Channing Hill (left) leads a chant during a protest outside Trinity High School in Euless, TX on June 14, 2020.
Channing
At Trinity, I was the president of Black Heritage Organization (which is our Black student union) ever since I got to Trinity, so from sophomore year until senior year. We were more active sophomore and junior year, because IB was tough senior year, but I did that. And then junior year in high school, we had a program called Trojan Symposium, where they brought Police Chief Brown and some administrators, and they asked, “How could we better our school?” I raised the point that the school was disproportionately punishing Black and brown students and sending them to AEP over issues that were more socio-economic issues -- issues that needed healing, issues that needed treatment, issues that didn’t deserve students to get kicked out of the classroom. After that, I formed an organization called 45 Degrees on campus. Me and Ms. J really worked hard on this project. She got funding for it, actually. It was to target at-risk kids that were getting into trouble and really just missing somebody to say “Hey, are you okay?” and to not just ask if they were okay but to provide some mentorship, to provide some guidance. Really, when it comes to at-risk kids, there is a level of guidance that they are not getting, and we wanted to stand as an in-between, as a safety net, before they drop too far. So we started that junior year. Outside of HEB, I work with the NAACP, and that’s about it.
It’s so funny, that week we got sent home was such an up-and-down week. It was a rollercoaster. Going into the week, I was accepting a Congressional internship offer, and by the end of the week the offer had been rescinded and I was on a flight home. And it was the week of my birthday. It was such a rollercoaster week. And then I get home, and George Floyd… it wasn’t just George Floyd for me. It was George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and all of it happened within a few weeks of each other, within a month. The way it broke my heart was not different. It wasn’t anything new. It was the same heartbreak I had felt every year of my life since I became aware, since Trayvon Martin. So when the protests first came out, I was in San Antonio -- my life has really just been a rollercoaster since school ended -- my grandfather had a stroke, so I was helping my family in San Antonio. Since I was staying with my grandparents, I couldn’t be out on the streets. But I was desperate. I was angry at the world, I was desperate to find some way to do something. So that’s when I hosted a forum, for people to not only discuss what activism looks like off the streets, but to discuss how to sustain activism and how to really do what you can and in your own way. If you’re creative, what can you create? If you’re a finance major and good with money, how can you raise money, how can you organize funds? So I raised that forum. And I also made signs and put them in the yard. My grandma was terrified that they were going to toss a rock through our window, they’re gonna wake us up, they’re gonna come for all of us. She was terrified. And it was kind of funny, because I guess I just hadn’t been down there in a while, but I thought she lived in a pretty minority-friendly area. Also, most of the people in her neighborhood were Black and Hispanic -- or at least the people we interacted with. So as I was putting up the signs, you saw people would drive by multiple times, and some people would be like, “Oh yeah, hey! Cool, Black power!” but then you also saw the stares, and the shaking of heads, and I was thinking, “Oh, maybe we might get a rock through the window.” I did that for March and early April, and then maybe two weeks into April (maybe less), it was like I was called from multiple different directions. So, I work with NAACP, and I had the NAACP saying, “we’re doing a youth protest, and I need you to help organize” and I was like, “I’m out of town!” and then literally the day after, my friend Deyana -- who I did the protest with in Euless -- she says, “Channing, I want to throw a protest. This is right up your alley, let’s do this.” and I was like, “Ugh, I’m out of town!” And I guess everything happens in threes, because then somebody from my church called and said, “Channing, I need your help.” And I was like, oh my God. So I called my mom, and my mom said, “Channing, you’ve been called on, literally.” She dropped everything she was doing to pick me up from San Antonio and drove all night, all the way back. Two days later I was working doing TV and protesting and organizing the protest in Dallas (that was my first protest), and it has been, whoo, a lot ever since.
So yeah, in total I've organized six or seven protests. I did Hurst-Euless-Bedford. Actually, we started in Bedford, and did Hurst and Euless last. I did Arlington three times, then Dallas and Hurst Euless Bedford. I think I'm missing one, not sure, but I've been to like two to three that I didn't organize.
