During the weekend of Nov. 7 and 8, a video of a white West High student using a racial slur went viral on social media among West High students. On Nov. 9, West High Principal Mitch Gross and members of administration held a meeting for students of color to air their concerns about the nature of the video. After the meeting, a protest began in the halls of West with Nisreen Elgaali ’22 and other students leading the way to change.

The First Protest

[After the meeting], I really didn’t know if students were going to come together to do something like [protest] or not, especially with the pandemic, a lot of us have been struggling socially. I know it could have been a really hard environment for a lot of students to be in. It’s scary, too. I was just really happy that the whole day happened, that we came together.

I made sure before we started walking around, I stood up and talked to everybody. I said, ‘This has to be peaceful. We have to be in unison and we have to be loud. We don’t want anything violent. If somebody is planning on doing something violent, do it on your own. It should have nothing to do with the protests.’

As the protest was going around the school, I was feeling very confident in a sense that this is the first time the Black students from my past four years here have unified together about this problem. It’s something that we’ve all been upset about for a long time, but we haven’t really come together to figure it out. [When we were protesting during lunch] there were a lot of students who walked by and there were a lot of students who laughed at what was going on. But that didn’t bother me, I just looked at them and I thought, ‘What’s funny?’

That made me feel… I know it might not make sense, but seeing those students and their true colors when they walked by when they were laughing at it or looking at it those types of ways, it made me feel hopeful. I was thinking, ‘People’s true colors are showing now. And now, as much as [people want] to sweep things under the rug, they can’t.’ In a sense, that gave me some hope.

(Later), other students started getting into conflicts and fights (unrelated to the protest). That’s something that really upset me. The first couple of fights started happening, and me and a lot of other students said, ‘We don’t want y’all to fight but if you’re gonna fight, fight outside of school, don’t fight in the environment that the school gave us for our protest and for our message, because then it’s going to deteriorate the message,’ which is exactly what happened.

That was the first point throughout this whole journey where I felt like it wasn’t working out my way. It was kind of like a letdown. Then the cops were called, and that was a mess because cops didn’t need to be involved. 

For the students that were supporting everything, I was amazed. I loved the unity. Besides that, I was mainly disgusted, honestly. For instance, when we were protesting in the cafeteria, one of the students who was protesting with us — she’s a Black student — was standing on the table protesting. This white student who was sitting at the table asked her to give him a lap dance, which was very inappropriate and degrading. A lot of situations like that have been happening, which is one of the main things that disgusted me, but the thing that really baffled me were the rumors that started. Anonymous accounts on Discord started rumors saying that we were planning violent protests. 

The Day After

Wednesday, I came to school, and the administrators told me that somebody called the police and left an anonymous tip that there was supposed to be a violent protest with knives and firearms on Friday. That was not correct at all. That was the most overwhelming and stressful part for me. That whole time I was feeling very upset, but it just sparked more in me to keep fighting. It was like, ‘You guys really made me angry, now I’m gonna go ten times harder.’