I lived about 20 minutes away from Ferguson when that controversy arose a couple years ago. A few of my friends went to the various protests, and my high school got significantly stricter policies. As the Black Lives Matter movement came to light, it was easy for me to see the racial divide in everyday life. In response to this, there was a program started called the Summit, which brought together suburban schools, which had a majority white population, and city schools, who had a predominately African American population. We visited each other’s high schools and sat in for classes, and the differences were staggering. The quality of the facilities at the inner-city school were nowhere near as good as ours, they didn’t even have a track! We were able to discuss the differences in teaching as well. At my school everyone noticed that the teachers wanted to be friendly with the students and interacted lots, whereas the teachers at the city school gave them worksheets and spent the majority of the class yelling at them. One of the coolest things to do however was hear about the different opinions on several of the racial issues which were exposed throughout the country. I remember reading an article with everyone about the Oklahoma SAE chapter incident, where a video was surfaced of them singing an extremely offensive song. Instead of insisting that the boys be expelled and the chapter disbanded, it talked about how the more effective response would have been to use this as a teachable moment. Use the publicity from this to educate people about the history of African American struggles in that area and let them experience for themselves how offensive the song was. This was powerful for me because before that I had used my gut reaction of pure anger and disbelief to make the judgement that the boys should all be kicked out of the school, when really the more intelligent option would have been not to erase the memory of the incident, but publicize it in a new light, using it to add fire behind the BLM movement.