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I am Black without apology
You're beautiful put the bleaching cream down, you don't need it Stop allowing society to convince you that you're too dark Stop feeling discouraged everytime a guy says ''I like light-skinned girls only" or ''You're pretty for a BLACK GIRL'' You're beautiful On a Saturday night you're laying down with your feet kicked up scrolling through Instagram admiring your favorite celebrity wishing you were ''that girl'' Truth be told, you are THAT GIRL When I tell you are dripping melanin and honey you wouldn't believe it because you run to society for validation ''Am I light enough?'' ''Is my smile...
Personal growth
Children, mainly teens this day and age can be easily influenced by negative things and fall into traps. I understand the new difficulties children and teens like me have to face at such a young age like drugs, sexual assault, and even suicide. But I'm also aware of the opportunities my generation can use to reach out to and help people going through these things. Most people think of social media as a distraction or a brain washer that makes us lazy, but I think otherwise. Voices of Youth is a part of social media, is it not? I believe people of this day and age can use social media to make a...
The Feminine Way
Boys will be boys, often, when I was young I would hear that phrase after a boy did something wrong. It was a made up excuse everyone just recited instead of correcting the boy for his behaviors. As I have grown older that once innocent phrase now holds a terrifying definition. Girls learn many things to get themselves safe: always carry mace, never walk home alone, buddy system, lock your cars doors as soon as you get in, never put down your drink, etcrea. Boys will be boys no longer meant it’s okay if they steal your toy. It now meant he will probably cheat on you, pressure you, use you...
Creating a Future We Want to Live In
Being apart of Generation Z, I'm living in the most exciting time in history. Our computers are as smart as ever, we understand life like never before, we're developing at an exponential rate, and we've developed new ways of thinking and are capable of doing nearly anything with the wealth of technology that's now available to us. Technology is no longer a novelty, but now a superpower that 5B people and climbing have the opportunity to leverage. I feel privileged to be one of those people, especially as a young person. I'm Okezue, a technology developer and science researcher looking to...
The normality of mental health in graduate school
Graduate School should be hard, but not impossible. Graduate school should help you develop professionally, without losing your personal life. Graduate school should challenge you without taking a toll on your mental health. Graduate school should encourage you to be creative, not force you to prove that you are worthy of being there. Because you know what? You are more than worthy. You should embrace who you are and where you come from. Coming from the small island of Puerto Rico, an island which sometimes you cannot even find on a map, I often feel lost in this big escape of being in...
A page ready to be filled
A page ready to be filled, history ready to be made Write as you will Because education is everything, improvement needs to be made For some education is gold But what if that gold was limited or restrained What if that gold was restrained because of gender inequality Because of ones pride and satisfaction A page ready to be filled A page that still hasn't been filled for decades A page that has been written on, but has never been completed A page that has a decent beginning but not a marvelous ending So write as you will Write until the page is filled Write until history is made Write until...
The country side
Waking up from the shining sun to the sounds of the rooster's cock-a-doodle-do. When you open the windows and you can feel the fresh breeze of air hits you. Then you go work in the fields in the hot sun sweat dripping.When you finish you will feel accomplished. As an award you take a nice hot shower feeling refreshed and get ready to do it all over again.
Out of pain comes religious solidarity
Hello. As you may know yesterday there erupted two fires in two beloved, and incredibly important religious buildings; the Notre Dame in France and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. I have seen far less information circulating about what occurred to the mosque in the same time, that seemingly, every news outlet in my Midwestern American town reported on the Notre Dame. I understand a larger part of the Cathedral may have burned, but I think it is a very sadly missed opportunity if people are not able to see that both these events happened on the same day. For those of us who believe in God, it...
Importance of education
As a student who belongs to a developed country, I am constantly surrounded by people with multiple perspectives to situations. However, a major problem that is very visible to me is the ignorance of the value of education among many students. Generally, when we go to school our first thought is, “This is so boring” or “Can I just go home already?” I think we are so used to just having easy access to things like a good education that we don’t realize what would happen if we didn’t. Sometimes we forget how fortunate we are, as we get caught up in the whirlwind of events that occur in our lives...
