Feb 14th, 2021
Vol. 11
BLACK HISTORY MONTH THE BELFIELD BANTER:
Th e S t . Ann e’s -B el fi el d S choo l S tud en t New s l etter
In This Issue:
MINORITIES IN STEM BAYARD RUSTIN: CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST STUDENT POETRY: ELIJAH JOHNSON FACULTY FEATURE: DR. AUTUMN GRAVES EDITOR’S NOTE: ELLIE POWELL
MINORITIES IN STEM FIELDS by Nia Robinson – Diversity in the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) world is often fought on two fronts: gender diversity, specifically the lack of women in STEM, and racial diversity, specifically the lack of black and Hispanic people in these fields. It is important to note that diversity appears in many different ways, and travelling beneath the surface to look at religion and sexual orientation can broaden the meaning of diversity. Many organizations focus on diversifying STEAM fields because they recognize how important a variety of different people in a workplace can be for company success. Most schools and businesses, especially predominantly white institutions (PWI), now either have a statement, plan, or even a whole department focused on diversity and inclusion. At the beginning of the new semester, I returned to the computer science classroom to learn more and help my peers do the same. Prompted by the deep conversations about race I had with my family over Christmas break, I realized that I am the only black woman in the whole computer science department. This prompted me to think about the diversity in my other classes. I found that I am also the only African-American in both our orchestra and in any music theory class at St. Anne’s-Belfield. This list could go on. Encouraged by my
realization, I set out to find more information about racial diversity in the STEAM community. Schools and outreach programs are responsible for cultivating an early interest in STEAM to create our next generation of artists, scientists, and engineers. Although technology surrounds us every day, there is a disconnect between the field of technology and its userbase. Early exposure to subjects like computer science in both middle and elementary school helps destigmatize the field and intrigue a broad scope of children. This recruitment effort should not just fall to teachers trying to implement more computer science in their classes or underfunded schools, but to the universities and companies who have the means to create outreach programs as well. We need to ask what companies are doing to encourage minorities in STEM, and more importantly, is it effective? Carnegie Mellon University, which houses a leading computer science college, has two programs focused on exposing more minorities and low-income youth to STEAM fields. The Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach and The Summer Academy for Mathematics and Science (SAMS) both help their local Pittsburgh area and the entire country through camps and online resources. In their student enrollment of 2018, however, black students make up only 3.9% of the class, and Hispanic students account for a mere 1.9% of the class. For reference, black people make up 10.4%, and Hispanic people make up 7.8% of Pennsylvania’s population. While the university does a lot of outreach, their effort is not reflected in their admissions statistics. This means [cont p2]
that through the years, many minority students at Carnegie Mellon may be the only person of their race in a class or program. For many minorities, the diversity rates of schools can influence whether they apply to a school. Even though creating a welcoming community that elevates the STEAM world is easier said than done, schools need to have outreach programs and diverse enrollment for us to take a step in the right direction. Looking to the future, the recent push to diversify the STEAM community has created multiple programs, statements, and plans regarding diversity and inclusion in these fields. This effort should produce more equality in college enrollment and workplace staff, a subject I was unable to touch on in this article. I have hope that both the broader STEAM world and computer science program at STAB can exhibit more diversity in the coming years.
BAYARD RUSTIN: CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST by Brehanu Bugg – When recalling civil rights activists, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcom X immediately come to mind. While these individuals were obviously important activists, there are hundreds of other essential figures who also fought for equality. We cannot advance in our fight for equal rights and unity without first recognizing the hard work of the leaders before us, even if they are not wellknown. Bayard Rustin was born in March of 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania. One of twelve siblings, he was born when his mother was only 16 years old, and his father was not present in his life growing up. He inherited his Quaker roots from his grandparents, and many of their religious lessons involved nonviolence, a concept he carried into his adult life. As a teenager, he was well-rounded: he wrote poetry and played on his high school’s football team. He then attended the City College of New York in 1930, where he joined the Young Communist League (YCL) in its fight against racial injustice. After the YCL shifted its priorities, Rustin left the group, and was appointed youth organiz-
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er of the 1941 March on Washington (which was eventually called off) where he was affectionately nicknamed “Mr. March-on-Washington” because of his meticulous planning and involvement. Rustin spent years protesting civil injustices and traveled the world encouraging others to speak up. He spent 26 months in federal prison as a consequence for not showing up to his draft board. Rustin heard some of Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings at the 1948 World Pacifist Conference in India. Rustin loved the idea of non-violence, and came back to America with a newfound outlook: “The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”
Rustin met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956 after traveling to Alabama to take part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Many believed that MLK was always a non-violent activist, but this was not the case. When their paths inevitably crossed, Rustin taught Dr. King about Gandhi’s non-violent teach ings. Those lessons played a large part in the success of the Civil Rights Movement; when the police violently abused peaceful protestors who were not retaliating, people were angered enough to create new legislation. So why isn’t Bayard Rustin a well known activist? Largely because he was openly homosexual. Any gay black man in the 1950s would likely have been closeted, but Rustin embraced his sexual identity. Because of his pride in himself, the government and U.S. media continually tried to silence him. Nonetheless, it is because of Rustin and his behind-thescenes work that civil rights protests worked as well as they did.
