At age 16, I left Mali to study at Science Po in France. During my second week there, I was sitting in a quiet student lounge, surrounded by White peers, when one of them asked me loud and clear: “So, Estelle, were you living in a hut before you came here?” Little did I know, this was just the beginning of a five-year journey of racial confrontations with students and professors. No one had prepared me for this.
Are African students prepared to face racism abroad?
Every year, at least 250,000 African high school graduates decide to leave the continent to pursue higher education in North America, Europe, the Middle East, or Asia. I wonder how many are prepared to become a “minority” suddenly? How many are ready to engage in racial dynamics that attack and belittle their intelligence, ambitions, and lives? To prepare African students for this aspect of expatriation, Tissi designed a Racial Orientation Program for African Students®, ROPAS®, for short.
2020 is particularly fit to attract the attention of teenagers on issues of race and oppression. The recent murder of George Floyd made global the 7-year-old Black Lives Matter Movement. However, since race relations play out differently in our countries, many African teens or teens raised in Africa do not have an in-depth analysis of why Black people face such injustices and may not be ready to face them themselves.
Black Lives Matter in School: the need for a racial education
ROPAS® is a 14-hour online or in-person course. It uses the Black Lives Matter movement as a gateway to address the history of racism, the history of Black resistance, the collateral damages of racism in our societies in Africa and elsewhere, and the commitment to antiracism. The course is student-centered, with a maximum of 12 students per session, to allow an interactive and constructive exchange.
We created ROPAS® as a space to inquire, analyze, and think critically about racism and oppression. ‘Ropas’ in Spanish means clothes. While this is purely coincidental, we aim to shield your students with a cloth of knowledge and power that will remind them to rise and thrive, always, regardless of circumstances.
How do you deconstruct systems of oppression and injustice? The same way they were constructed: by dismantling racist policies and racist ideas. Our main objective is to use the power of education to dismantle racist ideas and prepare a generation to advocate for antiracist policies.
Bring ROPAS® to your school: it’s time already.
Tissi designed ROPAS® primarily for high school students and university students. We rooted this space of transformational learning in the African experience, to bring our perspective to serve students on the continent and students worldwide who seek to learn more about antiracism.
At the end of ROPAS®, students will be able to
- Construct a cohesive analysis of racism;
- Examine the inseparable link between oppression and resistance;
- Determine their commitment to antiracism;
- Critique and face racism rationally and not only emotionally;
- Effectively research, analyze, synthesize and present information on a new topic;
- Defend their opinions and interact with different views.
You represent a school, university, an association, or an NGO, and would like to enroll a group of students, please fill out this form. Individual students may use the form to manifest their interest in the course so that we contact their schools directly.
