Minority Empowerment's Plans for Black History Month
With the arrival of Black History Month, the Minority Empowerment club is making plans to incorporate the culture of black people over the years. For Black History month, there has been a common theme of educating students mainly about the civil rights movement as well as its important figures. This year, Minority Empowerment club’s president Ariana Jones (along with vice presidents Diego Shipman and Baron Walker) want to do more than just discuss MLK and Rosa Parks. As a member of Minority Empowerment, I will be meeting with Vice-President Diego Shipman to get insight to their plans of celebrating BHM in Galloway.
I started the interview off by asking Diego how Minority Empowerment plans to involve Galloway students in celebrating Black History Month. He discussed how in the past, “Minority Empowerment has done something for each advisory. [We] would set something up for advisory and we would send something out for town hall.” This year, there’s more excitement for the upcoming events since there are now two advisories per week. “When we’re in advisory, when we’re in town hall, we are kinda like forced to be a community <sic>. … that way, we can reach a broad group of people with the Black History celebration…” Diego then goes into the main goal for this event: “what is most important is reaching the people who are both minorities and not minorities who aren’t really paying attention to those types of topics like politics, the social climate and racism in America; stuff like that. So we want to reach those people who aren’t necessarily listening.”
As I moved on to asking about future events that Minority Empowerment are planning, Diego broke down the layout of the month: “we want something [for] Monday, Wed, Friday. Each week, [in] February, which [will] be twelve events in all . So we can probably count on three events per week…” As far as the activities being presented, Diego wanted to replicate some of the performances inspired from previous years: “I was originally inspired by freshman year which was … 2020 when Ariana sang ‘Lift Every Voice’ in front of the whole school… I thought that was really powerful… So I want more of that, more of our students showing their talents, some performing a song, some performing a slam poem… just stuff like that.” Though plans aren’t finalized, Diego expresses how, “[He’s] here to help guide people in the process- but in terms of actually planning the events, that’s mostly, actually not [him] or Ariana or Barron,” as he mainly wants the members of ME to take charge.
As Diego elaborated on how he wanted members of ME to take charge, we moved on to the next question: How are all members of ME going to contribute to the celebration? Diego follows up by breaking the event down into four parts: “Last week when we had minority empowerment, we split up into four- each week of minority empowerment was going to be something that we wanted to focus on. We had each student sign up for the stuff that they’re interested in.” With the four main topics consisting of black fashion/ hair, music, film, and art, Diego took the time to break down the contents of each: “... Black fashion (so like Black hair styles, Black makeup, Black contributions to like the fashion community) Black music- the culture that Black people have created around music (especially …like hip hop and rap which has become one of the most popular genres in the country) and then we have Black film, which I imagine is like cinematography by Black people; Black people going out there- Black people being journalists, Black people documenting the world, and like Black people just engaging with the world and the people around them. And then number four being visual art … like afrocentric art isn’t- again it’s not just art made by black people but it’s art that’s made by Black people when it’s influenced by the black experience, black culture, black aesthetics that only black people can bring to the media like that.”
As I moved on to my last question: what is the message you want to spread through this, Diego wanted to make sure that this Black History celebration wasn’t going to follow the generic theme of previous years: “Black History month, we have like MLK, we have Rosa Parks and it’s like okay, racism was bad and everything is like terrible . So like I think the monarch of Black History is honestly kinda misleading [because] like we’re still making Black history.” Instead this year ME wanted to showcase more of their talents in the present rather than staying in the past. During their last meeting, “The resounding input from our members was that we want it to be a celebration of black excellence… So our message is gonna be, we’re gonna have student talent, we’re gonna go out and we’re going to essentially show Galloway exactly how skilled and talented and beautiful and eloquent and just amazing and excellent that our Black Galloway students are.” With this celebration, Diego also wants to acknowledge that, “ … [Black Galloway students] all have these merits that especially need to be celebrated considering that [they] don’t have the resources that people who aren’t minorities got. So when we’re talking about celebrating black excellence, it’s not just celebrating people who are black and also excellent, it's about acknowledging the struggles that black people had to make to get to this point and how amazing it is that they’re able to achieve excellence even though they went through so much.”
With the recent changes of covid protocols, Minority Empowerment will be able to engage directly with its audience in town hall to make the most out of the Black History celebration. Final touches are being put on the 4 main events for this month, with the first week featuring music. Due to Excursion, the last two weeks of the celebration will continue when we come back to school in March.
By Kayla Beasley