Hi, my name is Becky Antoine, and I am a rising sophomore at Colby College, and I'm from the Foxboro campus. I have filmed this many times. I- It's hard to find the words- the correct words for what I want to say and in such a short time. But, I wanted to speak on the amplified racial issues in our country from the perspective of a student. I've been navigating predominantly white spaces pretty much my entire life. I guess for me, when anecdote that I have is that all throughout high school and even now through college my I've always been mixed up for the other black girls in my grade.

And- My high school was predominantly white space, and there were three black girls in my grade. We all look different, we have completely different names, but the teachers always manage to mix us up for each other.  I was reading this post on Instagram the other day, and let me just pull it up, but I was reading this post on Instagram, and it's just scary how accurate this was because that means someone else somewhere in this country is going through the exact same thing as me, which is honestly just profoundly just sad for me. And so the post reads:

"your teachers will call you by the name of every student except the one that is your own; the one that is spelled out in gold hanging tightly around your neck eventually you'll become numb to it. You'll laugh it off begin purposefully greeting each other in the hallways by the wrong name. you're not an individual."

This struck me so hard when I read it because, you know, that's what I do with my friends- and what I did in high school, and its what I do in college. and and I never really thought about, it but I was talking with a few friends, and it's just a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that people don't see us as individuals. Like, I'm not seen as an individual person. And I know that's not i know that's not how people understand mixing up my name. That's not how people see it but that how it feels.

I bring all that up to say that we need more allies in the classroom, whether it's out fellow peers or your teachers, and especially the teachers. Because, you know, they're ones who are giving us knowledge. they're the ones who are guiding us through our journey as students. So, we need students to start stepping up, and we need teachers to start stepping up because we need more people who will be willing enough to speak up and say something and make themselves uncomfortable- make other people uncomfortable. Because something that I really live by is, you know, the saying that like if you're not uncomfortable, you're not growing, you're not learning. So, we need people who are willing to make the situation uncomfortable, so the burden doesn't fall on black students of color to defend themselves and to explain what's happening. Quite frankly, there's Google, and there is a lot of literature out there that explains what's happening and what we're feeling. With that being said, this is not work that will get done with just black people and people of color pushing for this happen. It has to come from both "sides," I guess. This is not a problem that spans party lines, and it shouldn't span racial lines. It should just be about our fellow human being. We have to dismantle the years of ingrained racism that has made its way into our education system; that is stunting what our students are learning and absorbing. We need to be in this together, you know, this fight isn't going to happen with one side alone. Both "sides" have to do the work so we can fix this broken system and so we can finally get justice. We're all in this together