BLM Interview — BeyondRace Team
BeyondRace was created to discover, speak up and find solutions to the burning issue of racism. We particularly focused on the black lives matter movement around the world and especially in our country.
Our last mission was to reach out to people who are actually facing this issue daily and ask them a few questions. We did not want neither to imagine what these people went through or are still going through nor we wanted to talk on their on their behalf.
So we tried to connect conduct an interview with members of the Afro — Greek community. In lack of answers from participants, we decided to use a conversation, or better yet a video interview, from Onassis Stegi, who gathered many people from the Afro — Greek community to create a discussion, share their stories and raise awareness for the black lives matter movement. They also discussed the matter of racism and how the participants have been affected by it in their own everyday lives.
The most crucial questions that they were asked were “what does “I can’t breathe” mean for you in Greece? have you ever experienced racism in your personal life?”. The participants all took their turns answering this question and the results were shocking. Another question that really shocked us was “whether the color of the skin have been an obstacle in their lives”. The participants went around the room telling stories about how the color of his skin had been the reason for them to lose jobs and opportunities during their lifetime. Interesting was also the answer that they gave to the question “do you think that things are getting better with racism nowadays”. Turns out that the world is moving forward, but it seems that we also need to push things ourselves so that we can finally get rid of racism. That is exactly the mission of BeyondRace. When they were asked “what do you think the problem is that causes racism”, one of the participants answered that it’s not just the police, referring to the George Floyd incident, but instead it’s justice. And added, that he believes that we must start from the beginning, because law is made by the ethics of every age. Also, all the participants seemed to believe that there are many allies around them that have been there from the beginning of the journey of recognizing and supporting that the Afro — Greeks too have their rights as individuals, as citizens to be active in this society and not to be perceived as second class citizens.
Overall, what the participants seemed to conclude to, was that Greek society needs to understand that they are here too, they speak Greek, they are educated and they can follow their dreams without the color of their skin being an obstacle. On a positive concluding note, one of them recognized that there has been change and there has been evolution, that things are going forward in a slow but steady pace and they seemed to be very grateful for that.
All this information that I described, is exactly the information that we used to better understand how Afro — Greeks live, what problems they highlight and exactly what they think needs to be changed immediately.
With those findings, we crafted a new project that is a vision board and a focus board for our organization to take action and make an impact in the Greek society. We would love for you to join us and support our cause.
Click here to see our full project
BeyondRace Team Members:
, ,Special Thanks to our professor and mentor Mrs.
