Miriam Pinkhasov

Growing up in Queens, New York as a kid, I went to a public school with a lot of diversity. My first best friend was an Indian girl, and a few of my elementary school teachers that I looked up to were black. I had kids of all different colors in my class, and although we all looked different, we treated each other all the same. In the life of little elementary school me, race was not something I though about, and racism didn’t even exist.

Come middle school, things started to change. Suddenly, groups of friends of the same races and nationalities started hanging out with only each other, and their seemed to be either friendships or hostilities between the groups. There were the white kids, the white kids who acted black, and the black kids. I was in none of these groups, and was instead in the “miscellaneous” pile: friends with Korean, Russian, and Hispanic girls. The white kids who acted black often had fights with the black kids, and although it was “dramatic”, those kids were the cool kids and I wanted to be like them. They wore Jordans, so I wore Jordans. They would talk in slang, so I would talk in slang. It was a strange phenomenon that occurred subconsciously; almost everyone in the school was going through this phase. Yet no matter how hard I tried to act “cool” or “black”, I was still as white as a snowflake and was often tormented by the white kids who acted black and the black kids.

This came to a drastic end when I entered high school and 75% of the school was Asian while 24.9% of the school was white and 0.1% of the school was black. With barely any black people around, I found myself trying instead to fit in with the white kids. I threw out those Jordans and started acting like a real white girl. I did this unquestionably until I started to fill out college applications and saw the infamous race boxes. Something in me was unsure just how “white” I was. My parents came from central Asia, so aren’t I technically Asian? But then I looked at my skin, and saw that it was white. Was I an Asian white person? Was that possible? I wasn’t sure, but I filled in the white box anyway.

Through my life I have tried to apply to different races, but I have found that it was not something I started doing from birth. By analyzing my life, I found that race and racism is not something that we were born with, but I found that somehow it has etched its way into our minds as we grew older. At what point did the black kids and white kids in elementary school look at each other and see a difference? I’m not sure, but all I know was that during adolescence when I was amongst black people everyday, I was ashamed of being white. Yet when black was the minority in high school, I strove to act more white. Somewhere in this racial concept, there is a fear of inferiority, and I believe that that is where racism comes in. With some coincidence, the same years that children start to strongly care about how people perceive them (in middle school), were the same years that I noticed race and racism come about.

Aside from feeling some form of racism in middle school, ever since then I have never felt like I was a victim of racism. I have ambivalent feelings on the term “white privilege”, but I certainly see the racism that black people endure and feel that the best thing I can do is to have an open mind and try my best to put myself in their shoes. I feel that I have really grown in this field ever since I started college and became more educated on this subject and even by reading about their experiences and feelings about it. Do I ever feel like racism will cease to exist? Maybe not, but I do feel like it will be more controlled and that people will learn to be more open minded. I certainly hope I am not giving humanity too much of a benefit of the doubt.

For this website, I worked on analyzing the different views that the New York Post and the New York Times had on the Eric Garner case. I also created the URL and theme of the website, and wrote the introduction of the Home page as well as the interview of Kent Williams and its analysis.

Steven Lensky

Growing up on Long Island in Farmingdale, I, by no means,experienced as much racial discourse and diversity as kids growing up in New York City. Farmingdale is a mix between black and white people, with a relatively small Asian population.

As a kid in elementary school and even throughout middle school, race was not a topic of discussion. It wasn’t really until high school, as I think is the case with many others on Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk County), that race became a valid topic of discourse. For many in my area, race probably never became a topic of value to them. Since Farmingdale was largely a mix of white and black, with little to no other ethnic groups within the mix, race, at least in my view, was never really at the forefront of discussion. I also have never noticed cliques in school solely based on race.

I have never had to think about what my race is. For me, the first and only thing that pops into my head is white. I have never had to make a choice or be forced into checking a different box than I wanted t on a questionnaire. So, being in what many call the “socially higher” group, it seems likely that I have never experienced racism directed towards me. And that is true. I haven’t experienced any racism, and I haven’t experienced any first hand racism towards another person, white or black.

So, I have been very lucky that I have been in the group that has not been affected by race for my whole life. However, that doesn’t mean that race and racism are not extremely talked about subjects that are at the forefront in other people’s lives.

I look and analyze the Eric Garner case and the reactions of the public to his death and the case’s grand jury’s decision. I connect this case to the race relations between blacks and whites.

