This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at DePauw chapter.
Meet junior, Inés Giramata, this week’s Campus Celebrity! Her involvement in all things social justice and her tips on how to get yourself engaged in allyship are crucial in light of recent events. Check out what she has to say about how you can support below, and be sure to attend her Peace Camp event on October 6th!
Her Campus: Hey Inés, thanks for talking with us. Let’s start with you telling me about yourself.
Campus Celebrity: You already know me.
HC: Well yeah, but do it for the readers!
CC: This girl… Well I don’t like cats. I’m a junior, from Rwanda in the city Kigali, and I’m an Econ and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies double major.
HC: Tell us what you’ve been doing in regards to last week’s protests.
CC: I’ve been attending and organizing meetings, meeting professors and other administration that want to talk to students. I’ve also been trying to be there for students of color that need friends to talk to. Like I said, organizing different types of protests and forming healing spaces.
HC: That’s awesome. What did you do this past Wednesday (when the protesters returned)?
CC: I had class. Our professor said that we could go to the protest, but I just did not want to go, so I stayed in class. It’s been overwhelming since last Wednesday and everything and I’ve just been conflicted so I just chose to go to class.
HC: Definitely understandable. So what can people do to get involved and show support?
CC: There are different ways to show support. Educating yourself is showing support, trying to understand what’s going on, going to spaces where students are talking about what happened on Wednesday. One example is the allyship events that went on. There are spaces where you can go to talk—there are organized forums. You can go to places like AAAS where they have a lot of things to talk about; how they feel and some of the solutions the school can make. Just going to these things, listening, contributing, educating yourself more, and being there for your peers is also support. It just depends on who you are and what you’re comfortable doing. If you’re comfortable rallying and supporting you can do that too…I’m the type of person to flip tables and stuff but if you’re not that type of person, there’s the organizing and planning that goes into it that you can also get involved in.
HC: Educating ourselves is so, so important… Tell me about your upcoming speech in the Academic Quad.
CC: So I’m a Compton Peace and Social Justice intern and we have these things called “Peace Camps” which we have annually. It’s events regarding different types of social justice topics. My passion is Africa so I’ll be talking about different things involving Africa. My speech in the Academic Quad is about the role of young people in social justice movements. Specifically I’ll be looking into South Africa and the Soeta movement which is like a protest or riot that was led by high school students in 1976 during the Apartheid and the role that played in ending it. It was one of the big events that caused international awareness of the Apartheid. All of the students involved in the riot never went back to school, so I’ll be looking at how that affected South Africa because today, South Africa is enduring xenophobic acts where South Africans kill other Africans from different countries, saying that they’re stealing their jobs and houses. So if you have a large number of people who never went to school, they cannot go get the good jobs that can satisfy their basic needs and more. So you have people from other countries that are educated to take those jobs—that arose from the Soeta movement. So I’ll be talking about how these are high school students, but also about what other African nationalists we know that changed the image of Africa that started at a young age. These are continuous mirrors between America and other African counties where revolutions are started by young people and they’re continued by young people. So like Malcolm X, Dubois, the Black Panthers who were 16-18—which are young ages—and what that means.
HC: That’s so cool. What are your plans after DePauw?
CC: I’m not doing anything with Econ once I’m out of here! I’m going to grad school for African Studies and hoping that I will end up in South Africa or in Ethiopia or somewhere studying colonial impacts and using my knowledge of being in the US back in Africa. AND THEN get a PhD in the same thing and hope I end up in the Pan-African congress.
HC: That is so interesting! And an awesome plan to have for yourself.
CC: I don’t know how I’m going to get there but I’m going to get there.
HC: Yes you will! Is there anything else you want to say to the readers?
CC: Tell the frats to play some African music at their parties ‘cus it’s bumpin’.
Inés’s blog post digging deeper into her feelings about the protests and their results can be found here.
Inés’s talk will be in Academic Quad (outside Roy) on Tuesday, October 6th at 4:15.