Here at The Guilfordian, we do our best to give a voice to the entire student body. However, like many organizations, we are limited in our ability to accurately represent all voices given our staff’s lack of diversity.
A majority of our editorial board is white. We do our best to be aware of the ways our backgrounds influence our decisions about the paper and its content. Yet we still make mistakes and thus reinforce oppressive systems without even knowing it.
At the same time, Black History Month is very much alive and well on our campus with a slew of events. Community members are doing great work in seeking to understand and undo the oppression of black people in the United States while also celebrating the many beautiful contributions of blackness.
But as senior Jodie Ann-Geddes points out, “Black History Month should not be the only time where we feel comfortable as a community talking about the oppression of black people in America.”
We at The Guilfordian concur wholeheartedly.
Many of us on the staff received depressingly scant lessons on the history of blacks in the U.S. We received sanitized and whitewashed versions of MLK Jr. and Rosa Parks — not to mention the complete omission of Malcolm X — as well as the presentation of Lyndon Johnson as a champion of racial equality laws instead of a career politician whose relationship to the civil rights movement was much more complex.
It is all of our responsibility to free ourselves from the misinformation disseminated in our high school history textbooks and use the abundant resources we have at Guilford to become truly aware of black history.
Not only that, but we must also remember that these issues are not solely historical: they are still alive. One need look no further than the continuing segregation of U.S. cities, the NYPD’s stop-andfrisk policies, the outcomes of the Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant cases and the school-to-prison pipeline.
Ann-Geddes says it best: “When we talk about oppression, we are referring to a system that is perpetuated by silence.”
We at The Guilfordian believe that it’s time to start speaking up more than once every 12 months. It’s time to start challenging ourselves to leave our societally prescribed comfort zones and start combating the systems of oppression that have controlled our human experience for too long.
