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Students break through cultures
By Jeff Kearns
Homestead High School senior Susan Feizzadeh was starting to notice that something didn't seem right about the bulletins broadcast to students at the end of third period every day.
"I'd hear the announcements every day, for the Black Student Union, the Latino Club, the Asian Club, and I'm just thinking to myself, what is the need for having these racial based clubs with names that sound so intimidating?" Feizzadeh says. "Why can't we just have a club where we learn about each other together?"
The anwer, it turned out, was that there was no reason why that club couldn't become reality. So Feizzadeh started working to create it.
All Shades of Colors, a recognized club at Homestead since the end of last year, doesn't cater to any one racial, ethnic, or religious group. Instead, says Feizzadeh, the club's president, it caters to everyone. And on top of that, she adds, some of ASC's officers are also officers in some of the other ethnic clubs on campus.
Last summer, many of the club's more than 70 members and five faculty members spent four days up in the Santa Cruz Mountains at Camp Anytown, a non-profit camp that teaches groups how to break down barriers.
On the first night, group members excluded one ethnic group at a time, and while they were gone, the remaining members wrote down their racial stereotypes. After all ethnic groups had been cycled out of the room, the group came back together to discuss the results--which led to a lot of crying, anger and laughter. With lessons like that, ASC members came face to face with their own prejudices, as well as those of others.
"A lot of people thought they were pretty open-minded, but we saw that we had prejudices, too, that we all need to break down," says Feizzadeh.
Next week, ASC is sponsoring a cultural holiday party, where students bring food from their own cultures and discuss the meanings behind their own holidays.
ASC members are also set to make presentations at several Cupertino and Sunnyvale area middle schools in January and February on the lessons they learned at Camp Anytown.
Additionally, the group is planning other school activities designed to help bring down some of the barriers. Next May, ASC is putting on the school's first International Night, a big show of foods, dancing, fashion and talents from around the globe put on by no one else than the school's own diverse population.
On top of that, group members regularly attend Cupertino Citizens Cross-Cultural Communication (5Cs) meetings, and in the future, ASC may head up to the mountains again for another retreat at Camp Anytown.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
