Photos taken by Ryan Goldberg and Mr. Cory Merchant
Hastings Rallies for Justice
By Avanthi Chen (Contributing Writer) and Kaylee Oppenheimer (Managing Editor)
On Sunday, June 14th, hundreds of people from our community gathered at Draper Park for the “Our Generation Will Do Better” Rally, organized by T’nyas Catalan and a group of graduating seniors. The rally was in part a fundraiser for 914United, a “therapeutic-education” organization based in Yonkers that advocates for the youth and the formerly incarcerated. Over $4,000 was raised for 914United, and over $1,000 for Black Lives Matter. Throughout the event, there was music (by a group called Esnti), dance, and many inspiring people from our community, who shared their experiences, perspectives, and dreams for a more racially aware and inclusive community...
By Avanthi Chen (Contributing Writer) and Kaylee Oppenheimer (Managing Editor)
On Saturday June 7th, hundreds from the Hastings Community gathered on Main Street with signs, all painted with different messages of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Organized by 4 students, ranging from fourth to sixth grade, this protest was possibly one of the largest in Hastings history. T’nyas Catalan, a graduating senior, led the march down Main Street, chanting the names of those lost to police brutality, before gathering the crowd in front of the VFW. Many students from the elementary, middle, and high school spoke at the rally, including the event’s organizers. Many spoke about their horror and sadness over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others, while others spoke about their experiences as people of color (POC). Community leaders like Niki Armacost and Mary Jane Shimsky spoke as well, pledging to prioritize issues of race and racism within our community, and calling on all of us to vote in the upcoming elections...
A Quick Report on the Farragut Avenue Protest
By Kaylee Oppenheimer - Managing Editor
Sabine Bos, a graduating senior, was initially “super upset because all I wanted to do was go into the city because I felt like I wasn’t doing enough,” but she didn’t want to put her parents’ health at risk by going out. She decided to organize a demonstration on Farragut Avenue as “a way for people who didn’t feel comfortable going to the protest to show and take part in something.” The demonstration was organized with everyone lined up on Farragut Avenue six feet apart with masks and held-up signs for cars to see as they drove by. (click the arrow on the right hand side to continue)
In organizing this event, Sabine also realized that “you don’t have to attack issues nationally; it’s easy to put something on Instagram and feel like you’re doing something, but you can also make the most impact locally.”
One of the major motives in organizing this event was to show solidarity and support. However, she noted that although the majority of cars were honking in support, there were also a number of people who gave thumbs-down signs while driving away or “flipped us off.”
Throughout the week leading up to the Farragut Avenue protest, Sabine really wanted to emphasize that “People think that Hastings is free of all the microaggressions and racism and people see it as this liberal haven,” but it has many issues. When she and her friends put up signs and posters around town, they returned to the places they put them up only to find that they had been ripped down, torn up, and sometimes left in the middle of streets. This only prompted her friends to put up more posters, by the dozens, in hopes of making people in Hastings confront this issue.
Lastly, Sabine reflected on the bittersweet feeling of graduating this year. She said, “I would like to be someone who holds the administration accountable and see the changes to the school.”
By Avanthi Chen (Contributing Writer) and Kaylee Oppenheimer (Managing Editor)
Last week the Hastings community partook in two Town Hall meetings providing students and Hastings Alumni a space to share their experiences with racial discourse and representation in the Hastings school district.
Led by Mr. Abrams and Ms. Mateo-Toledo, many students found these Town Hall meetings illuminating and a safe space to talk about their experiences, while others expressed that there is much more that needs to be accomplished.
During the town hall, one graduating senior, T’nyas Catalan, discussed the lack of curriculum and representation for students of color, and stressed the need for more faculty of color. Additionally, she spoke of the need to have classes that focus on Afrian history, Asian history--all of history--instead of just centering around European-American history. She continued by saying that white students need to understand the experience of students of color and that white students often aren’t aware of their own privilege.
T’ynas said of the need to have more faculty of color that “everybody keeps saying ‘no’ and keeps trying to push it and hush it up, but it’s not going to get hushed up.”
By Avanthi Chen - Contributing Writer
In the midst of all this chaos, I realized it had been just over a year since the Special Issue on Race had been published. I had written an article at that time about my experience as a student of color in Hastings, and I have not stopped writing about it since.
Rereading it now, I see myself scraping the surface of complex issues, issues I have been diving deep into throughout my senior year. The article, too, marked the first time I fully confronted the mix of joy, anxiety, and resentment I felt growing up in Hastings.
That was hard to do. I remember literally starting to cry in Mr. Abrams’ classroom because I was so overwhelmed by the idea of publishing thoughts and feelings I had kept so private for so long. I was convinced I’d be met with criticism, that people would tell me I was too sensitive, that I should feel lucky to live in Hastings. Reading the article now, I can only see the countless qualifiers in each sentence and how hilariously timid I sounded, despite how much anger I felt at the time.
By Avanthi Chen - Contributing Writer
While attending the Kids 4 Justice Walk in town the other day, I was standing behind the speakers and heard someone say something like, “as a white person I don’t have the right to speak.” And I understood what she meant: rather than talking about issues of race from a white perspective, she was turning her platform over to me and my friends, students of color who can talk about these issues as people of color (POC). But that statement continued to bug me, even after the rally was over and we were thanked countless times for our powerful and inspirational words. Why do I “have the right to speak,” and she doesn’t?
While talking to my good friend and fellow student of color Amanda Escotto, she explained to me the same authority she felt she gained from others by starting a sentence with, “as a person of color…” while discussing race with her white friends. After starting a conversation with that statement, she described a feeling of “being put on a pedestal,” and feeling like there was an extra weight to her words. When she finished, the conversation ended with comments like, ‘thank you for sharing,’ and ‘that was very insightful, thank you.’
By Seamus Pugh - Managing Editor
The repression of culture starkly distinguishes the conqueror and the conquered. West-bound white Americans, for instance, asserted themselves over the indigenous population by forcing nomadic Native Americans to adopt 19th-century farming techniques, effectively destroying a sacred way of life. Similarly, Anglo-American slave-owners compelled newly-captive African slaves to drop traditional languages, religions, and even perceptions of time: Bantu peoples, who populate a great majority of sub-Saharan Africa, believe that the past returns to the future, and thus the past, present, and future are inseparable. Slave-owners did their utmost to dispel this notion and to propagate the view that time is measurable and calculable, as on a clock or a calendar. The Anglo-American way of seeing time has slowly spread across the nation, repressing other more traditional, but no less “American,” perspectives.
By Kaylee Oppenheimer - Managing Editor
Earlier this year, junior Kalani Martial decided to make a podcast for his English Honors class that aimed to illuminate the experiences of his black peers in Hastings. His decision to create this podcast was inspired by the poem “White City” by Claude McKay, which is about how a black immigrant accepts the fact that he is on the outside of the white city, always looking in. Kalani was interested in discovering if his own experiences in Hastings mirrored those of other black students of color.
In fact, creating this podcast strengthened Kalani’s own views of race in Hastings. He added: “[the podcast] secured the fact that it wasn’t only me that saw things going on that made us uncomfortable. I think that as liberal and as progressive as Hastings attempts to be, if you look closely there’s a lot of things that go on that people don’t really talk about. A lot of people say things that are flat-out racist..."