A Personal Essay by Maya Kennedy
I’ve learned that solving racism will require growth and thus mistakes, regrets and speed bumps along the road.
Our experiences have a curious way of shaping our beliefs. The tiniest assumption is shaped by a myriad of individual experiences from which we draw conclusions. Of course, most of these conclusions are human. We all experience sadness, regret, hatred, joy and much more, just sometimes through different mediums, different experiences. Still, while the experience or the mean is different, we’re all connected in the ending emotions- we all feel pain after heartbreak, and we all feel joy through laughter. Somehow these ending emotions allow us to collectively experience another one: sympathy, which is maybe our greatest human instinct.
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| Nicholas A. Christakis The Post |
Eight years ago.
I was in a young women’s lesson on the priesthood. The room was quiet, and everyone seemed tired. Suddenly, I asked a question.
“Why couldn’t black people hold the priesthood?”
Everyone stopped abruptly and an uncomfortable air settled over the room. The question seemed to cause everyone to look at their feet creating a long, awkward pause. Finally, another teacher broke the silence.
“Well, I believe that the church wasn’t ready for black people yet. With everything going on with the civil war, the church wouldn’t have been able to grow with black members.”
I remember feeling dissatisfied and a little uncomfortable with her answer. Something about the conversation sparked a newfound interest in racism and I began researching it and, the more I did, the more I began to notice race, especially at my high school, where white students were considered the minority.
Later that summer.
I remember asking my uncle, who’s black, about race. As a young boy, his mom moved the family from Alabama to California because of the racism her family experienced there. He spent time telling me stories about his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles participating in the civil rights movement. He discussed the movement with a reverent and nostalgic tone, almost in the way a grandparent reflects on their “glory days” or the way my grandfather, a Vietnam veteran, reflects on his experiences in the war.
We are both American and share the civil rights movement in our history and the history of our ancestors and those events compose a cultural DNA that form who we are. Yet, one of us cared more about that piece of culture and history than the other. Regardless, my experiences and questions seemed to build upon each other and by the end of the year I understood why my young women’s teachers felt uncomfortable with my question. I also felt uncomfortable with my question. I think this was the moment when I first began experiencing something people now call “white guilt.”
Two years later.
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| Damian Memorial School |
“Why not complain to BYU housing? Why not voice your opinion to the administration?” My question only revealed that I was white, that I’d never experienced racism first-hand, and that I was somewhat oblivious to the risks students of color took when complaining to administration. Not to mention that students of color had been reporting racism in vain for a long time on campus.
A few days went by
and I couldn’t seem to get the conversation out of my head. Knowing the pain these girls felt made walking past the flag everyday upsetting for me too. My roommate and I had several long conversations about how to help them. I couldn’t figure out why the situation bothered me so much. After all, I’m from the south, I had seen racism before! Was it because I was at a religious school? Was it because so many were not bothered by it? I had never felt such a strong sense of empathy for someone I knew so little. After incessantly grappling with the situation over the course of a couple days and seeking my own inspiration about what to do, my roommate and I wrote a petition.
2:30 am.
“BYU’s lack of response to the presence of a Confederate flag does not speak to BYU or church values…If we choose to ignore the flag are we not thereby acquiescing it?” The petition spelled out everything: historical claims, legal precedent, church talks, scripture, BYU mission statements. We argued that BYU was a private institution and controlled many aspects of student life (including several other forms of speech!) yet was allowing something truly harmful to slip by. Inexplicable to my freshman self, it appeared that making boys shave their beards had become more important to BYU administration than addressing racism on campus.
By the next day the petition had blown up. We had meetings with BYU faculty and staff, American Heritage classes were debating the petition on campus, people- internationally -were signing it, some donors were threatening to withdraw university donations and a few news channels had even contacted me to talk about it on air. One of my BYU professors emailed me that her entire department had signed our petition. Students of color from all over campus were messaging me on social media and thanking me, which I often felt incredibly undeserving of. At one point the Democratic party representatives in SLC even reached out to invite us to participate in events. It was all a really big deal.
