The following originally aired on KQED-FM.
By: Derek Williams
I’m so bowlegged that my older brother says I look like I’ve been riding a bull since the day I was born. I stand five foot seven and weigh 380 pounds.
Some days when my knees are giving me a lot of pain I’ll look over at my shadow doing a slow pigeon toed wobble down the street, and I just think to myself how gross and unhealthy I look.
Being overweight is something I’ve dealt with my whole life. Names like doughboy and fatty used to really get to me. But even when kids weren’t being mean, I felt isolated. In the 3rd grade my class took a field trip for Chinese New Year to the Empire Buffet. Chinese food is my favorite, and I was so excited, but then came the bad news…we had to walk eight blocks to the restaurant. Sweaty and out of breath, I eventually stopped to sit on a fire hydrant. I remember the look on some of my classmates' faces when they had to stop and wait for me. I had never felt worse in my life.
I’ve come a long way since then and have my mom to thank for a lot of that. I remember she once told me, “You’re fat simple as that, and until you’re ready to put in the hard work to change, you might as well be the cutest fat boy in the game.”
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The following originally aired on KQED-FM.
By: Sayre Quevedo
Around this time last year I was busy applying to college. Clicking that ‘submit’ button on my online applications, I imagined myself in New York City, going to poetry readings and cramming for various exams. I listened to Patti Smith and Lou Reed over and over in anticipation of receiving acceptance letters. But my acceptance letters were followed by even more important pieces of mail, my federal financial aid statements, or FAFSA.
The minute I saw the amount of financial aid I qualified for, I knew that the price tag of my dream was way out of my budget. My mom is still paying off her college loans, and I had already spent more than I could afford paying for official transcripts, applications, and the ACT test. Tuition at my top school was 30,000 dollars a year and I was going to be on the hook for 2/3 of it.
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The following originally aired on KQED-FM.
By: Asha Richardson
Every day I check my Gmail, chat with friends on Facebook and tell my Macbook Pro how much I love it. But when I graduate from college next year, I’m not sure how much these companies will love me, and by love me I mean hire me.
Less than 1% of startups funded last year were founded by African-Americans. This year as a part of Youth Radio’s App Lab, I visited the headquarters of one of the world’s biggest tech giants four times and was never introduced to a single black engineer or executive. Maybe they were in a different building or all at a meeting?
That experience reminded me of visits to my father’s office in the 90’s. He worked at Intel for ten years, and I could count the number of his African-American colleagues on my little hands.
The tech industry argues that there’s a pipeline problem. In other words not enough African-Americans are entering the industry. And there’s some truth to that. Until recently tech was considered Steve Urkel nerdy, not Steve Jobs cool. Plus where are black kids going to gain exposure to programming? For example, In Oakland, only 2 of 20 public high schools offer classes in computer programming.
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The following originally aired on KQED-FM and published on Turnstyle News.
In 2009, more than half of the African-American males who started high school in Oakland, California never graduated. Pendarvis Harshaw joined Oakland Unified School District's African American Male Achievement Initiative to reverse that trend.
By: Pendarvis Harshaw
The phrase "I don't give an F-Bomb" resonates throughout high school hallways every day, especially in Oakland public schools. Which begs the question: how do you get students to actually give a flying F-bomb?
The numbers show that young black men drop out of school at higher rates, and are more likely to be incarcerated than other groups. Earlier this year I worked as an educator in the Oakland schools, in a pilot program designed to prevent young black men from dropping out. My students, all freshmen in high school, were in my class because of discipline issues, low attendance, or academic shortcomings. We called our class the Young Lion’s Lair.
To maintain focus, we did pushups. We did wall sits. We did sets of 20 jumping jacks. And everyone had to stop at the same time, or else we’d do it again.
At the start of class- we’d toss around a tennis ball and review the prior day’s lesson. And at the end of class- we’d toss around that same ball and review what we learned that day.
