Oral History Interview with Kaila Seger
- Title
- Oral History Interview with Kaila Seger
- Interviewer
- Lizzy Ray
- Description
- Kaila Seger of Sewanee, Tennessee was interviewed by Lizzy Ray, a Sewanee student, on October 28th, 2023 in person. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included how it affected her views on government policy and encouraged her to be aware of the history of modern race relations in the United States. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.
- Transcript
-
0:00:05 Lizzy Ray: Thank you.
0:00:06 Kaila Seger: Thanks. That's a little terrifying.
0:00:15 Lizzy Ray: Okay, lovely. Okay. This is Lizzy Ray from Sewanee, the University of the South. It is 1:37 PM Saturday, October 28th. I'm with
0:00:31 Kaila Seger: Kayla Seger, also currently at Sewanee, the University of the South.
0:00:39 Lizzy Ray: Thank you, Kayla.
0:00:40 You're welcome.
0:00:41 Okay. We're going to do some of the general questions. Okay. Where are you originally from?
0:00:48 Kaila Seger: I'm originally from Nashville. I was born there. I grew up there. I've lived there my entire life. Haven't lived anywhere outside of Tennessee either, because obviously I'm here at Sewanee, which is Tennessee. Still in Tennessee, but I live on the outskirts of Nashville, though I don't live inner city. I live in Davidson, which is really close to the airport.
0:01:15 Quite literally next door. It's a five minute drive from my house. There is a part.
0:01:18 Lizzy Ray: Thats doesn't sound like a fun living location?
0:01:22 Kaila Seger: Considering that I've lived there my entire life,
0:01:25 Lizzy Ray: Fond memory
0:01:26 Kaila Seger: I'm used to it. I'm used to hearing the airplanes going over my house.
0:01:29 Lizzy Ray: I said they'd be soothing now, wouldn't it?
0:01:30 Kaila Seger: At this point, it really is. I am just like, I'm used to it. It's fine. But yeah, so close to VNA that there is actually a part of my neighborhood that was torn down by the airport control because planes were too close to it. I call it the abandoned neighborhood in my neighborhood.
0:01:54 Lizzy Ray: That's fantastic.
0:01:55 Kaila Seger: That's where I'm from. Yeah.
0:01:58 Lizzy Ray: I was going to ask where you currently live is different from where you were raised, but you've lived in Nashville your whole life. Yeah. What's the kind of community like in Nashville?
0:02:08 Kaila Seger: So my community in general, I would say is mostly just my peers at school and then also softball. But softball kind of extended out beyond Nashville. It was more kind of like a middle Tennessee thing. Because I played travel ball and Davidson County, which is the county that Nashville's in, has absolutely horrendous and I mean horrendous softball programs for anything. I'm talking rec leagues, I'm talking school, I'm talking everything. It's just bad.
0:02:43 Lizzy Ray: That's sad.
0:02:44 Kaila Seger: Yeah. If you want to do anything with softball, you have to go out of county to actually play anywhere. That's good. So my community with softball is more scattered around Middle Tennessee. A lot of the outlying or surrounding counties of Rutherford, Wilson, Williamson had a lot of girls that I've played with who were from those counties, went to schools in those districts, as for in Nashville, I think mostly just my friends at school. I went to McGavock, which I think I've mentioned in class how it's an absolutely massive school, has an absurdly large number of acres under one roof. Oh, wow. We take in kids anywhere from downtown, inner city, Nashville to middle of nowhere, Jolton. So we have a lot of kids under the same roof. It's very, and
0:03:50 Lizzy Ray: I'm assuming this is a public high school?
0:03:51 Kaila Seger: Yeah, it's a public high school. It's like the third largest in Tennessee. Population wise, it's larger than Sewanee.
0:04:02 Lizzy Ray: Makes sense.
0:04:02 Kaila Seger: Population wise
0:04:03 Lizzy Ray: My high school's the same size as Sewanee.
0:04:05 Kaila Seger: Yeah. Yeah. So it's huge. A lot of diversity. So just kind of those, my friends there, I was in the smart people classes.
0:04:23 The advanced classes. We had the ACE program instead of ap, which is
0:04:30 Lizzy Ray: Oh, I've never heard of that.
0:04:31 Kaila Seger: Yeah, it's just like British ap. Think of it that way.
0:04:36 Lizzy Ray: Oh, so posh.
0:04:37 Kaila Seger: Yeah, I know it comes from Cambridge. So it's just that sort of thing of your little British ap getting you ready for college and everything. We dropped a lot of the AP classes that we used to offer. There are only a few now that are still there, so I was pretty much around the same people in school a lot because I was in all the ACE classes and the same people who I had been with for decent portion of middle school doing the honors classes there, were there. So most of my community was the kind of same batch of people with some variation here and there for most of my schooling career once I got to seventh grade. Yeah
0:05:25 Lizzy Ray: Awesome. Where in Nashville is this school downtown
0:05:31 Kaila Seger: Area? No. Okay. No, it's actually, it's in Donaldson about maybe technically it should be a 15 minute drive. Let's just say that most school days, I would make it a seven minute drive to get there on time.