Of course, not all of the responses were positive. I had expected a lot of backlash and I wasn’t ignorant to the fact that I attended a predominantly conservative university. I knew my opinion would upset some people. I expected people to ask me questions, to disagree and to even feel uncomfortable with what we wrote. However, I didn’t anticipate the magnitude. Suddenly, friends stopped hanging out with me, students I’d never met were swearing at me on social media and everyone would stare at me when I walked around the Cannon Center.
The worst was a group of boys who I would pass walking to my classes. For three days consecutively, they waited for me to pass them and then swore at me, yelled degrading and sexist comments at me and, the worst, actually throw things at me. I still remember anger I felt when a pebble they threw hit the back of my head. I tried not to let it all affect me but, admittedly, sometimes it just did.
The polarizing responses were nauseating and it was emotionally exhausting to spend so much time talking about race. It didn’t help that I often felt unqualified to speak about it at all. For one, I was an eighteen-year-old and not even the years of reading and studying were enough to prepare me for some of the questions I received. Two, I was white and had never experienced racism first-handedly. My lack of personal experience with racism caused people wonder what had motivated me to write a petition in the first place. Consequently, I often said the wrong things and, despite the petition’s success and the flag’s removal, by the end of the month even I had mixed feelings about what we wrote.
Was it worth all the backlash? Was it worth losing the respect of so many people I cared about? Was it worth the bullying? A month earlier I believed that what we did was inspired. Afterall, this was an issue I had grappled with and prayed over for days, and I had received my answer. But then why was this experience so negative?
I revisited the situation in my mind over and over again during the next years. At low points, I doubted whether or not I really knew how to receive inspiration or if it even existed. Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if we hadn’t written a petition, if we had tried another approach. Other times I appreciated our action and commitment but saw flaws in the execution and wondering about the strength of its impact. After all, the flag was removed… but was the racism on campus gone? Of course not.
May 25th, 2020.
My family and I were watching videos online of George Floyd’s murder and the videos were startling. Suddenly, the country was burning both in a literal and theoretical way. I was curious what my parents would think about the protests, the violence and the trending phrase “Black Lives Matter”, especially since they hadn’t completed supported my petition just four years earlier. I knew what my opinion was on the subject- I supported and empathized with the black community but felt the violence and vandalism didn’t help the situation. After the backlash I received when I wrote the petition, I would never be able to support violence or hatred as a response to any opinion.
This time I wasn’t sure how much I was willing to vocalize my support. Truthfully, my experience with the petition still disturbed and confused me and, in this moment, now restricted me from taking any strong, public stance or trying to persuade friends and family members to join the movement. Sometimes I still felt like the eighteen-year-old being interviewed by BYUTV, still puzzled by the questions and still trying to construct an appropriate answer, without sufficient experience and foresight to really know.
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| Angelina Bambina Getty Images |
Then, things started to change. People all over the world began to stand up for the movement and the black community in ways I had never experienced before. Many of the people who had disagreed with the petition four years earlier were now standing up for the community and many were even denouncing the confederate flag. Finally! Of course, not everyone agreed with Black Lives Matter and especially with the protests. However, I now felt that, even if they still disagreed, more people understood my point of view and thus understood me, and that made all the difference.
One month later.
“Hey Maya, I need your help on a new project for BYU.” It was my friend Conner calling me. He wanted to establish BYU’s first ever Anti-Racism Club -- a club almost every other American college campus had established long ago -- and was requesting that I be a founding officer. My mind began to spin thinking of all the ways we could structure the club and set it up to be a place of learning for all BYU students. Of course, this time I was not naïve to the backlash we could receive but something inside me gave me the confidence to keep going.
One year later.
Do you ever do something based purely off of instinct? I’ve found that the hardest choices to make are the ones that often don’t have a clear outcome and that don’t fit neatly into boxes of morality and immorality. In those situations, the only thing we have left is our instinct- some inner intuition trying to convince us that a certain path will bring good in the long run, even if we can’t see it now. Occasionally those gut feelings are felt only by one person or a small minority, but I find they’re often felt more largely within a society. Somehow, those instincts seem to move communities of people, binding them together in powerful ways in order to keep going in the right direction.
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