BSU Dinner Speech - Brooks Kahsai

2/13/2023 12:05 pm

Brooks Kahsai Speech, BSU Dinner, February 9, 2023

Photo courtesy of Beniam Yetbarek

Hi, everyone. It’s really great to see all of you here tonight. My name is Brooks Kahsai, and I’m a councilman for the BSU at Mercer Island High School. I first want to let you know that this week is a huge week for the Black Student Union and our campaigns for Black History Month. This year, the BSU began organizing all of these incredible projects for the school, and the Mercer Island community, to help enrich the education and communication of ourselves and our peers about Black History.

Firstly, we have our BSU documentary. This is something that’s been worked on since last school year, where we compiled testimonials of the Black experience on Mercer Island from some of our veteran members of the BSU. The goal was to encapsulate the Black experience on Mercer Island and emphasize the meaning and the necessity of the BSU, and I personally believe we’ve done that, and this video can serve a valuable purpose to this community. The head of our curriculum department, Cassidy Bundy, set up the 21-day racial equity challenge, which has been led by Tewodros on social media since last month.  Teddy also is the one who organized this dinner, and I’d like to highlight that for a second, can we give him a round of applause?

Our BSU councilmen have also been working on outreach with the elementary schools, to create a mentorship relationship with the Black students in the K-8 range of our school district. We also have one of our councilwomen, Le’Asia Lane, heading the Juneteenth Festival for the city of Mercer Island this upcoming June.

I’ve personally been working at the high school to help organize our events for Black History Month, which has been my department. We got Black Music Matters, our campaign playing Black artists on our local radio station, something that Teddy actually recorded commercials for by the way. We’ve also got Black cuisine from Africa, the Caribbean and the US being sold at lunch this month in partnership with the cafeteria, with recipes approved and researched by the BSU. Lastly, tomorrow we have an incredible opportunity to meet Ijeoma Oluo, the author of “So You Want to Talk About Race.” Partnering with the PTSA, the BSU applied for a grant to pay for this opportunity, which we got, and we’ve been emailing back and forth about this event since December.

This is a long time coming, and we’re all extremely excited to welcome her here tomorrow for the assembly. I’m going to hand over the mic, but I wanted to thank the BSU for your commitment to heading these projects, the effort you have put into this club, and the allies I mentioned, who have provided their support wherever they could. None of this would’ve been possible without that cooperation and teamwork, and it’s incredible how far we’ve come from last year, when this club was formed. Thank you for your time.