Black students to showcase ‘Powered by Courage’ art, poetry, essays at annual Black Voices Symposium on Monday

Twenty students from Spokane-area schools will be showcasing their art in the annual Black Voices Symposium event on Monday, many of them gracing the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center stage with their poetry, paintings, dances and essays with the theme of “Powered by Courage.”

Ferris High School senior Jetaime Thomas will be reading a poem she wrote entitled “Angry Black Girl.”

Thomas explores the “adultification” of Black kids, especially Black girls, she said, who are regularly held to higher standards and fighting an uphill battle of the “angry Black girl” stereotype. When she does get justifiably mad at racism she faces, she said it’s often brushed off as something inherent in her being because of her race and gender and the stereotype associated.

“The anger I feel living as a Black woman in America right now is immense and that also inspired it,” Thomas said.

Thomas has long had a way with the written word. She struggled with reading and writing when she was younger, but kept at it and was eventually reading far above her grade level.

She’s always been drawn to books about slavery and by Black authors, filling in the gaps missing from the religious history curriculum of the majority-white private school she used to attend.

Continuing to inspire her writing is the late author and professor Gloria Jean Watkins, whose pen name was bell hooks; NAACP co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois; abolitionist and autobiographer Frederick Douglass; and Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton. Each wrote about civil rights in their respective eras of history.

“They wrote about things that affected them and that affected their communities; they were part of a change, and I want to be like that too,” Thomas said. “I want to change where we’re at because I’m not okay with it.”

The president of Ferris’ Black Student Union, Thomas finds strength in her community and has a number of mentors that drive her to keep speaking up and advocating for herself in moments of injustice. It’s a lot on her teenage shoulders, but the young poet is motivated also by future generations of Black students she hopes won’t have to carry as much.

“It’s been more supportive recently because we’ve actually been advocating for ourselves and not allowing disrespect and I think that’s very important,” Thomas said.

At Thomas’ side overseeing her school’s Black Student Union is her best friend Heavyn Williams, who prefers painting to communicate her struggles as a young Black woman. She’s featuring a symbolism-rich painting depicting a Black woman on an operating table, loosely stitched up with the chain of a pocket watch from her stomach to her mouth. “Surgery,” as her painting is called, has several sets of outstretched hands meant to represent the central figure’s ancestors.

“It represents Black people reaching out and wanting closure, leaning on her for strength and help,” Williams said. “I also was thinking they represent that they’re reaching out to support and help her through her way, help people not silence her, not let time itself try to heal her wounds.”

The central message in her work, she said, is that her generational trauma and ancestral resentment can’t be healed with time alone.

When explaining the racism and microaggressions she encounters, including being called a racist slur while at school recently, it’s often dismissed as “not as bad” as times of slavery or segregation in America.

“Comments like those, it really sticks out to me because it really goes to show how society tries to hide our pain with time,” Williams said.

Trauma lingers and is passed down generationally, she said. Her ancestors were enslaved, her grandmother still residing in the house her own mother labored in as a house maid.

“Even if we weren’t a part of slavery, that doesn’t mean we don’t carry ancient resentment,” Williams said.

Williams has been a painter for as long as she can remember, and is eager for more opportunities to showcase her work like at Monday’s Black Voices event.

She plans to study architecture and interior design after graduating from Ferris; she already has her first set of blueprints designed.

Painting and other forms of art help her process emotions and experiences.

“It’s really become an outlet and a stress reliever for me, I can put all my pain and all my resentment in a piece of art to maybe help others with their problems so they are not alone in that,” Williams said. “Just because we go through this every day doesn’t mean we won’t be able to rise and become these leaders or doctors or lawyers.”