When you're on the ground working, it's always something -- you're going, and going, and going. And in HEB, when it wasn't necessarily an organization backing us yet, it was... it felt very heavy, because it felt like everybody was looking to me to do everything. So I had to not only find the funds, I had to, you know, think of everything. So it was very heavy. And then we continue to organize, and to accept that role that you've been put in, it's more and more responsibility. And not just responsibility. More expectations are put on. So after the protest and everything, and you go to the school board and you say, "look, you'll have a problem. This is what we demand or we'll be at your door every week." They look to you to solve the problem. And I'm like, I have raised, I have lived through, this trauma. I have raised the issue. I have highlighted proposed solutions, but now you also want me to solve the problem for you? Well, there are people with degrees that specifically work on this issue. And then also it's... I had a relationship with Police Chief Brown in Euless. We worked on 45 degrees together. Before the protest in Euless, when I told him, "These are our demands," and we didn't say "remove police officers from schools." We didn't do anything controversial. We didn't even say to defund the police at the time. We wanted them to accept the proposal that the Democratic Party put to Congress, we wanted them to accept the 8 Can't Wait proposals, and we wanted them to start establishing a database. Even if there isn't a national database, but a Euless database that checks all officers and complaints. We wanted training. There's only three Black police officers in the Euless police department. But the Black community in Euless is very familiar -- all of us know what it feels like to be pulled over for nothing more than driving by Black in our own neighborhoods. So when you don't have diversity that represents the population, you need to make up for it by getting to know your population, like having a connection. So we wanted them to do diversity training, de-escalation training, and we also wanted their policies be reviewed for discrimination. Discrimination and racism sometimes can be unintentional, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous. That doesn't make it any less traumatic to people of color. So we just wanted them to open the department up for review. And the police chief said, he sent me an email. He's like, "I thought we had a better relationship than this. I thought he knew me better. I'm so disappointed in you."
And that shook me to my core, because I don't... I truly don't understand what was wrong with anything that we asked for. And what he was most upset about was that I said HEB ISD, along with all the police departments -- so Euless PD, Bedford PD, and Hurst PD -- wrongfully criminalize Black and Brown students. Because having the SROs... first of all, the automatic fight policy, through which students are given tickets. So, we all know from sitting in assembly, if you get into a fight, both parties go to SOS, et cetera. Well, it's disproportionately Black and brown students in those situations. So police officer Axton, he sent me an email saying he only executes that policy discretionarily because he believes that the students deserve a chance. But the policy still exists. So just because you don't follow the rules doesn't mean it's okay. Like, what if you have a bad day? And you just don't feel like doing something? Is the student who deserves a chance still going to get a ticket, or do you just not feel like it? And he said, "Well, we don't do that. We barely give out the tickets anyway." And I'm like, A, there is no protection for students against this policy, and B, the proportions, the numbers from the school from Principal Harris, show that it is disproportionately Black and brown students who are put in these situations. So how are you not criminalizing them?
If you really want to get involved in the school to prison pipeline, then we can talk about the dynamic of AEP itself. So just because you feel like being nice doesn't mean that there isn't a problem here, and that you aren't complicit in the problem, especially if you are aware of the school to prison pipeline. And Principal Harris, he was like, "Well, I just became aware of implicit bias in our schools two years ago." I was like, how could you just become aware of the issue that I've lived my entire life in HEB, that my brother lived his entire life in HEB? And he graduated from Trinity back in 2006. So what's the problem?
I've been finding, I guess, they're really defensive. So when you're defensive, you kind of close your ears to learning. They feel like they are personally being attacked, I guess. And it's kind of annoying. It's not personal for you. Like, you have gone through no pain during this struggle. You will lose nothing. Like, you have a contract, you've got teachers unions or whatever. This costs you nothing to do the right thing. It costs you nothing to at least admit that there is a problem and to investigate further, but it costs us everything.
What this looks like for [Deyana and I] right now is that we went to the school board meetings. We've been to two so far, which is the amount they've had since we've started protesting. At first we were going to try to address both the school board and the community at large, like the policing issue. And that seemed like a monster that was just too big for both of us to handle from those two different directions. So, we went to the school board. The first meeting, I laid out the issues, I laid out that by not correcting these issues, HEB ISD is in violation of the education code and the code of conduct, the Teachers Administration, and really the school district in total. I also laid out the demands.
The second school board meeting, they also laid out the plan for school for Coronavirus, and they claimed to address our issue, and what they laid out truly made me want to cry. Like, thinking about it now makes me want to cry, because I was so angry. Um, they laid out this... they pulled out this Excel sheet where they claimed to show their efforts over the last 10 or 12 years on dealing with race issues in the school district. So hiring diversity, dealing with performance differences, dealing with discrimination, discriminatory policies in the school district. And really all it showed is that they hadn't done anything. They put, "Oh, well, we went to a conference that talks about implicit bias this year. And that was just so great." I was like, “Well, what did you do to stop the implicit bias in the school district?” And they're like, "Well, it's a long process, and we're making progress, and we're working on it, and we're getting there."