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The following originally aired on KQED-FM.
By: Jesse Bussell
Not too long ago I did an exercise in a small business class where students talked with each other about companies that had a negative image. A friend of mine mentioned that Goldman Sachs had a bad reputation and another classmate responded, "Really, you think so? I think they're one of the best banks on Wall Street."
The situation summed up the divide I see among business school students. One group is driven entirely by success and the other deeply believes that businesses have a social responsibility.
That divide pretty closely correlates with who is following the Occupy Wall Street protests, and who is ignoring or unaware of them. I have classmates in both camps, and they face different career paths. One group strives for banking and corporate careers, whereas the second pursues non-profits and start-ups. There is little room in between.
Coming from a small rural community and a working lower class family, for a long time I have dreamed of being successful without losing where I came from or regretting how I got there.
The problem is that there are very few options to accomplish both of these goals.
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The following originally aired on KQED-FM and published on Turnstyle News.
By: Belia Mayeno
Youth Radio instructor Belia Saavedra was 20 years-old when terrorists hijacked four airplanes on September 11th. Ten years later, she mourns the tragedies of that day…and reflects on the stories that connect – and disconnect us from each other.
As a kid I remember flipping through the pages of a book my Japanese-American grandfather made for me and my family. There's the ink drawing of an old-timey radio broadcasting the news of the Pearl Harbor attack and the colored pencil sketch of the small wood stove in the family's barracks at the Minidoka internment camp.
I once asked my grandfather if he thought such injustice as forced relocation and incarceration could ever happen again. He said yes - because people will tell and believe all sorts of stories in the name of safety.
As we mark the anniversary of September 11th, I mourn the passengers on the planes and all of those who didn't make it out of the twin towers or The Pentagon in time.
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The following originally aired on KQED-FM.
By: Bianca Brooks
When I joined Tumblr, a photo blogging website; I was in awe of all the “beautiful” people. I too wanted to be “internet famous”, to be appreciated for my beauty. I honestly believed with nice clothes, a cool camera, and a little luck, that thousands of Internet users would love me too.
It was an escape that let me be the person I felt I could never be in real life. My own faults and insecurities were hidden behind a computer screen. The praise I never got from my family and peers created the need for compliments, “likes”, and “reblogs”.
The problem was not that I enjoyed the attention, but mistaking this praise for validation of my beauty and intelligence, instead of taking it at face value for what it really was: The Internet.
But how could I resist slipping into a world where it’s so easy to “add” who loves you and “delete” who doesn’t? Photoshop and Picnik gave me that whiter smile I could never get with my nonexistent dental coverage. I said I was born in Hollywood instead of Orange County to sound more glamorous.
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The following originally aired on KQED-FM.
By: Rachel Krantz
“You guys have been dating 5 months? And you're going to live out of a car together for how long?” That was the reaction we usually got when we told people about our summer plans.
Staring out of opposite windows in Minnesota, it was starting to seem like a valid concern. My boyfriend Ethan and I were just 2 weeks into our romantic journey, but the honeymoon was definitely over.
We'd come up with the idea just a few months after we'd met: What if we took all summer to drive cross-country and collected America's first love stories? The idea was simple and lovesick, like our new, seemingly flawless relationship.
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The following originally aired on KQED-FM.
By: Maya Cueva
This Sunday I am heading to Europe with four of my best friends. In order to make sure we see and do everything under the Tuscan sun, we have to carefully budget the whole trip. And while in school, my friends and I have taken language courses to prepare, I’ve been thinking that a lesson on how to handle our cash may have been more useful.
In high school, I took an Economics class for a semester and can now recite the concept of supply and demand, how to calculate GDP, and how to maximize opportunity cost. But in that class we spent only two days learning about matters of personal finance, like what counts as a liquid asset and how people often run into debt. The California State Frameworks didn’t leave much room for teaching about personal and household budgeting, which is why my teacher couldn’t go into much depth.
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