"General Science taught me how to measure weight, the displacement of water, it taught me how to measure the speed of a moving object, but it never taught me how to measure the diversity and inclusivity of a school. It’s a long and extensive process that will almost never be complete.
Given a society obsessed with facts and figures, how do we begin to measure and even identify the unmeasurable elements of humanity?
As young adults in the world we live in, we are often caught up with our extracurriculars such as sports, jobs or just school itself. We become robots in a society where issues like equity and equality are often overlooked.
"You would think that attending a high school where almost 40% of the population identifies as non-white would make it easier to have a conversation about diversity and inclusivity, but the truth is: it’s not."
After spending day after day and week after week in a classroom where even the adults are scared to speak about being inclusive and accepting diversity, it makes it even harder for students and myself to understand what exactly it is.
It was ironic that after having one of my speeches censored, I found myself in a classroom in front of a white male teacher who spoke about racism as if he had encountered it. How do we get students to begin to have conversations about diversity? And how do we prompt them to become more inclusive? It is a question I have asked myself for years. Why is it that instructors can talk about almost anything except diversity and inclusion?
Why is that we have overlooked this issue for so long and are just now addressing it? Being inclusive beings as soon as a baby is born, it means sharing your crayons in preschool or sharing a textbook with your classmates in elementary and middle school. It seems as if this inclusivity disappears once we grow up and forget that we are all human.
"We forget that skin color is just a color at the end of the day and the amount of melanocytes we have are the same for every single human in the world."
Having an ethnic studies class would help students become more aware of marginalized groups. Celebrating multiculturalism strengthens the diversity in a classroom. Imagine a young native American, African American or Hispanic in a classroom where their instructors also come from the same background. As someone who went through K-12 with only one latino teacher it would have been nice to have other teachers who looked like me. From a young age I always had the idea that people who looked like me could only have jobs like a janitor or landscaper. Media often portrays minorities; “uneducated” and this is why I invite you, as teachers, educators and mentors to join me in this fight for inclusivity and diversity."
Odalis Aguilar-Aguilar