Though Cypress Ranch is becoming more diverse, students of color often find themselves feeling underrepresented on campus due to microaggressions.
Sophomore Aniyah Bolden expresses the feeling of being like the odd one out.
“I feel like you’re being judged if you’re doing something,” Bolden said. “Or if you’re raised a certain way that’s just how you act, but overall you just get judged here.”
Bolden described the many ways she’s been treated in Cypress Ranch due to microaggressions. Bolden is just one of the many students of color facing the underrepresentation as an effect of the microaggressions in the community. These microaggressions leave students of color feeling less than and underappreciated.
“I feel the school should make it more obvious that there are black students here,” Bolden said. “If they don’t, things won’t get better, and people will get worse.”
Although some students of color are still being judged at Cypress Ranch, others do not have those experiences at all. For example, freshman Mia Kirkland said sheh feels that although there are groups of people who act on microaggressions, they are not a big problem.
“I don’t think there’s a majority of people who are more than another,” Kirkland said. “It makes me feel happy to know that there are people like me in the school, but I do feel like we could be represented a bit better.”
Kirkland also experienced some judgment from students at school. Kirkland says that they called her hair “dirty and messy,” which made her feel like she “was less than a person.”
Microaggressions have a way of making students look down on themselves and even view themselves as the problem. The students issuing out these harmful remarks do so without considering how the other person at the end of the words feels. Kirkland also expressed how whenever that comment was made she felt like her “world was kind of breaking from disbelief.”
Another student at Cypress Ranch also shares the same sentiment.
“It’s really nice to know I’m included here,” sophomore Le An Binh Nguyen said. “I’m really comfortable here and it’s really welcoming.”
Nguyen expressed her gratitude this morning for how Cypresses Ranch differs from her past experiences when it comes to microaggressions. Nguyen says CyRanch was much more “diverse and full of nice people” rather than her old schools.
Microaggressions don’t stop at African American students. They also continue on to Asian students as well. Nguyen explains that she was experiencing microaggressions in the past, but now that she is at Ranch she does not anymore.
Microaggressions are words of offense usually to berate a person of a certain class. The amount of diversity affects the usage of microaggressions and can eventually affect the people who are being targeted. Students at Cypress Ranch are trying to change the way they are represented and perceived but it starts with stopping microaggressions from happening so often.