Part 1: A Mennonite identity
In writing all this and speaking with the wonderful lady who inspires me every day, my mom, I've learned a lot about myself and who we are as a people, all people. I'm sharing a part of myself as I write this. I'm sharing a part of my family, which scares me. I don't trust the general public with my family history. We're a private people for a reason. But what I will say are the things I wish everyone could know. This will be in bullet style, general sentences because I tried writing essays about the different aspects of the Mennonite identity and it is just too long. - The Mennonite religion...
Part 2: Where will they go
Here are my feelings on the Mennonite Identity, (continued) I think there's a lot of sadness, inherent to a lot of people in the faith and in the families. But there is so much love. That's what I hope my family is remembered for, because that's how I remember them. Mennonites are complicated, their descendants are complicated. But my family was pretty amazing. They weren't all the stereotypes people might think about them. The thing is a part of me has known that it is more than possible there will be no more Mennonites in America in the next few centuries. I am not personally of the faith by...
United Methodist Church future?
These are my thoughts on the recent United Methodist Church (UMC) decision to continue to not allow the marriages of same sex couples in the church, and any openly LGBTQ+ person to be ordained as a pastor. So I love the UMC with all my heart. I also love women and men (romantically) and I don't personally think those two sentences contradict each other, despite any decision our conference recently made. But I also do not want any of us to be in pain or the church to break. I believe there were parts of the conference's vote that I did not previously understand, and I think we should. I just...
In 20 clicks
Celebrating International Youth Day
When I was younger, I balked when hearing phrases like “time may be moving slow now, but as you get older, it will fly by.” However, I’ve slowly begun to realize just how accurate those statements were. Major milestones like graduating college, high school, and getting a first car all kind of blend together, because time is truly moving so fast. When you think about it, it’s unfortunate that everything moves at such a fast pace that there’s limited time to stop and reflect on the past. However, admittedly, days filled with classes, meetings, and community events are an exciting way to keep...
Look to Computers for the Next Dr. Seuss: The World of Language Generators and GPT-3 Technology
When talking about A.I., Google’s Cassie Kozyrkov asks you to imagine an island of drunk workers, an island that does the mindless, repetitive work that humans don’t want to do. We’re used to thinking about computers this way—but when they become better writers than us, things grow complicated. Natural Language Generation (NLG), the subset of A.I. that powers computer-written language, essentially works by predicting a response to given data. If you feed it an incomplete sentence, it calculates the probability that a next set of words will follow. In our daily lives, this is built into...
That's my family
I love my family. I got to see some of my relatives today from my mom and it was very lovely. They are people so they're not all just good or bad. But they are kind. They are selfless. They take care of each other. My family couldn't always afford to go to school or have their own clothes or nice houses or sometimes any house to live in. Or shower frequently or have good medicine or buy makeup. Or have nice paper to write on or envelopes to send. Or much to eat sometimes. They may talk different, you would too if you grew up there. They have mental disabilities and physical disabilities. They...
Making schools healthier for our children
From fall through spring, school is a full-time job for most children in the U.S. Every day, kids wake up early and get ready for school, rarely realizing that they are preparing to be the next generation that will write our laws and run our businesses — hopefully with an eye toward ultimately improving the environment for the better. With so much relying on how students do while attending school, you might expect the investment into school safety standards to be high. Unfortunately, not all schools offer students the same opportunities for a successful education. In order for children to be...
How can summer schools help atypical learners?
South Asians and the criminal justice system
UPDATE JUNE 2020: After writing this article, a few people reached out to me, pointing out some information that could be misleading. The point of view this article is written in implies that South Asians do not have troubled relationships with police officers or the criminal justice system. While this may be true for those of us who reside in primarily upper middle class neighborhoods, this is not the case for those South Asians who have grown up in predominantly economically-disadvantaged neighborhoods or ethnic enclaves nested in major cities. The South Asian-American identity itself is so...