There will be a lot less racism in New Zealand society in future if three empathetic east Auckland school pupils have their way.
Allegra Browne, Una Zhou and Thedara Ranaweera are making a stand to raise awareness of the hurt caused by racism and their goal is to educate children that it should be avoided.
The Bucklands Beach Intermediate School (BBI) pupils have written to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon about the issue as part of their end-of-year 8 exhibition, which requires them to identify an important issue and ways to effect change for the future.
They also invited him to visit the school on December 5 to check out the displays in the exhibition.
Allegra says the trio chose racism as their topic as Thedara and Una have been exposed to it.
“And I have siblings who people have been racist to, so we’ve all experienced it, and we really do not like it,” she says.
“We’re focusing on changing younger kids’ lives so we can teach them to try not to be racist.
“If we teach younger kids to stop being racist they’ll grow up with a world where there isn’t a lot of racism.”
Thedara says people can sometimes be racist if they’ve had a previous problem with someone of a certain ethnicity and they then think everyone in that ethnic group “is exactly like that person”.
She says they have more work in mind as part of their project.
“Our plan to take action is to create a website where you can read about racism and how to help stop it and how it looks in schools and the community.
“We also created a board game which you can play and it’s kind of like snakes and ladders.”
Una says they also came up with questions and answers relating to their research.
“It’s mostly on our key concepts like change, connection, perspective, causation, and stuff like that. We also sent a survey to the entire school.”
That survey found 58 per cent of respondents said they’d experienced racism while 61 per cent said they’d been bullied because of their race or knew someone who had.
Allegra says there’s a lot of information on racism in the boardgame they’ve created.
“There’s these cards where you can either do challenges or it asks questions about racism and you have to answer them.
“We’ve advertised it on the website and will show it at the exhibition.
“We may donate it to a kids charity so someone can learn about it or we’ll show it around to people at our school or to Pigeon Mountain Primary School as most of the kids are coming to BBI next year.”
The trio agree society will be better off if racism no longer exists.
“People will stop bullying other people just because of their race, like what is the point of doing that?” Allegra says.
“And making racist jokes. It doesn’t achieve anything so why do it.”
