The Office of Community and Multicultural Development (CaMD) selects an annual lineup of scholars to research and present topics regarding race, gender, and ethnicity. This year’s scholars will give presentations starting in Winter Term and ending in Spring Term. This year’s CaMD scholar cohort consists of Thao Pham ’25, Jaceil Britton ’25, Inti Stephenson ’25, Olivia Isacson ’26, Annabel Curry ’25, and Sam Clare ’25.
Thao Pham ’25 | Beauty or Colorism? The History of Vietnamese Attitudes Toward Light Skin and Its Lasting Social Implication
For the most part, I was inspired by my personal experiences. Growing up in Vietnam, skin color is brought up in conversation very often. Even though we’re a very racially homogenous society, we do use skin color as an indicator of certain socioeconomic classes and lifestyles. When I was younger, I didn’t really pay attention to those things, but as I’ve grown older, those things came to my mind when I was thinking about what I wanted to write for my CaMD paper, and that’s how I settled on colorism… The hardest part was definitely getting the right sources. Going to school here, I just have so much more contact with American and English-language journals. Since I’m researching colorism in Vietnam, I wanted to expand the scope of my scholarship and what I was basing my paper on. I used Vietnamese history books and talked to as many Vietnamese historians or scholars as I could schedule… As I researched, I learned that this issue was a lot more deep-rooted than I thought before.
Sam Clare ’25 | Playing Indian in the Woods: The Anti-Indigenous Culture of American Summer Camps and Steps Towards Reconciliation
I broke my topic down into three forms of cultural harm: one being appropriation, another being offense, and the third being misinterpretation… My inspiration was attending this camp called “Robis” as a child. I went for five years starting when I was nine. That was a camp that was mostly white. It had a totem pole; our cabins were named after Native American groups. Overall, things like that were normalized at the camp. As I started to get older, I realized that was pretty problematic, and I used this as an opportunity to take my childhood experiences that were negatively affecting another community and bring something good to them… I wanted to be really careful because I’m not an Indigenous person. I came into this as someone who was part of this racist system, so [I was] careful that my research and writing weren’t going to perpetuate that. I tried to focus on writing about white people and the white people at camp and the harm that they were doing because that’s what I know best.
Olivia Isaacson ’26 | From Book Burnings to Library Recalls: Unveiling the Oppressiveness of Book Bans and Their Impact on Our Generation
My topic is on book banning and its effects on teenagers and marginalized communities. In my paper, I show censorship’s evolution from 221 BCE to the 21st century. As a big reader, I wanted to shed light on the value of banned books and its positive effects on teenagers. Reading plays a crucial role in navigating the world as a teenager, and it is really important that books sharing diverse stories remain accessible. I had a lot of fun during the writing and researching process. I conducted many student interviews for my paper, and I interviewed a librarian fighting against book banning. Most of June was a dedicated time to research, and July and August were when I began writing. I learned a lot about the history of censorship and its lasting impact. The CaMD scholar project also helped me refine my writing and research skills as well as prepare for the History 300 essay. The hardest part for me was probably working on organization. There was a lot of interesting information and arguments that I wanted to share but didn’t know where to fit into the structure of my paper.
Inti Stephenson-Castro ’25 | The Failures of the Massachusetts Public School System in Immigrant Latino Communities
My CaMD project is about how state tests and the public school system in general in Massachusetts and in the United States have disproportionately affected Latino immigrant students and other minorities… As Andover students, we set ourselves in this bubble, and it was a personal duty to speak for my people here and make it known that there’s an actual serious problem of inequity in public education that people are having. The biggest effect of this is that it creates a cycle of poverty, which then reinforces stereotypes, institutional racism, and xenophobia… I did personal interviews with friends and family members who are Latino-identifying and have [gone] through similar experiences. With the research I did, there was the academic side, but [I] also bring in the emotional sides for my research… As lifelong learners at Phillips Academy, it is our job to make sure that these inequities are fixed. What we have to do is mitigate the inequities of public schooling because that’s our role as leaders.
Annabel Curry ’25 | Breaking the Ice: Black Hockey and the Removal of Black History in Canada
One of the first professional leagues in North America was an All-Black league in Halifax. It pioneered some of the most used moves in hockey today like the “slap shot” and, for goalies, the “butterfly,” which is a style that is used by every goalie. They have this incredible moment in history where it really united the white and Black communities in Halifax. Because it was a source of social elevation, there was a group that didn’t like that and shut down the league and targeted the entire Black community over a course of 40 years, and erased all their contributions… Because it’s a less researched topic [and] because there was an erasure of all the history, I had to go to Halifax. I spent time going to the archives and finding old newspaper articles… The hardest part was that there’s so much that this topic covers. There’s the stuff I went through, but it feels like every event in North American history has some relation to this league. It goes back to the American Revolution, War of 1812, and Jamaican Maroons. There’s all these different moments in history where people went back to Halifax and made impacts there. It was just finding a way to put all this history into one paper.
Jaceil Britton ’25 | There’s Something in the Water
My presentation is about environmental racism. I studied two different cases. One was North Carolina, where my mom’s family is from, and then Jackson, Mississippi, where my dad’s family is from. I wanted to talk about the racial capitalism that continues to perpetuate the pollution of water by big pharmaceutical chemical companies… I live in [North Carolina]. Researching was difficult because it was so recent. It’s not something super historical. I went to the public library, and they directed me to this news source there. For Jackson, Mississippi, we had a family reunion, and I got the opportunity to speak to a lot of my family members who were there, most of whom I haven’t met before… [My inspiration] was basically that [both of my parents were from the cities], and also my parents both got sick around the same time, and I always thought it was from the water. Where we live, there was always news about this company dumping microplastics into the water. I always had a suspicion that that’s why they got sick.
Editor’s Note: Thao Pham ’25 is a Copy Editor and Jaceil Britton ’25 is an Outreach Manager for The Phillipian.
