From High School Sit-Ins to StrivEquity: The Roots of My Leadership Journey
🔎 Reflecting on my high school days in Massachusetts amid the current wave of student activism, I’m vividly reminded of my first encounter with activism – a defining moment that shaped my approach to leadership at StrivEquity.
🗞 During my time as a reporter for The Lion’s Roar, one of Newton South High School’s newspapers, I reported on, and participated in a student/faculty sit-in. Due to a deeply misguided attempt to acknowledge Black history, a person of color senior administrator (who did not identify this way) convinced an all white library staff to display a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe on a biology class skeleton behind the circulation desk in the main library.
This act, lacking any context or sensitivity, ignited immediate student uproar.
👨🎓 Students of all grades, myself included, and faculty, spontaneously organized a sit-in in the library. We demanded the removal of these symbols of hate and an apology from the administration. As both a journalist and an activist, I was navigating between participating in the protest and capturing the voices and sentiments of my peers.
🚨 This incident was a harsh lesson in how symbols, particularly those as charged as a KKK hood and robe, can deeply impact a community; one where Black students were greatly outnumbered, were absent from leadership, and were systematically relegated through tracking. The administrator, who said that they “found” these items in a barn, said they believed it would illustrate a painful chapter in our nation’s history. However, the lack of context turned it into a moment of crisis, solidarity, and action.
💡 Fast forward to today, as the founder of StrivEquity, where we focus on equity-responsive leadership, this memory reinforces my commitment to nuanced, empathetic leadership. It underscores the importance of historical/current context, levels of systems, power, privilege, and position as catalysts for collective action.
🎯 Leadership isn’t just about managing or making decisions; it’s about understanding the impact of those decisions on the people you are building with. It’s about listening, engaging, and sometimes addressing hard truths in your environment that were the results of malevolent design, yet met with silence and avoidance for decades by those who sought real change.
Engage with the StrivEquity community on LinkedIn here