Youths Deliver Message of Unity in New Magazine : Staff Writer Shalonda Dartis, 19, Says ‘Ready or Not, We’re Here to Tell the Truth’

It’s time to cut the bull. And ready or not, we’re here to tell the truth. That’s what Unity magazine is all about. We are a bunch of young people who have come together to try to make a difference. We feel like this is our time, and if we don’t do something soon, the next generation will be lost.

It makes me sad that some young kids are learning terrible things in their home, because that’s where it all begins. That’s where racism gets started. I can’t understand how parents could teach their children to be racists. What you learn at home is the basis for everything else. But if we can get to a point where the majority of people think the way we do, we can make racists the minority--then maybe they’ll come home one day and wonder why everyone thinks differently than they do.

Maybe they’ll say, “Momma, why do you say that black people are wrong?” Maybe they’ll see more and more interracial relationships and wonder why they’ve been taught that that is wrong. Maybe they’ll start listening to other people’s ideas and question what they’ve been taught, and make up their own minds. Once they figure out that their opinions are in the minority, they might be able to see our point of view.

We know that to get that point across we have to say it loud, and that means we have to be controversial. Unity isn’t all about controversy--it’s about unity, and people putting their differences aside and working together to break racism. But the first issue is controversial. It has to be, or no one hears the message. We can’t just walk around and ask nicely, “Hi. Please don’t be racist anymore” and expect that anything will change.

Unity is powerful, particularly the section I wrote with Robert Wright, my partner in “He Said, She Said.” When we first started writing “He Said, She Said,” I wrote down a lot of ideas, and we decided to write our first article on racism. His point of view on racism and how it got started was different than mine, but I still saw his point of view. That’s the way I think it should be in life. We all have different opinions, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all try to understand each other.

All of us at the magazine are from different races. We all have different opinions. But we have one main thing in common: We’re all young adults who aren’t holding anything back, and who don’t want to go on like this anymore. I think we just need to put our heads together and stop being so ignorant--all people--and we can end it. Whatever happened in the past to cause racism and to make people hate each other the way they do over color is in the past. And if we can’t leave the past in the past, we have no future.

I feel a little pain inside because of what my ancestors may have gone through, but am I going to hate every white person I meet today because of that? No, I’m not. It would be ridiculous for me to decide to hate a 15-year-old white person I see walking down the street because her ancestors may or may not have beaten one of my ancestors. I am from a mixed family myself. My mom is half black and half white, and my dad is black. How can I hate white people when that is a part of me?

It’s all about knowledge. That’s the first step to breaking the color lines and bringing us peace. Society is based on what the “big man”--whatever that means to each individual person--wants us to see, and we can’t overcome that without knowledge. I live in South-Central, and all you hear and see about South-Central is gangs, drugs and prostitutes. But that’s not all there is here. There are people here--hard-working people, students, honor students, who are trying to make a better life for themselves. It isn’t all society says it is.

My job is to get the facts out there, and that’s a big responsibility. If all I’m doing is speaking from the heart about what I’ve done and what I’ve seen, how can I go wrong? It’s all coming from my heart, and I may not have a lot of writing experience, except for poems and essays in junior high, but you can’t teach heart.

I want to make a difference here. I hope to make people understand other people. I want my articles to hit everyone--the people who agree with me and also the people who live every day without thinking that racism is a problem. I want racists to read it. I want to let them know that we’re not scared. We’re tired of this--all of us. We’re tired of being labeled, we’re tired of talking about this, we’re tired of trying to convince people that this is a problem. The problem is there. It’s right in your face, and so are we--trying to put an end to it. Racism isn’t getting us anywhere.