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...

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...

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.

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.’

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.

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..."