Last week Friday September 13th 2018 in the class photography two, teacher Mrs.Mendel assigned a photo project to her class. The assignment was to capture concepts in a photograph! The class was given 25 options, They had to shoot 15 photos of each different concept and turn in 10 photos at the end of the week. Something I (student Sarah Khang) wanted to capture in an few photographs were being tied along with racist-ism or stereotypes. As I talked it over with Mrs.Mendel. She liked the idea but I had to careful. My idea in my mind that I wanted to photograph included a Caucasian and African boy. Mrs.Mendel said to be careful of it because I as the artist am neither Caucasian or African american, nor am I a boy. She said I may be in the wrong to create the photo because I personally don’t understand their struggles. The photo I was planning to capture may mean much more to others and can be taken in the wrong way. In short words,  this photo that I want to create to come alive can turn into a big impact on me because the photo has the possibility or lots of bad backlash!

This brought me into having to interview some students. I came up with 3 questions to ask students of different ages and ethnicity.  The first one was “What do declare yourself as?”. What this question means was how do  you as a student define your ethnicity. The second question was “Have you personally experienced racism?”. The last question asked was “How did the racist comments effect your feelings?”

As the questioning went on I noticed a pattern, almost all Caucasian students I spoke to never really experienced racist-ism. One student (no names will be provided for personal reasons)  I asked that was Caucasian he told me that the only thing he experienced when younger was being called a red neck. For the African students I talked to they had lots of stories, from getting called the N word to  being called a cotton picker. An quote that stood out from someone I talked to was “When people  call me those names and words it makes me sad and angry because I know my ant-sisters did not just fight and work hard for this freedom I have now today for no reason” For the Asian community they too had lots of stories from always being mistaken for being Chinese or being called chinks. A student quote from this community was “Just because i’m Asian it doesn’t mean i’m smart!” The last group I talked to was Hispanics they along with the Asian and black students had lots of racism stories. I feel with these answers I wonder why our school and staff don’t speak out more about the problem. I understand we have more ethnicity groups in our school but either or I feel like our school should bring out more racism as a topic to talk about.