Alleya Wharton 

When I was younger, it was easy to say that I did not see race. Having been born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, I was primarily surrounded by people who looked just like me. To my left and right there was a multitude of melanin. With such a variety of brown complexions, I easily felt at home in my neighborhood. My earliest memory of clearly seeing a difference in race was when I was in the second grade and a white boy enrolled in my class. The first thing I noticed about him was that we obviously weren’t the same color, but that didn’t change the fact that we were both just kids looking forward to recess after a long morning of learning multiplication and vowels. Living in a West Indian ethnic enclave sheltered me from interactions with people who didn’t look like me. When I finally ventured out of my neighborhood to attend middle school, it was a culture shock: suddenly, I was surrounded by people of all races. For the most part, the school’s demographics were evenly distributed, making it a somewhat easy transition. Perhaps the biggest eye opener about race for me was high school, where black students only made up 10% of every grade!

Having been dancing since I was three years old, I often entered competitions and attended workshops where mine was the only brown face in the crowd. With that being said, I would always remember my father’s words of wisdom: Being black, I have to be twice as good as my white counterparts to get even half of the recognition. Keeping that creed in mind, I went on to give 110% of my efforts and energy to everything I did, and it hasn’t failed me since.

A lot of people seem to think that the greatest compliment you can give to a black person is saying “Oh, you’re not really black” or “You don’t act black”. First of all, what does that even mean? I didn’t realize that acting civilized classified me as not being black. A few years ago, I would have relished in hearing something like that, seeing it as something that set me apart and made me special. But not anymore. I don’t want to feel uplifted at the expense of my brothers and sisters. It’s all in the perpetuation of stereotypes. According to stereotypes, black people are supposed to be loud, ghetto, thuggish, or brash. Oh, and how could I possibly forget that we’re supposed to love fried children and grape juice! God forbid I were to get too passionate about something, people are quick to call me ratchet or the “angry black girl”. This mix between subtle and obvious racism is what I’ve been experiencing for most of my life.

In the past few years, I’ve taken a particular interest in my background, being inspired by things such as the Natural Hair and Carefree Black Girl movements. I’ve specifically been invested in the idea of black representation in the media and pop culture. It’s been great to see the Black community uplifting each other over the past few months. Seeing hashtags such as #BlackExcellence and #Blackout is truly inspiring and rousing. I even find myself engaging in debates about race and identity more frequently than I could have ever imagined about cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. Keeping this in mind, I’ve chosen to place my focus in Race Relations on pop culture through music and movies and the effects it has on its viewers and listeners.

Watching the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases unfold, I’ve been a proud supporter of the Black Lives Matter campaign. After all, it could just as easily be me or one of my loved ones.

Elizabeth Yakubova

My earliest childhood memory is an art project from the first grade. The project was called “Friends Come in All Different Colors”; the collage currently resides on the bottom of a pile of memorable things as decided by my mother. The resounding message was to treat everyone equally, everyone was your friend regardless of their color or ethnicity. It was as simple as that, to the mind of a child but looking back now I realize that this message couldn’t have possibly resonated as strongly as intended because of the demographics of the classroom. At the time I lived in an upper middle class neighborhood; in the most diverse classroom there were half a dozen asian students and at most two black students. 

I didn’t personally experience racism until I was a little over ten years old. I was one of the few Jewish students in the class and several classmates would make Holocaust jokes and penny jokes alluding to how cheap Jews are. You could label this bullying and accredit it to how evil young teenagers are but these were specifically aimed at belittling based on religion. In the years to come I did experience anything of the sort, perhaps because the people I was meeting were more refrained or perhaps because they were mature enough to understand that these statements were inappropriate. 

The next time in my life when I questioned the idea of race was when I was applying to colleges and one of my classmates who was one quarter Moroccan claimed to be black because of the common knowledge that a black students with same grades as a white student is more likely to be accepted and receive financial aid. Was the application asking about his skin color? How should his skin color affect his ability to perform in high school or college? Why are the standards set lower for black students? What effect do these established differences in expectations have on students in regards to their willingness to do well in school? 

An environment in which I was pleasantly surprised with the discussion of racism is an online social network. As an active member of a blogging community I am constantly coming across posts that aim to inform others about recent events that are not so publicly broadcast. Bloggers additionally aim to discuss social issues that are sugar coated or avoided all together. While many people in my “real” life face certain oppression or discrimination, I wouldn’t say its something people feel comfortable discussing so its refreshing to see such openness about such serious issues. I’m hopeful that the stigma will soon dissociate and it will become a more prominent topic that can be dealt with and eliminated outside of the internet community. 

For this website I worked on the History section; I created a timeline depicting the most recent and most influential events that have occurred and wrote about what has changed for black citizens since the Civil Rights Movement. For an academic input, I interviewed Professor Melissa Checker of Queens College on her views of race relations.