We are excited for IGR student Zeinab Khalil for having an Op-Ed piece published in the Michigan Daily this week!
Zeinab participated in Summer Youth Dialogues On Race and Ethnicity this past summer as a facilitator. She said about her piece:
"I think a lot of what I wrote about connects and is informed by my experience working at IGR this summer. Stepping into Detroit and Dearborn as an outsider and working with high school students from the area, I had to constantly remind myself of the importance of local knowledge and how I needed to be extra cautious when discussing issues on race relations in the metro-Detroit area as someone not from the area, no matter how much instruction, training and reading I had done, and regardless of whether I could relate to them on other matters (e.g. a shared race, common experience, etc.).
Throughout the summer, both the students and I struggled with this idea of bringing in and using our lived experiences to make sense of the extremely complex dynamics and concepts we discussed. One participant really drove this point home for me in their end-of-program evaluation where they wrote, 'I learned that emotions are okay to feel and that they play a huge role in my journey with race and who I am.' "
Thanks Zeinab, for sharing your thoughts with the campus community!