You Have to Initiate Change!
Amity Paye, 18
Massachusetts
Amity Paye is an 18-year-old senior at Boston Latin Academy and a past Peer Leader at Teen Voices. Amity spoke at Faneuil Hall this past January on the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and shared the stage with the newly-elected Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Recently, Teen Voices honored Amity with the Teen Activist of the Year Award for her dedication to making a difference in her community and for her ability to inspire others to create change. Teen Voices presented the award to Amity on April 11th at its event, AMPLIFY! a celebration of sixteen years of girl power, poetry, and prose. Here is Amity's speech that brought the packed house to their feet at Faneuil Hall.
Thank you, it is an immense honor to be here. In preparation for this speech, I found it shocking how relevant Dr. King's words still are today. He called for countrywide civic engagement, something that many people are currently doing in Boston. For me, however, despite knowing that there were aspects of my community which I wanted to change, getting involved wasn't always something I felt comfortable doing.
Growing up as a biracial individual, I felt stares from others when I walked down the street with my white mother or grandmother. When my mom came to school, students and teachers would always ask me if I was adopted. This made me feel out of place, not only in my family but in my community as well. So, for a very long time I was angry and felt unaccepted.
My feelings were very similar to those my mom sees in her students. She started teaching in the Boston Public Schools twenty-two years ago and has seen many angry and frustrated Boston teens with acceptance issues, self-doubt, and low self-esteem. So when I started high school she insisted that I participate in various activities to build my self-confidence. Working at a magazine called Teen Voices, I began to get involved in my community for the first time. Although I had always heard my mom talking about the violence and job challenges facing her students, I never felt like these affected me. And I never really cared to try and solve them. But through Teen Voices and many other organizations I became engaged rather than detached.
One thing Dr. King always tried to do was to prompt real, everyday members of the community to become involved and that is what organizations like Teen Voices and the Mayor's Youth Council have done for me. It's amazing to think that my first activity connected me to tons of organizations that educated me on the problems in our city-but it really did happen that way! However, I worried that being one person working on one issue I couldn't make a real difference.
Then last summer I went to New Orleans to do relief work in the communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina. One project I worked on while there was gutting a house. This process was like nothing I had ever experienced before. Imagine that every single thing you owned was riddled with insects and was decaying into hardened brownish sludge. It was my job to haul all of this into a huge pile on the sidewalk while covered in protective gear-in the middle of July. At one point, I stepped out of the house and looked around. That devastated block had once been thriving with activities involving teens a lot like me. Now there was nothing. Many houses were just piles of degrading rubble and those houses that were still standing were unrecognizable.
The woman whose house I was gutting was inspiring. Despite losing all her belongings, her home, her community, and dealing with an unresponsive bureaucracy, she was still optimistic about her neighborhood's future. Her hopeful perception of the situation in New Orleans made me see that although there may be negative circumstances, there are still many positive things happening in New Orleans, and in Boston, for that matter.
Here, the media frequently highlights the negative aspects of our communities. Let's celebrate the positive by encouraging others to take part in the conversation toward change. One thing Dr. King said was that American society in 1963 had "been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue." I see that it doesn't do us any good to only discuss our problems and successes amongst ourselves; we must communicate with each other across race, gender, and age.
Today in Boston we have made progress on creating dialogue. Our city is a place where teens and adults are beginning to communicate their ideas to each other, producing some innovative new programs. Just last week I attended Governor Patrick's Youth Inaugural where he discussed youth problems and solutions with teenagers from all over the state. Not only did Governor Patrick get his ideas heard by the people he represents, but he also got insight into the many aspects of our society that young people think need attention. Teens are no longer sitting on the sidelines complaining about what is wrong in our society; we are beginning to get involved. Although there are still many issues waiting to get attention, there are tons of amazing programs in our city that we should be proud of.
However, we are not done yet. Just as I was gutting out a single house on one block in New Orleans, we must deal with one obstacle at a time. Before we rebuild the teen scene in Boston we must gut it out, and that is what we are in the process of doing now. Don't get bogged down with what to do—just do it! Don't think about what you can't do; think about what you can do. It is each individual's responsibility to get involved and get connected. When it comes to our communities, every little bit counts. New Orleans is a prime example of how even a small amount of involvement contributes to widespread change.
Although I may have only gutted out one house, if everyone did the same the entire neighborhood would be alive in no time. So, I would like to applaud all the people sitting here today and in the city as a whole who are working on teen issues and I would like to challenge those of you who are not to take a stand like Dr. King and to fight for something you care about because as Dr. King said "Time itself is neutral." I have personally learned through my experience in the community that there is nothing in time that will fix itself; you have to initiate change.
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