Starting the Change

In my First Post I introduced the topic of racial microaggressions and defined what they were. Racial microaggressions are degrading statements that target a specific race, they are usually jokes or stereotypes. I also addressed the fact that the best way to stop racial microaggressions, in youth, is by raising awareness about them.

In my Second Post, I explained all the progress I had made since the first post. I interviewed six individuals. I summarized every interview in the post and also attached the full interview done with each person. Most of these interviews told me that racial microaggressions happen commonly in SLA, but more commonly on social media. I also started to figure out what my Agent of Change would be. An Agent of Change is the part of the project when we make our change that we have been building to.

For my agent of change, I did a presentation in my English classroom, to an audience of SLA students willing to learn more about this cause. I decided to do a presentation because I found it to be the easiest way to get my information out to a large audience. I made the presentation by using the knowledge I gained from my research, taking my previous interviewers feedback  and changing it for the better.

This presentation was a success. I raised awareness of racial microaggressions to about thirty students and many of them said that they learned how to have a conversation about race from the presentation. That is exactly what I wanted to accomplish and I think I did it to the best of my ability.

Me at the start of my presentation.

The video was split into two seperate videos, but they can be found here and here.

Part of my audience at the end of my presentation

The focus of the presentation was to tell people to not be afraid about race and explain to them how to have the conversation. I started my presentation by explaining what racial microaggressions are and how they are commonly jokes or stereotypes about it. Next, I explained that they come from a place of comfort if there are jokes, stereotypes or serious statements Lastly, I explained that the best way to have the conversation is to inform and to look to be informed, not to judge the person you are talking to. The presentation was inspired by the American Psychological Associations feature by Tori DeAngelis. One thing Tori said was, “She was acting with bias—she just didn't know it.”There was a part of my presentation that focused on ignorance to race and what Tori said was the inspiration for that. Sometimes the aggressor may not even know that they are acting with bias or being racist because it may be all they know. My hope is that students will see racial microaggressions and stop them by following my idea for how to have a conversation with others. I hope to continue raising awareness on this subject throughout my years of high school.

I enjoyed this project because of two main things. One of the first reasons being that I loved how it allowed students to be creative with their work and what they wanted to do for their agent of change. The second reason being that the project was made to help the world in someway. I never really had any problems during this project and everything went well. This has lead to students doing things that have benefited their community considerably.

This project has given me the tools and the will that I needed to make a change for something that I care about. Here is a link to my Annotated Bibliography.