By Brittanyana Pierro.
The summer of 2014, I remember, was a good one. I was 15, gaining independence and had my best friend Samantha to spend the summer with. My sister Melodi was still in town before she left for college, and the two of us got to spend an entire month in San Francisco with our other sister Nicholle.
My sophomore year of high school came up quickly, and it started off really good. I had a new friend group this year, mostly Samantha’s friends, and they were all pretty and cool. If I were to put it in terms of high school popularity, we were the coolest of the not-as-cool girls. It was an upgrade for me, because the year prior I was still with my middle school friends, who’s status was slightly less and they were also all very boring. My new friends liked to smoke weed, and got invited to (some) parties. And they were just generally more fun.
I never really got the chance to get close with any of them except Sam and sort of Anna, and one of my older middle school friends, Emma.
Towards the middle of fall quarter, probably September of 2014, I came into an incident with one of me closer friends in the group, Anna. Basically, what had happened was; there used to be this app called Ask.fm where people would ask each other questions anonymously. One Friday night, Anna and her friend Marie had decided to get on the app and respond to rude questions people asked them by just typing ‘NIGGERRRR” in all capital letters. When I saw their acts dumbfuckery, I was immediately shocked and irritated, and asked the two, through the app, to not say it anymore. Their response was them mocking me, and in turn calling me a nigger. I was pissed!
The following week at school, I was still pissed. I talked to a bunch of people about it, including my friend Tyra, who I would later start a Black Student Union with. The consensus was that I should say something to Anna.
So, at the end of the lunch period that Monday, I walked up to her and told her off. I told her she had no right to use that word, especially with a hard R. I said that she had no idea of the implications of the word, and how it negatively affected me and generations of people before me. She was taken aback, with little to no response, and in the light of the fear in her eyes, I walked to class satisfied.
However, after this incident happened I was quickly isolated from her friend group, and our drama was outed throughout school. She went around talking shit about me, saying I was crazy and loud Etc., and all the while I was finalizing plans with Tyra and a few other Black students to start my school’s first ever Black Student Union.
In the wake of all this, the Black Lives Matter movement was at its strongest. In response to the deaths of Eric Garner and Mike Brown that had happened over the summer of 2015, cities of people were coming out and marching. My friends and I wanted to start the club because we wanted to talk about these issues with other black people, and people on campus in general.
We had our first meeting on Oct. 14, and we had a pretty good show out. Our meeting was held in our advisor Mr. Monroe’s classroom, #15. There were no Black teachers at our school, so we chose Monroe to be our advisor because he had a black wife, the Olympic athlete Sharon Day-Monroe. Mr Monroe was our school’s health teacher, so almost every student on campus knew how to find his creaky and cultured classroom. The room lay in the oldest building on campus, right across from the school’s cafeteria. It had old oak floors and a tall vaulted ceiling, large windows lined one side of the room, and looked out over the football field.
The turn out of our first meeting was pretty good, and we were super happy with the progress being made. Each coordinator had a position, each club member had set tasks and we all had very big dreams.
Tamir Rice’s shooting on Nov. 22 was a tragedy that brought a dark and gloomy presence into my world. At home, there was silence, in our BSU meetings, there was silence. I felt this sense of frustration bubble up in my tummy, watching white kids with no care in the world walk past my own world, that was crumbling. I wished for actions, and riots and world endings, so people could see what was going on.
A few weeks later on the night of Dec. 4, my friend Naya sent me an IG message with the details of a protest happening before our towns annual Christmas parade, the next day. Her message read “ Spread the word ”. I immediately told my sister Case, and we discussed the option of going for a while. I was nervous about it, and so was she. We went back and forth the night of Dec 4., until finally, we asked our Dad, who agreed we should all go, and said he would join us.
We immidiately rushed to make a sign. I pulled out my craft markers, and an old poster board I had stored in my closet. In quick precise lines, I traced the outlines of my hands stretched out, raised, onto the board. In between the hands, my sister wrote ‘We Can’t Breath’ in bold red letters.
My family left the house at 5:30, and arrived at the meeting location just in time (CPT is real, but you can always tell where our priorities lie). There was a big show out of at least 75 people, most of them white students from our small towns university, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. As usual, we were the only Black people in the crowd, but this time instead of feeling isolated in the sea of whiteness– I felt empowered.
We marched around downtown for at least an hour, halting the parade. Our chants were “Black Lives Matter”, Assata’s prayer, and some others. I saw the faces of classmates in the crowd, and some teachers. I listened to white men scream insults at me and my family, and the families of people marching. I made eye contact with my then crush, who’s eyes showed me a mix of inquisition and intimidation, followed by his raised hand stretching out to form a peace sign. Ironically, the sign I was marching with read ‘No Justice, No Peace.’ His actions were indicative of his complacency, or maybe his support.
A reporter from Cal Poly’s student paper stopped my dad for a quick interview. I looked to the back of the crowd at my father, thoughtfully answering the student’s questions.
In this moment, I felt myself shift. No matter what, or who, I always knew what side I was on.
#BLACKLIVESMATTER
