BRAVE attendees work toward justice
Dozens of students explore identity, race at conference
April 11, 2022
With a theme of “Moving Forward,” 92 attendees from the middle and high schools discussed racism, racial justice movements and taking action at the student-led Becoming Racially Aware and Valuing Ethnicity conference on April 8.
BRAVE Committee president Zachary Gin, a senior, said the last in-person BRAVE conference was three school years ago.
“We thought that a lot has changed since then,” Zachary said, referring to the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements. “We have to think about how we can continue these things and how we can acknowledge that these things have happened and address them further.”
Attendees rotated through three core workshops, all centered around the theme.
“We wanted a lot of our workshops to address current issues but also how those outside world issues affect the Lab community,” sophomore Santana Romero, a BRAVE board member, said. “We also wanted to focus on how we can sort of rebuild connections and do more creative things to just build up the community.”
Zachary hosted the workshop “Moving Forward,” where attendees created a timeline listing major national and world events that occurred since March 2020.
“The idea of the workshop was to consider, acknowledge and understand how the different events that have happened are traumatic but also very impactful and are important to learn from,” Zachary said.
For sophomore Ella Cohen-Richie, making the timeline was particularly thought-provoking.
“It showed how a lot of us forgot what happened during the 2021 year,” Ella said. “We remembered George Floyd as kind of the big thing that happened in 2020, alongside Breonna Taylor. It was interesting to just kind of see that moving on, and that was the message I think they were trying to get across, which was very impactful to think about.”
In another workshop, “Mural with Jesús Acuña,” attendees painted a mural on the second floor of Gordon Parks Arts Hall.
“I very much enjoy art, so being able to work with Jesús Acuña on the BRAVE mural and some of the really big, banner-like canvases,” junior Juan Chaides said. “It was really cool to be able to work with an artist that’s been in the field for so long.”
This was the first year the BRAVE conference included mural painting.
“Everyone was able to work on it, and now it’ll be a permanent thing in Lab that represents the conference,” Santana said.
With the idea of progressing racial and cultural justice movements and moving forward at the center of the conference, Santana emphasized the impact of middle and high schoolers coming together.
“The main thing that stuck with me were some of the ideas that people brought up. Especially with the middle schoolers,” she said. “Just hearing everyone be super engaged, conscientious and invested in talking about identity and race within Lab and in general was super rewarding to be able to see and know that I participated in allowing this space to happen.”