[cont p3]
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The next time you hear the term “civil rights activists,” don’t only think about Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcom X, but also those who had more on the line. Think of Bayard Rustin. We still have a long way to go before achieving true equality, but Rustin and many others made tremendous progress towards this goal, and paved the road that we must travel.
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STUDENT POETRY: A Poem by Elijah Johnson – If I have an outburst you can’t tell me to stop I got the melanin not you my people lynched by the cops I can’t even go a day without fearing for my pops Cuz he won’t back down if you a cop or not I can’t blame him The cops try to shame him Shoot em and tase em This systemic racism Creates no good only mayhem The cops shot a man didn’t try to save him The moment you pulled out that gun, no cuffs you enslaved him Now tell me do you think that’s right Can’t go out for a drive late night It could be yo last seconds when you see them blue lights He asks for yo id you reach to the right He pulls the trigger cuz he was scared for his life He didn’t know what he was grabbing so his actions are justified If you were the cop that fired on an unarmed man could you sleep at night. At the end of the day they don’t care cuz he aint white.
FACULTY FEATURE: DR. AUTUMN GRAVES an interview with Khamare Steppe and Cheryl Oppan * This interview has been edited for both clarity and concision by the staff of The Belfield Banter -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- What is your story? Did you always know you wanted to pursue higher education as a career?
and thought I would go to law school to become a sports agent. So I worked in UVA’s athletic department in sports information, and really loved that work, but realized that it was not what I thought it was going to be. I got a great job working at Mercersburg Academy, which I loved. I lived in an allboys dorm, I was an assistant girls soccer coach, I
I went to college and thought I was going to work in finance, and then I realized I did not like any of those classes. Thankfully my brother told me that, “If you don’t like it, it’s not something you’re going to want to do for the rest of your life,” which was really great advice. I really enjoyed both my history classes and my rhetoric classes, and pursued a degree in that field of study. While I was in school, I was pre-law, [cont p4]
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taught some history, and did all of the student life programming. I have had moments where I’ve thought maybe I want to try something else. However, once I start to dip my toe in those things, I realize that I really miss being with students, and I really miss being around teachers and school leaders. I have come to love this work because it is complicated, nuanced, interesting, and allows me to both run a business and feel like I’m doing good things in the world. How has your experience growing up as a black woman shaped the way you engage with different students in your work with education? I think that it has evolved over time. That is an interesting question because I feel like inherent to those questions is that I know what it would be like to be something or someone else; that there is some factor of comparison. I have only been a female, and I’ve only been black, so I don’t know if some of my actions and behaviors have been influenced by my gender, my race, or by my family structure. So it is kind of hard to narrow down just because I feel there is so much complexity to me and who I am. I really wanted to work in a school with first-generation kids because my mom was the first generation to go to college on her side [of the family], and that was really powerful for me. Then on my dad’s side, I am in the fourth generation to attend college. My sense of identity has continued to evolve over time, which is good, because it means I am constantly growing and changing. I think our culture has become very attuned to gender and race in ways that it was not when I was your age.
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We know you attended UVA, Columbia, and UPenn. Were there any defining moments you had throughout your time at any of those universities? I picked Columbia because I had been out of undergrad for 5 years, and I knew that if I wanted to progress in my career, I would need an advanced degree. By then, I had really come to believe that I wanted to continue in independent school education, and I wanted to get a progressive degree to further my education in this field. I finally came back to what made me most comfortable and I had a really awesome interview at Columbia with my thesis advisor, who has since passed away. I fell in love with her because I was blown away by the fact that she was a three-time breast cancer survivor, she was the mother of triplets, a prima ballerina, and this hardcore researcher who cared so much about quality education. She was just this force, and I am so attracted to really strong, driven people, women in particular. I just really liked her, and chose Columbia because they offered to pay for half of my degree, and Harvard did not. My thesis advisor was so committed to making sure that black and Hispanic children had access to quality education, and she knew enough to know that independent schools did not have the business model to make that an available option to all children. I picked Penn because, at the time, I was really curious about the pipeline through which first-generation college students from financially under-resourced families could not just to go to college, but complete college. I thought it was important for me to understand what higher education is all about, because that’s what I am preparing my students to go through. What is one of the goals you work towards to ensure students are receiving the proper tools they need to have conversations pertaining to black history/ black experiences?
I hope I show that I want all students, majority and minority, to see me as someone who treats them fairly. [Someone] who is trying to create a school environment where it is your merit, your heart, and your integrity that I see, and that it’s my responsibility to create pathways of access for all students to understand their fullest potential with. What those pathways of access look like should all be different.
