Princeton has long been a town where the races have co-existed side-by-side, not always together, but with an ability to get along. The willingness for different racial groups to accept each other has, in most cases, provided a racial harmony in the community.
In this issue of The Packet, there are two articles that remind us that racism, even in subtle forms, continues to exist here. Executive Editor Mike Morsch’s story about Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo and their website, princetonchoose.org, and the Paging PDS column about the website redefy.org by its founder, Zaid Ahmed, tell us about the situations that these students have experienced in their young lives.
“We feel like the race topic isn’t addressed, like people don’t talk about it. So we started talking to more and more people and they started telling us they didn’t think that race was a big issue in Princeton,” said Winona. “We think even though they may not think it’s a big issue, it’s still present. The main issue is that people don’t talk about race. They kind of assume that it’s not there or it’s not important. Nobody is doing anything about it and it was just going to remain that way.”
“It was important that we got theses stories out and that we shared them. So many people told us that Princeton wasn’t the place to be doing this, there was no racism here,” said Priya. “But we both knew from living in different countries that we’ve definitely experienced racism here. So we thought, why are people saying that there is no racism here? And we wanted to show and bring into the light that there was.”
“Bigotry in high school is unavoidable in day-to-day life, and it is severely disheartening. The atmosphere is also being polluted by racial micro-aggressions. Sadly, in my 16 years I have witnessed many occurrences of insensitivity among students,” writes Zaid.
While it’s discouraging to us that these young people have had to endure racial slurs or, as Zaid notes in his article, have been ostracized because of their dress or have been subjected to the insensitivity of their peers, they are willing to air their stories through their websites.
They encourage others to join them and tell their stories in the hope that airing their experiences will give others a chance to learn and to understand the nature of racial indignity.
We hope their efforts will not be in vain.