But every day you don't do anything, every day you say "We're getting there," more students are being harmed, more students are being traumatized, more students are being criminalized, more students are being miseducated. More students are being left behind. Just like, when you talk about Black Lives Matter, you have to realize that Black lives matter not only in the streets when they're walking home, in their beds when they're resting, but in the schools when they're learning. Like, HEB disproportionately sends Black and brown kids out of school and into AEP. HEB disproportionately has Black and brown students in remedial courses, disproportionately performing at lower rates. It makes no sense, especially for Black students, because we make up maybe 13% of the population at Trinity, but failed testing at a rate of 30%. We are sent out of the class -- like, Principal Harris held this kind of think tank type program, where he pulled Black students out of the class and said, "Well, what are some of the issues, like race related issues, that you've felt at Trinity?" But since then, after he's gotten that feedback from students, he's done nothing. He said, "Oh, I had one training." And when he told me the training was mandatory, I was told from teachers that it wasn't mandatory, and that there were teachers who weren't there. So which is it? Regardless, even if it was mandatory, you have one training. What is one training going to do for the hundreds of Black kids at your school who are wrongfully treated?
So dealing with the school board, that was the last thing. There's a woman who has some type of leadership role in the school board -- she sits in the middle, I forget her name -- but she asked me, "Well, can you write it all out?" Really asked me to provide the solution to it all. And I'm like, you just approved a probably million-dollar budget with the police departments in the area to continue [School Resource Officers] in school. But you don't have the money to hire somebody to fix this issue?
What do I hope the future of these schools looks like? In the future, I hope it looks like my little sister's smile being preserved. My sister just started at Trinity like this year -- this would have been her first year, she's a sophomore -- and already she's had a horrible experience with racism at Trinity, on the gymnastics team. She spoke at my protest, at the one in Euless, and it brought not only me to tears, like thinking about it brings me to tears, because for her to have her heart broken in the same way that I had mine broken, when I thought going through Central and Trinity, that I had done something that would make her experience a little bit better. It hurt. To see her hurt the way I was hurt hurt, but there was nothing new about the way that she was hurt. So I wish she could go through school and have a completely different experience than I did.
I hope her classrooms -- she wants to do IB -- I hope there's more than two Black students in an IB classroom, in her class. I hope that she isn't the only one in her class who knows what Langston Hughes' "Dream Deferred" is. I hope that she is not chastised for being "a loud Black girl" anytime she wants to express herself. I hope my little sister doesn't have a teacher who shies away from her, cowers away from her into a corner, because she thinks my little sister is violent. I hope that my little sister's hair isn't made fun of, or she isn't pet in class. I hope that she is made to feel exceptional for the right reasons. I hope that she's encouraged to perform and excel, and not expected to fail. I hope her classmates, her Black and brown classmates, I hope she doesn't have to watch them being dragged off campus. I hope she doesn't have to question whether they deserved it. I hope my little sister graduates with all of her Black and brown classmates and she doesn't watch her friends drop out one by one. I hope she never has a classmate that is delivered directly to the justice system. I hope she just has a wildly different experience than me.
I hope there's a Black Heritage Organization for her to join. I hope that when she gets to Trinity, the African Dance Association won't be considered the most ghetto dance association on campus. I hope if she wants to name the Black Heritage Organization to the Black Club, like we have the Poly Club and Asian Club, then she could do that and white kids won't complain. That's a whole story. But I just hope we're better.
It's not an issue that the administration feels is relevant to them. They say "Well, as long as you know, you don't make us look bad." If you're somewhat performing, it's not something that will disturb their sleep at night. It's not. If you were to leave or drop out or move, you will somehow just fall from their statistics or be a .0001 percent. HEB tells you in the loudest, but at the same time in the most subtle way imaginable, that your life does not matter.
Graduating high school and in my first year of college, I was just kind of really done with this area. I was so jaded. Being Black in the suburbs, it's kind of funny, because you leave your household thinking you're kind of the same, like, I'm not different from my neighbors next door. But when you get to school, like, it was white people who taught me that I was Black and what that meant. But being back and organizing and seeing the support and seeing the community that this has created -- a community of people who are defiant, and resilient, and seeing a community of people who genuinely desire to be an accelerator for change -- it is not only heartwarming, but it's allowed me to find a village that I've never seen before in HEB. So, I think, I guess there's somewhat of a silver lining in everything.
It is what it is. Like, going to Howard... I wanted to go to Howard just to find a niche and a community of like minds. And that's what I found. So not everybody's gonna understand you. Not everybody has the same purpose in life as you do. Not everybody has... Like, something in me just allows me to speak truth to power, unafraid. It used to get me in trouble. Now it's one of my biggest strengths. You just have to find your people, and realize that it's okay that not everybody understands you, or is your people.”
To hear how another student has been pushing for change at Trinity HS, view Tulsi’s profile.
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