I think in my work as a Head of School, my job is to make sure the adults have the tools. It’s not so much that I am making sure that the students have the tools; it’s making sure the adults--your teachers, coaches, advisors, and mentors--are equipped to engage all of our students in conversations about history, difference, and culture. We have to talk about power and privilege, we have to talk about who is not empowered, and why that is. Some of that is through professional development, and some of that is through me asking a lot of “Why?” questions. At the end of the day, it’s about the students, and it’s about how we make sure they feel safe so that we can have these conversations. [cont p5]
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Some of these safeties are around who we hire, the composition of our faculty, leadership teams, etc. [...] I look for people who share my heart, my belief in kids, my work ethic, and my willingness to put myself out there for other people. What is the most important lesson all students can learn when discussing topics of race, gender, social equality, class, etc.? I definitely think about it differently, and in a very unpopular way. I have taught history for a really long time, and I did not wait until February to teach kids about black people. I tried, though not always successfully, to weave it all in so that my students saw it as our shared American history. None of us would be where we are if it weren’t for all these different contributions from different people. So we need to understand where we’ve come from, how people came here, the struggles and triumphs they had, and how people have broken through different doors. There’s a certain way to organize one’s thinking and awareness, and I appreciate that we need to do that, but I want students to step back and realize that this is our shared history. Part of my history, for example, has been understanding the impact of the Irish Potato Famine, and what that did to immigrants coming to New York and Boston, because then I can further understand racial tensions. It’s not your history, or my history, it’s our history, and I think there are pieces that I instinctively and biologically connect with more than others. Why is Black History Month important to you specifically? My timing is a little different, and it’s because for so many years, I taught American history. My focus on thinking about the African American experience started in January as a history teacher. I think it’s really important for students to understand that the end of Reconstruction was not the end of segregation and slavery, it was a chapter marker, and then we went into a whole series of pertinent and powerful events for us to get to 1968. To me, it has never been about focusing on what February means to me. It means I’ve got from January to spring break to make sure my students understand this. [When teaching,] I would do the Black Civil Rights Movement, and then I would start to teach themes concerning women, because I wanted my students to see how these things wove together. [For me,] history is learning to understand the past so you can make the now and the future better.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: ELLIE POWELL
– During Black History Month, we come together as a community to discuss and commemorate the accomplishments of African American leaders, learning from brilliant students such as writers Nia Robinson, Elijah Johnson, Cheryl Oppan, Brehanu Bugg, and Khamare Steppe. I am so inspired by the commitment that these individuals have put into their pieces this week, and I hope that you all have enjoyed reading their work. As we learned in community meeting, Black History Month was organized by Carter G. Woodson in 1926, and was initially celebrated as National Negro History Week¹. This celebration has since expanded, though its original intent of recognizing and appreciating the impact of black Americans on our country remains largely unchanged. I am honored to have published the first annual Black History Month themed edition of The Belfield Banter. To me, being part of the St. Anne’s-Belfield School community means constantly striving to make the world a better place by learning more. In reflecting upon our student newspaper’s goal of advancing intellectual curiosity through inclusivity, I am inclined to consider the wide variety of voices we employ each week to discuss topics such as performative activism, cancel culture, climate change, and more. We want to hear perspectives from every part of our community through poetry, art, opinion pieces, media reviews, and more. An annual issue of The Belfield Banter dedicated to celebrating the achievements of African Americans in honor of Black History Month is extraordinarily meaningful to our mission of diversity and inclusion both as a student newspaper, and as a school community. I was inspired to work on an edition of The Banter for Black History Month after having interviewed Professor Ibram X. Kendi with my friend Cheryl Oppan (‘21). As part of a reading group sponsored by Dr. Graves and Mr. Taylor, we read How to Be an Antiracist together, and I came away from each conversation our group had with a better understanding of white privilege, implicit bias, and what it truly meant to amplify black voices. Cheryl and I were actually recording an episode of the STAB podcast in which we discussed interviewing Professor Kendi when I asked her if she would help me create a sp-
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ecial edition of The Belfield Banter for Black History Month. I was thrilled by Cheryl’s enthusiasm for the idea, and we met soon after to discuss how we could best execute our plan. Without Cheryl’s leadership both regarding this project and throughout the school, this issue of the newspaper would not have been possible. She solicited articles from friends, sent out a school-wide email calling for submissions, gave community meeting announcements, and was the perfect partner with whom to speak about the logistics of publishing. I would like to thank all of our writers for their contributions, each staff member for their tireless efforts to piece together a newspaper each week, and all of our readers for their constant encourage ment of The Belfield Banter. It is with all of your help that we can publish meaningful issues such as this one.
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The Banter Staff: Eleanor Powell----------------------------------Editor-in-Chief Jack Dozier---------------------------------------Junior Editor Emily Gohn--------------------------------------Features Editor Hannah Laufer-----------------------------------Sports Editor Emma Finley-Gillis-----------------------------Director of Graphics & Formatting Sonia Kamath------------------------------------Director of Student Outreach
Lo o k o u t fo r o ur w ee kly ed i ti on s con ti n ui n g thi s s pr i n g!