Beyond Tolerance: Moving Ahead Together
A Community-wide Conference Organized by the Santa Barbara School Districts
June 28, 1997
Sean Powell, San Marcos High School SOAP Student
Let me give you Prejudice Lesson #1. My name is Sean Powell and I am from San Marcos High School. I’d like to introduce a couple of the students that also came from San Marcos High School, other members of SOAP and the Principal’s Advisory Commission on racism and they are Candace Cedar, Kim Bird, Jessica Wright, Ben Johnson, Pat Sweeney and Erica King.
It all started with a note on a girl’s desk and a man walking into a cafeteria and hitting another man at our school. And what happened is it caused all the students to take a look back at themselves and say, "How are we going to carve out diversity as a virtue? How are we going to look at diversity as a positive thing and turn these incidents that made our school’s reputation so ugly and have made this year a little bit sour in a way, how are we going to turn them positive and make them look like they were meant to happen and that they started something really good?" And I think that’s essentially what we’re asking ourselves today.
The way San Marcos responded to this [incident] is in a variety of ways. San Marcos SOAP, which initially started the San Marcos anti-racist action, is kind of an existential concept. It’s not 40 or 50 people who meet at lunch every Monday. It is a group of students that are highly motivated, all very talented leaders who are on a mission to reach out to their fellow students and kind of point them in the right direction by providing a good example for everyone to follow. And this is not always an easy thing. For me it wasn’t always easy when I’m sitting in a class with my tennis team and they’re telling sexist, racist jokes. It’s not very easy to stand up and say, hey, stop telling that joke. That’s not cool, it’s going to hurt someone’s feelings. And this is what a lot of us ran up against when we’re trying to be leaders of our fellow students. But in a way that is the most effective way of fighting against the prejudice. Since the fellow students at San Marcos have known better from the leads of other students as well as the teachers.
San Marcos now is an excellent environment for having open forums and class discussions. We have very enlightened teachers who open things up. The key we’ve deemed to becoming a more diverse environment that is more accepting of different types of people is this open forum, this freedom, this ability to say whatever you want but to be challenged on whatever you said.
San Marcos has been gifted with students that have various talents and diverse talents and they’ve blessed the school with a mural, which I’m sure a couple of you have seen. It’s very impressive. It was the art students showing what they could do to fight racism and that’s another important key. All the students are not public speakers like me. All the students are not artists and all the students are not basketball players but when we all do what it is that we do best to promote the causes that we all see to be important that is when true advancement will come.
Thank you.