Over six weeks, students from Bronzeville, Chinatown and surrounding areas shared their experiences with racism, culminating with an art installation.
By Esther Yoon-Ji Kang
Aug 2, 2024, 7:00am EDT
Before her family moved to Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, Lena Leshey spent part of her childhood in Ohio.
As a Black kid in a mostly-white school, she said she was bullied regularly and had just one friend, an Asian American boy.
“We were always together because [others] would make fun of him, too,” said Lena, 16. She remembered classmates stretching out their eyes with their fingers to make fun of her friend. She remembers peers telling her she couldn’t play near them.
Lena said she never had a chance to unpack some of these early childhood experiences with racism until recently. For the past six weeks, the Lindblom Math and Science Academy student was part of the Racial Healing Collaborative, a joint program of the Love, Unity & Values (LUV) Institute and the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC).
For Leshay, the program was “a very safe space to open up about certain experiences. They also teach you how to speak up about those things.”
The Racial Healing Collaborative brought together four Black and four Asian American students from Bronzeville, Chinatown and other surrounding communities “to talk about what racial healing looks like,” said Yvette Curington, the program manager at LUV Institute, a Bronzeville-based nonprofit that focuses on restorative justice and workforce development.
Grace Chan McKibben, with Chinatown-based CBCAC, said she and LUV Institute Executive Director Cosette Nazon-Wilburn brainstormed the idea for the program together.
“Bronzeville is just a stone’s throw away from Chinatown, and I think that very often, the two communities don’t interact or communicate with each other,” McKibben said. She added that discriminatory housing policies and decades of segregation have resulted in misconceptions and strife among the communities, as well as a lack of knowledge about the similarities between the two.
Students in the Racial Healing Collaborative program spent two mornings each week having restorative circle conversations, storytelling and working with two artists — Damon Lamar Reed, who is Black, and Haerim Lee, who is Asian — to create collages that were translated into two heart-shaped sculptures. The sculptures were unveiled Thursday at the LUV Institute and will be placed in yet-to-be-determined locations in Bronzeville and Chinatown.
