Tinesha Zandamela is a BYU student double majoring in Sociology and French, with plans to go to law school. She has worked as a director of a nonprofit in Utah. Tinesha published a book about her experiences as a biracial Mormon woman that is available on Amazon Kindle. This is an excerpt of a speech she gave at “Stand Against White Supremacy and Racism Candlelight Vigil” in Provo, Utah on August 20th. The speech was not given verbatim, but it was almost identical to the written version below.
Over the last few days, people have asked how they can take action to stop racial injustice. And of course, with any large issue, there’s not one simple thing that anyone can do to end racial intolerance and bigotry in your communities.
It may be easy to look at other communities and easily identify the issues they have. It is much harder to do that in our own community. When I speak of community, I mean more than this city. Your community includes your friends, your family, and your co-workers and anyone else you spend time around and share your life with. Community encompasses a lot.
I’m going to suggest a few things that you can do every single day within your communities. These are things you should think consciously about every single day and be working to do these things to create change.
The first thing you can do is to condemn racism in your communities. It is sometimes easy to hear a racist joke or remark and to ignore it as to not cause contention. However, any time you hear a racist joke, a snide comment, or watch harassment of people of color online or in person and you say something, you are working to end the normalization of racism. That matters. Simply saying, “That’s racist and that’s not okay” helps remind other people that those words and beliefs are not acceptable. Indeed, stepping up to keep those in your community from harming others with their words and actions is crucial.
The second thing that you can do every single day is to actively work to learn about racism, listen to people of color, and then take action. Read books written by people of color. Do research. Learn about what movements already exist to end racial intolerance. Follow people on twitter or on Facebook who are having these discussions. As you learn, seek to take action. Perhaps you’ve done some research and you realize there is a policy in your community that is unsafe for people of color. Find out how you can change that. Find groups and work with them to create change. Education is very important and it helps us to move forward.
And the third thing, and perhaps one of the most difficult, is to do serious introspection. Just like I mentioned with communities, it is often easier to look outside ourselves and recognize other people hold onto stereotypes and biases, but we do not see it within ourselves. I challenge you to sit with this one. Spend every single day thinking about what you’ve researched and look within yourself. Whether or not we think we act on stereotypes we’ve been taught, we must be willing to look within ourselves, challenge our beliefs, and work to fix the negative things we’ve been taught.