Skyler Jackson: Profile of Empowered Leadership

Skyler Jackson attended the Anytown Youth Leadership Institute in 1999 and wrote this essay shortly after. He later went on to attend Stanford University where he served as President of Black & Queer at Stanford, founded Querillas: a LGBT activist organization, directed many educational programs for social change, and has received multiple awards for his community leadership, including the Black Male Activist of the Year Award (Stanford University) in 2002. In 2005, he went on to receive a BA in Psychology and had also completed two minor degrees-Feminist Studies and Comparative studies in Race & Ethnicity. His interest in using academia to further social change was not limited to the United States-he spent 3 months in South Africa, where he completed an independent research project in which he interviewed and documented the stories of community activists that played critical roles in the anti-apartheid and sexual liberation movements in pre-democratic South Africa. Still quite young himself, Skyler now works for an innovative, progressive youth development organization in Los Angeles, CA and continues to volunteer with NCCJ-STL.

My motivations sprout from a variety of people, personality traits, and occurrences. However, I recognize one academic experience as the spark that ignited my burning academic enthusiasm: The Anytown Youth Leadership Institute. This week long residential institute provides high school aged youth with the tools necessary to be effective change agents in all aspects of and institutions within society by providing a safe space to learn and dialogue about various themes of oppression. These issues included, but were not limited to, racism, sexism, classism, genderism, and heterosexism. The captivating contacts I made, stories I heard, and things that I learned that week have stuck with me for years, supporting my healthy addiction to social justice and intellectual activism. My time at the Anytown Youth Leadership Institute was definitely not the happiest week of my life-it was challenging, draining, and at times, emotional-but because of its impact on my future academic interests, professional goals, and personal values, it has proved to be the most important chapter in my intellectual development.

This institute was not a mere crash course on group conflict, but instead, it provided me with the motivation and a philosophy of thought that continues to guide me on my personal and academic journeys. There, I learned not only how to think more critically in the future, but also to be critical of my current assumptions. During the institute, I could feel my mind opening like a drain, allowing the dirty water of naivety to drain out and making room for new thoughts and a more open mind. As I began to realize that my understanding of the world-and more importantly, of myself-was far from objective, I felt empty, like all my previous learning had been a waste. But simultaneously, as I was granted the tools to begin scrubbing away my biases and prejudices, I was able to learn from youth with different experiences, difference backgrounds, and different ideas in order to begin living in a less prejudiced and more informed manner. With this loss of ignorance and new knowledge, came an obligation to make change, a challenge that I continue to acknowledge and embrace today. But with so many ways to make change, I found it difficult to know where to start. Determined to maximize my impact on the future of our world, I vigilantly tried to identify my own interests and to access the needs of an ever-changing world, bringing me to one simple, yet incredibly satisfying answer: education. It was an educational experience that transformed my being, and therefore, it should be through education that I spread the message, reduce ignorance, and thus, maximize positive change.

Education; as pleased as I was with my conclusion, I quickly found the term to be a bit too broad to appropriately guide me in my academic pursuits. I thought back to my Anytown experience in attempt to identify, more specifically, why that educational experience was so powerful and enduring. In my Anytown experience, the process of rethinking my assumptions created new ways of hearing, seeing, and experiencing others. I began to wonder if unlearning could be just as powerful as learning. Quickly, the answer became clear-the experience impacted my mindset not merely because I was given new facts and new theory about new topics, but more importantly, Anytown shook up my already existing opinions, which I had thought to be facts for years prior. It was the process of challenging the ideas that I had taken for granted, of revealing the inescapable biases in the human thought process, and of unlearning the all-to-common arrogance which claims that one can always be aware of their biases, trust in their interpretation of the world, and maintain full control of their behavior. Thus, I became committed to changing the consciousness of the world by studying, understanding, and revealing the power of the unconscious mind.

I believe that humans have a strong desire to feel completely unprejudiced in their perception of the world and completely in control of their behavior in it. This ideology has encouraged a backlash from mainstream society against the validity, power, and prevalence of unconscious thought, situational influence, and the effect of self-interest on the internal processing of external experiences. Although this recoil may be natural, it negates our society's ability to fully challenge what they feel, what they see, and how they act. Believing that we can interact in a world and simply ignore or look past the differences all around us only makes room for oppressive stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination to spread, unfiltered and unchallenged. If one thing is objectively true, it is that we cannot blindly trust our ability to see, interpret, and interact in the world without bias.

Therefore, as my experience at Anytown Youth Leadership Institute has inspired me, I am dedicated to using academic activism as a means to social justice. Thus, after the appropriate schooling, I am committed to donating my career to the intellectual revolution against oppression by doing applied research on and promoting widespread understanding of the unconscious motivators of prejudice, discrimination, prejudice, and other perpetuators of group tension in society. Whether considering slave owners in the past, patriarchal men in the present, or anti-LGBT groups of the future, one thing remains common: all believe(d) their intentions to be moral. Since my Anytown experience, I have learned that good intentions have never been enough.

It is my sincere hope that through revealing the invisible and often uncontrollable nature of prejudice, that the members of our society will challenge themselves more and perpetuate biased ideology less. I plan to hold myself to the same ideal. I thank Anytown for serving as a constant reminder of that vision and why it is worth fighting for. I thank Anytown for giving me the theoretical framework that would inspire my desire for a more unbiased way of life. And most importantly, I thank Anytown for giving me the opportunity to join other youth leaders dedicated to creating a world in which inclusion, compassion, and justice is truly present for all of us, not just some of us.