My first memories of racialized interactions were with my parents. They would avoid a person walking down the street, or mention to be careful around an area because certain people would like to hang out there. As I grew older ~around age 11 I began to see a pattern. The people that my parents would want to avoid on the street were often brown or black. They would be trusted less. This seemed extremely silly to me. Another instance of how my parents saw the world in binary and made huge conclusions with a miniscule amount of evidence.

I came to this conclusion about their black and white views hearing my parents talk about other children. They would say Lucas shouldn't be failing class his parents went to the best university in China. Or how another child's father was an engineer, or their grandmother ran a school so they should be xy and z. This one fact about them dictated much. Whatever it may be. They should be better behaved. Smarter. More curious. Musically inclined.

It always seemed to me that they were denying the person in front of them. They did not bother looking. There was no curiosity. My parents simply saw the label - be it race, genetics, or parent's job titles - and made a world of assumptions. I simply thought it was silly and nonsensical. And moved on. The next time I encountered something racial in my life it could have been an opportunity to experience hurt and be jaded. Instead due to the peculiarities of my life I simply thought they were silly. And just moved on. A fact which reflects my race's relative privilege in the part of the world I grew up in (The Bay Area).

A: My identities most pertinent to my life right now are in relation to other people and philosophical. I am a son, a friend, a brother, a partner. I am joyful, curious, and supportive. My identity in my schooling experience k-12 was as a fan of psychology. My memories of k-12 focus far more on the social aspect of the experience, than anything else.

The intersectional facets of my identity that have defined me as a learner are harder to identify. Through intersectionality as a framework of oppression leaves me with fragmented pieces of my identity which tell an incomplete story of how I am as a learner. I mainly learn through inspiring curiosity about a subject. This leads me to ask questions, which drives me to find answers. I am also very practical and my learning style is science informed. I learned using spaced repition, and through multiple means of representation to seal information into my brain. I am also social and I learn in community and in conversation. Of course my curiosity, science informed learning habits, and social meaning making tendencies are NOT intersectional identities.

Here are a few connections with things that ARE. English is my second language, which means I was pulled out in elementary school for added language support. I stutter when speaking English, however, this has not discouraged me from participating in class thanks to a brave friend of mine who perpetually stuttered and perpetually never felt invalidated for it. As an undergrad I was a man in an institution primarily run by, employing, and surrounded by born women identifying as women. While it made certain conversations impossible for me to relate to me I learned to step back and just listen. I have a condition which leads me to have a smaller bladder, so I learned to communicate with teachers whenever I am having a flare up that I will leave the room often. However, despite all the ways in which my intersectional identity changes how I exist in a learning space, these ultimately do not come to mind when I am learning and acquiring more knowledge. My needy bladder, isolation in terms of gender, and different first language do not present a difficulty that is always on my mind, and that is a privilege in and of itself that I am grateful for right now.

I took AP stats in 11th grade and my teacher would lecture the whole period. He had a projector and a statistical questions on a laminated sheet which he would use as a slide deck.

My teacher could have used different kinds of representation that were more accessible. We could have had slides, he could have taken photos of the laminated sheets which we could blow up. Provided the link to an online text book with accessibility features. We could have engaged with the learning outside of just a lecture style such as turning to talk to the people besides us, sharing ideas, and using statistics to engage with the real world. There are so many applications with statistics and literally everything that goes on around us. Sports, the weather, etc. It is really the study of how people make choices. We could have come up with experiments pertinent to our lives, gathered data, and then learned to present that data to lay audiences using color coded information, clear charts etc. So many creative possibilities. In the end, it was just 180+ days of lecturing. Tests were only used as a litmus test to see how much we had learned, rather than as a tool to inform continuous improvement. I enjoy statistics. I taught it for a semester before joining BTEP. However, the way this course played out in my high school was highly discouraging.

Notes: Although there are many articles written about Dolores Huerta the best place to start is from her own opinions and speeches. To embody her within a time limit I need to understand her essence. She fought for many causes beyond just the one we remember her for in popular history. But, no matter if it be immigration reform, LGBTQ Rights, or feminism she believed in the power of people to organize and spur great change. Many of her quotes are about how all you need to do is just to be an ordinary person and that is enough. She told people that they do not need to be invited to make a difference, they are the invitation. She told people to get off their butts and join each other on the walk toward making history. To mobilize and get active. That if only people realized the power inherent in themselves that's all they needed to create change, and through out human history that's how change always happened. When a group of people got together and decided to do something about it. Outside of these beliefs another quote which influenced how I would embody her are her quotes surrounding Gandhi which showed me where she stood philosophically in terms of activism. She was firmly non violent. The rest came together after reading these quotes and listening to her talk.

What patterns/beliefs were you enacting when engaged with the embodied history experience? Did this support leaning in or away from discomfort? I initially read 3rd person articles about Dolores Huertas. There are plenty, and for the most part speak in platitudes. Everything changed when I ran across a you tube video of her speaking just a few years ago. Although obvious this video centered the real person and I came to the belief that my embodied history should be of her own words, not what was said about her. This supported leaning in to the discomfort of trying to capture the essence of a person outside of myself. It felt more authentic and real to create a portrayal that was based off of her own words, thoughts, and opinions and nothing else.

I am on the Believing section of the moral compass. Her opinions were inspired to my occasionally jaded mind towards politics. She believes that if people recognize their power and are compelled to become activists for their causes they can create change. Her quotes are about how people do not need to be invited to make a change, that they are the invitation. That a person's fulfillment and recognition of their ability to change history, and make a difference is all it takes to actually make a difference. That if we only knew and believed in our power we could make it happen. A very pleasant almost karmic idea I would love to believe in.