Posted by Robin Suralta
Bullying is a major issue in the API community, studies have shown that Asian American, Sikh, and Muslim students have experience bullying than other races. With this the White House has launched the campaign #ActToChange which hopes to raise awareness and to empower students and teachers to report, stop, and prevent bullying. The campaign was launched in collaboration with the Sikh Coalition and Coalition of Asian Pacific in Entertainment. As Aasees Kaur stated a Sikh Coalition advocate, “Education is a right for everybody, but bullying has become a civil rights issue because it’s constantly interfering with their education.”
The campaign was made in hope that they can raise awareness but also stop the bullying. These students are being bullied because they are different from everyone else. There is nothing wrong with being weird or different, because not everyone is the same. To pick on a kid for having an accent or a special kind of clothing is not right. These students do not feel safe at school when being bullied, and hopefully this campaign will change that. In my opinion this campaign can change schools forever and can maybe finally stop bullying. Raising awareness is key to stop a problem and if most people know about this huge problem of bullying we can prevent it from happening. As a student I want to be aware about things happening in the world and hopefully this campaign will talked about in schools around the world because personally if something is brought to a kid’s attention they’ll do something about it. The key is to prevent it from even happening and the way to do that is raising awareness about it. I think the best way to raise the awareness would be to spread it around social media and to talk about it in schools. In my school we raised awareness about the LGBT community by having honoring a member of the LGBT community that has done something in the world, and I think that schools can do the same with this campaign.
In conclusion, with this campaign we can end bullying but it’ll take awhile and it can only happen if we spread awareness to our friends and families. I can’t wait to see what this campaign will do for the API community.