‘I Need People to Hear My Voice’: Teens Protest Racism

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/us/teens-protest-black-lives-matter.html

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In early June, as outrage over racism and police brutality erupted nationwide, three teenagers from Katy, Texas, grew frustrated by a void of activism in their affluent Houston suburb.

They banded together under the name Katy4Justice. Over four days, through text messages and video chats, they organized a protest at a neighborhood park, leading hundreds of people in a march through soccer fields and picnic areas in the summer heat.

“Katy loves to think it’s progressive and stuff, but nothing ever happens,” said Erika Alvarez, 17, one of the three organizers, all of whom will start their senior year in the fall.

Jeffrey Jin, 17, concurred. “It’s very all talk and no do,” he said. “There’s a lot of white silence.”

“It really takes action in order for real change to come,” said Foyin Dosunmu, 16. “That’s what we’re trying to get across and drill into the minds of the people of Katy.”

The youth-led protest in Katy is representative of the way the nationwide demonstrations after George Floyd’s death have energized a diverse cohort of the youngest generation. In recent weeks, high school students have led protests in Greenville, Mich.; Laurel, Md.; and Berkeley, Calif.

Several teenagers, including those in Katy, said that it was the first time they had organized any sort of demonstration — and that it would not be the last.

In Katy, the students’ activism was years in the making, they said, shaped by their own experiences with racism.

Born in Houston to Nigerian immigrants who are engineers, Ms. Dosunmu moved to Saudi Arabia when she was 5, and then to London three years after that. She was frequently the only black girl in her class.

“I remember thinking, Oh, I wish I was white,” she said. “I felt so left out.”

Her family moved to Katy when she was in the fourth grade. She joined the Girl Scouts, and she began reading voraciously — “Harry Potter,” “Pride and Prejudice,” eventually even scientific research papers.

Throughout her school years, she encountered racism. When her family first arrived at their new home in Katy, they did not yet have a key and were accosted by a white man while trying to get inside. He yelled at them and accused them of being looters, using racist slurs, she said.

Although she takes part in speech competitions, Ms. Dosunmu had not generally been politically active. After the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, however, she began to feel guilt, she said, for her relatively safe and stable life in Katy. She felt a bubbling need to do something in her community.

“I need people to hear my voice,” she said. “I need Katy to hear what I’m thinking.”

Ms. Alvarez grew up in Maturín, 300 miles east of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

Her father, an electrical engineer, and her mother, then a dentist, tried to ride out the country’s deteriorating economy. But food grew scarce, and there were increasing reports of friends being robbed at gunpoint. Scheduled power outages lasted six hours a day.

“In Venezuela, it’s so blatant and obvious — you’re basically born knowing that the government is corrupt,” she said.

When her family moved to Katy four years ago, Ms. Alvarez said she felt her world expand, a diversity of both people and ideas. She buried herself in schoolwork and joined the golf team.

“I fully believed in the American dream spiel,” she said. “I was coming to a great school, great district. I was excited to have way more opportunity than I was ever going to have back home.”

With the election of President Trump in 2016, however, she began paying more attention to politics, particularly around immigration. Her dream of starting a business began morphing into political activism, she said. Her passion deepened after the mass shooting in El Paso in August.

She later joined a student group protesting gun violence in schools. As she began to pay closer attention, she started to see more and more news reports documenting police brutality.

“I was starting to kind of notice maybe the American dream wasn’t as perfect as it seemed,” she said.

Mr. Jin was born in Houston, his parents immigrants from China. He said that in elementary school, when he would bring dumplings and bok choy to school for lunch, other children would sometimes poke fun at his meals, asking why the food smelled bad.

“I guess it sort of took a hit to my appreciation for my culture,” he said. “I was very self-hating toward my culture, in terms of my childhood. I eventually stopped bringing home food and I ate cafeteria food every single day.”

Children would sometimes pull their eyes back, mocking his appearance. In middle school, he sometimes heard students use racist slurs in the halls.

He laughed it off, he said, focusing instead on academics, encouraged by parents who he said had a traditional view of how to succeed in America: study hard, work hard, raise a family.

In middle school and high school, however, he began to question those values, which he described as playing into the “model minority” stereotype. He wanted to grow beyond them. He picked up photography and began watching and analyzing films.

“It was sort of a rebellion growing up, to not align with my parents’ views,” he said.

Even as he made friends who also cared about bettering the world, he continued to hear racist slurs for black people and gay people being used by students at school.

“It’s so easy to be racist as a young person who doesn’t know any better,” he said.

After Mr. Floyd’s death, the teenagers started to see a familiar pattern unfold in Katy. White residents clung to the suburb’s welcoming image — several immigrants had moved there in recent years — and trumpeted its proximity to Houston, one of the most diverse cities in the country, as proof that their community was not a racist place.

“They think because we’re such a diverse area or city, that just makes up for everything,” Ms. Dosunmu said.

Ms. Alvarez texted Mr. Jin on May 31 asking if he would be interested in holding a protest in Katy. A few days later, he looped in Ms. Dosunmu. They created a Facebook page and promoted the June 4 protest on social media. Within days, other residents volunteered to help them with water, food, medical aid and sign language interpreters for people who are hard of hearing.

That protest will not be the end of their activism, all three agreed.

After the demonstration, the teenagers started a fund-raiser, which is still continuing, for a Houston-based center that helps care for L.G.B.T.Q. youth. They plan to hold a “student series” at their schools to showcase stories of racism from students to help others better understand the harm.

“There’s just so much to do, so much to work out,” Ms. Alvarez said. “We have a billion documents in our Google Drive.”