analyzed Austin through a geographical lens, I learned so much about the dark physical divide that cuts through our city, and how it is something I didn’t have a full understanding of before. As an aspiring lawyer, and politician, this opened my eyes to the disenfranchisement of people based on race and the full aspect of what it does to an individual. In this article, I hope to shed light on these issues and share with you how they have dominated Austin for centuries. 6 Austin Divided
