CAMPUS CURRENTS
Students Lead the Way with Successful Diversity Conference Penn Charter’s inaugural Cheryl Irving Student Diversity Conference brought together 150 area students for an all-day event designed to give young leaders tools to be ambassadors for community building and social justice. “It is our hope that after your conversations and experiences today, you all will go back to your schools empowered with resources and make great strides to promote the beauty of diversity,” PC senior and conference cofounder Pierce Hodges told students assembled in the Meeting Room on Saturday, March 2. Reflecting on the conference afterward, Ainyae Holmes, senior and conference cofounder with Pierce Hodges, said the turnout and the content of the discussions gave her hope. “We aren’t alone in caring about these issues,” Ainyae said. “When so many people showed up, it made me realize that we have many allies who want to help.”
The morning began with a keynote address from Rohan Arjun, director of admissions at George School, who told a poetic, tender story of leaving Jamaica—and his mother—to find a new life in the United States. He encouraged students: “Tell your stories loudly, boldly, unapologetically so that they become the master narratives around your identities.” Supreme Dow, founder of the Black Writers Museum in Germantown, ended the afternoon with a second keynote, which Ainyae described as a call to action. “He told us it is up to our generation to make change,” she said. “We say we want it; we need to make a plan and go forward.”
During the middle of the day, students were actively involved in workshops, home groups, affinity groups and panel discussions. In addition to Pierce and Ainyae, PC students developed the content and led many of the workshops and affinity groups. Workshop topics included Race & Identity, Colorism, False Representation in the Media, Community Accountability. In the media workshop, PC seniors Bianca Bryant and Ayana Opong-Nyantekyi presented data and questioned why Hispanic movie characters are most often assigned roles as, in this order, criminals, gardeners and maids, but hardly ever as doctors. The series The Walking Dead has 266 characters, they said, and six are LGBTQ, or 2 percent; the show takes place in Atlanta where the LGBTQ population is 4.2 percent. “To not show the whole of humanity is to deny LGBTQ people,” said Bianca. Students who selected this workshop shared their own analysis about current media: “Black Panther was not a black movie,” said one student. “Black people were portrayed positively, running their own country … but Wakanda was a bubble, not the black experience. It was a superhero movie, it doesn’t address our problems.”
Director of Diversity and Inclusion Antonio Williams and student conference leaders Ainyae Holmes and Pierce Hodges succeeded in bringing together 150 students to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion.
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SPRING 2019
In the Colorism workshop, Leila Sor and Lizzy Ominsky asked students to identify personalities they find attractive, and used the responses to launch a discussion about light vs dark skin tone. Historically, they said, enslaved people with lighter skin were often kept as “house slaves,” while African Americans with
