See Beautiful Grant Applicant: InterAction Initiative

The feature below is brought to you by InterAction Initiative Inc,  an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about InterAction Initiative Inc, please visit their website page: here.

Remembering Our Beauty Through Our Counternarratives

Beauty is a contentious word for many, especially those of us at the margins. Growing up as a young Black woman, I quickly noticed the ways ‘beauty’ was weaponized to devalue my truth and identity. Comments like ‘pretty for a Black girl’ or ‘your hair is too nappy’ always served to remind me that Black was not beautiful. In school, the “beauty” of Black history was limited to a few exceptional stories of Black heroes who overcame insurmountable odds to earn a meager paragraph/sentences within our history textbooks. The rest of American history framed Black and Brown existence as woefully inferior, oppressed, and subjugated

For young Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian folks growing up in the United States, the stories of beauty we consume in the media are either entirely white, aspiring to whiteness or solely white-washed. These stories that surround us, from our textbooks to media to school curriculum, are all impacted by dominant narratives in our society and can have harmful impacts on our identity development and mental health.

In April 2015, the Executive Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, a national alliance challenging racial hierarchy and its impact on boys and men of color, created “His Story: Shift in Narratives for Boys & Men of Color.” The toolkit addresses how the Executive Alliance could not “advance racial justice, or simply the interests of boys and men of color, without addressing the narratives that surround them.” The toolkit outlines how dominant narratives, a system of stories that are repeated through history, media and culture that perpetuate stereotypes, discrimination, and violence, has a harmful impact on boys of color, and to further add, girls, gender nonconforming, trans and nonbinary young people of color.

As co-founders of InterAction Initiative Inc. and Young People of Color ourselves, we have seen this phenomena throughout work and personal lives. The external effects of dominant narratives manifest through (implicit or explicit) biases that influence how teachers treat Black and Brown children. In South Bend, IN alone, the city where we began our work, Black youth are suspended at three times the rate of white students, yet they make up less than 1/3rd of the population. From such a young age, people of color are educated in a ‘color-blind’ system that treats them as inferior (Childers-McKee and Hytten, 2015). Further, dominant narratives fuel the hatred that leads to mass shootings, policies and practices that contribute to police brutality, and mass incarceration. 

In fact, dominant narratives are so embedded in our culture that they are barriers to creatively imagining alternative structures and new ideas for the world we want to live in. Dominant narratives can also “trigger or be reinforced by internalized negative self-perceptions among community members.” In other words, dominant narratives are not only forced upon us, but reinforced by us and those among us: It impacts how we see ourselves, identities, worth, and potential. How can Black, Brown, Indigenous, and POC youth feel beautiful and know the beauty within themselves and their communities, when dominant narratives have the power to dictate much of our lives?

​InterAction challenges dominant narratives that deter Young People of Color from realizing their full selves within schools and communities. At InterAction, we build YPOC to resist, heal, and grow by centering the development of their own counter-narratives as a critical tool for advancing racial justice, inside and out. We activate and advance Young People of Color and their counter-narratives to build a more just, inclusive and equitable society. Counter-narratives are one of the many ways people on the margins express their lived experiences. In racial justice work, counter-narratives are powerful because they shed light on the ways in which systems of oppression and injustice manifest in everyday lives. Counter-narratives are beautiful because they help us recognize the power and agency that already exists within us.

At InterAction, we have a history of creatively engaging YPOC to foster empathy, become inspiring racial justice leaders, and be grounded in our collective history. We at InterAction create beauty by providing YPOC space to reconstruct their narratives, reclaim their future, and reimagine a new vision for our world. We create beauty in providing YPOC the tools and resources to inspire and create change in their communities so that all may flourish. We create beauty everyday as a team when we dare to exist as our full selves as women of color.

I co-founded InterAction because I felt a desire to know my own beauty, history and identity. This work has been a long journey of unlearning and remembering who I am, my own counter-narrative.

What’s Next for us at InterAction?

Our new initiative, the InterAction YPOC Summer Institute, will launch in the Summer of 2020. The Summer Institute will be a 5 day intimate gathering for a cohort of 12 young activists of color who identify as Black, Indigenous or People of Color ages 18-24 from the Midwest (particularly South Bend and Chicagoland areas). The Summer Institute’s purpose is to cultivate the next generation of YPOC racial justice leaders, thinkers, and storytellers. The Institute will be a space for them to build their capacity to thrive by engaging them in a comprehensive experience that focuses on developing their counter-narratives as a method to affirm their intersectional identities, providing strategies to care for themselves and their communities, and learn how they can use their counter-narratives to affect change in their communities.

So many of us who experience life on the margins only wish an opportunity like this existed when we were growing up. I created something that I wished I had growing up. With support from the See Beautiful Foundation, we will be able to launch our first Institute, where YPOC will have the space to connect with their counter-narratives to heal and grow from the inside and out. 

Submitted by: Deandra Cadet

Executive Director and Co-Founder