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Before her family moved to Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, Lena Leshey spent part of her childhood in Ohio.
As a Black kid in a mostly-white school, she said she was bullied regularly and had just one friend, an Asian American boy.
“We were always together because [others] would make fun of him, too,” said Lena, 16. She remembered classmates stretching out their eyes with their fingers to make fun of her friend. She remembers peers telling her she couldn’t play near them.
Lena said she never had a chance to unpack some of these early childhood experiences with racism until recently. For the past six weeks, the Lindblom Math and Science Academy student was part of the Racial Healing Collaborative, a joint program of the Love, Unity & Values (LUV) Institute and the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC).
For Leshay, the program was “a very safe space to open up about certain experiences. They also teach you how to speak up about those things.”
The Racial Healing Collaborative brought together four Black and four Asian American students from Bronzeville, Chinatown and other surrounding communities “to talk about what racial healing looks like,” said Yvette Curington, the program manager at LUV Institute, a Bronzeville-based nonprofit that focuses on restorative justice and workforce development.
Grace Chan McKibben, with Chinatown-based CBCAC, said she and LUV Institute Executive Director Cosette Nazon-Wilburn brainstormed the idea for the program together.
“Bronzeville is just a stone’s throw away from Chinatown, and I think that very often, the two communities don’t interact or communicate with each other,” McKibben said. She added that discriminatory housing policies and decades of segregation have resulted in misconceptions and strife among the communities, as well as a lack of knowledge about the similarities between the two.
Students in the Racial Healing Collaborative program spent two mornings each week having restorative circle conversations, storytelling and working with two artists — Damon Lamar Reed, who is Black, and Haerim Lee, who is Asian — to create collages that were translated into two heart-shaped sculptures. The sculptures were unveiled Thursday at the LUV Institute and will be placed in yet-to-be-determined locations in Bronzeville and Chinatown.
Both Reed and Lee said it was illuminating to work with the students on the art project. The artists read books and articles with the students, and discussed topics like culture, stereotypes and government policies that have been discriminatory toward both groups.
On Thursday, the students also participated in a historical bus tour of the neighborhoods.
For Alina Liang, 15, the program was an opportunity to imagine a different future. The rising sophomore at Curie Metro High School on the Southwest Side said she was reminded that young people can make a change by being more educated and starting conversations early.
“It will take a lot of collaboration, but we can start something small, like how we are doing here,” Liang said.
Kayla Hynes, 20, was surprised by what she learned. The Kennedy-King College student said she was previously not aware of “the statistics for Asian Americans when it comes to discrimination, so it opened my eyes to the similarities.”
She said, “Sometimes I got a habit of seeing the worst and what’s happening with my own people, and I make the mistake of forgetting that there’s other people struggling, too.” Being in this program, Haynes added, “made me realize that there’s still people out here that want it to get better, but not having resources is a big part of the problem.”
Curington, with the LUV Institute, said the program was a pilot that she hopes can be expanded in the future. “[There’s] so much ignorance, so much damage has been done, so much trauma on both sides,” she said. “It’s a heavy lift to bring healing.”
But Curington is hopeful that programs like the Racial Healing Collaborative can chip away at the problem.
“It’s about exposure … sharing our cultures and breaking bread together,” Curington said. “[The participants] are now more emboldened to continue the conversations in their homes, their communities and schools and to speak out against racial inequalities.”
Esther Yoon-Ji Kang is a reporter for WBEZ’s Race, Class and Communities desk. Follow her on X @estheryjkang.