0:05:47 What's a little speeding to class?
0:05:51 Lizzy Ray: We all have to walk with some pep in our stuff while we're here at Sewanee too.
0:05:54 Kaila Seger: Yeah, you got to rush.
0:05:56 Lizzy Ray: We don't really drive to class. We do some pep in our step.
0:06:00 Kaila Seger: You sure do run to class sometimes. So yeah, mostly. I mean, my high school was very close to me geographically, but for a lot of people it wasn't. I have friends who lived in Old Hickory, which is past the Hermitage. For anyone that knows anything about the Don and Hermitage area and stuff, the Hermitage, the house and everything. Old Hickory past that, I had friends who lived in Old Hickory and everything that would make the drive to McGavock. It's about what? A 20 minute drive.
0:06:39 Lizzy Ray: Okay. That's not terrible.
0:06:40 Kaila Seger: 25 minute drive. So it was close for me to be there, but for some people it was not close for them to be there.
0:06:53 Lizzy Ray: Awesome. Where do you find community at Sewanee?
0:07:01 Kaila Seger: I... I'm not going to lie. Mostly with a lot of my coworkers here at the library. Some classmates, I would say I'm an outgoing person, however, in class, sometimes I am not.
0:07:14 Lizzy Ray: That's valid.
0:07:15 Kaila Seger: I will just, depending on the class, I will just sit there like silent the entire time and there are some classes that I won't stop talking. It is nothing about whether or not I like that class. It's just like for some reason, some classes I'm like, yeah, I'm going to talk. And then other classes I'm like, I'm just going to sit here, and anytime that they call on me, I'm going to hope that I give a right answer.
0:07:42 Lizzy Ray: Emotions that are valid. I think we've all been kind of tied to that sort of thing.
0:07:47 Kaila Seger: It's sometimes scary, but it's like a lot of my current friends work here at the library with me and we all work at the Circ desk. My current roommate, I met her here. We were both going through some things last semester and both putting off work by just chilling out behind the Circ desk. I feel that. And so we got to know each other really well and we're like, you want to be roommates? And so we're roommates this year.
0:08:17 Lizzy Ray: and they were roommates.
0:08:19 Kaila Seger: And they were roommates. Some of the, I mean the softball team here, I used to be on the softball team here year, not anymore for certain reasons.
0:08:42 So it's like a lot of the girls that are my teammates I'm still friends with, I'm still really close with. I hang out with them a lot. I think really the oddball person that friends with here, that's like, I didn't meet them through softball. I didn't meet them through the library. I didn't meet them at an event. Was that one of my good friends here, met or was in the same class with another one of my good friends who went to high school with me, but then has since transferred to MTSU. They were in the same class together freshman year and she looked over at him and went, we have the same mole on our arm.
0:09:27 Lizzy Ray: Hey, we love a person like that. That's a vibe.
0:09:30 Kaila Seger: And then she was like, do you want to eat dinner with me and my friend? He was like, sure. So ever since then, we've been friends since freshman year. That's really the only oddball of how I managed to become friends with someone.
0:09:47 Lizzy Ray: That is such a vibe though. I love that. What led you to working at the library?
0:09:52 Kaila Seger: I needed a work study. I come from a lower middle class family, so it's like I'm here pretty much on every scholarship that I can possibly get, which thankfully Sewanee has been very good to me with scholarships and so I'm not paying.
0:10:12 Lizzy Ray: Very helpful.
0:10:13 Kaila Seger: Yeah. I'm not paying a lot out of pocket, which is really great. Otherwise, I would not really be able to afford to be here. But I was like, I need to get a work study so I can do some sort of work because as we all know, it's kind of hard to find a job even around campus.
0:10:32 Lizzy Ray: I used to work at Shenanigans.
0:10:34 Kaila Seger: Yep. It is really hard to find a job that will really be flexible with the college work schedule and stuff, so I was like, I need to get a work study. I applied to anything that I was interested in and the first round heard nothing back, nothing at all from anyone, and then I was like, I got to go and apply for more, and the library was one of the positions that I applied for. Lo and behold, I ended up getting it. Thank God. I absolutely love it. It's great.
0:11:07 Lizzy Ray: That's awesome.
0:11:08 Kaila Seger: We kind of just get to sit behind the desk and do nothing.
0:11:11 Lizzy Ray: That's such a vibe though.
0:11:12 Kaila Seger: Sometimes you just need a chill sort of time.
0:11:15 For the most part. We can do some schoolwork if we want to. It kind of depends on what hours you work because if you do work in the middle of the day, they're like, Hey, you kind of can't just, people are always coming up, but I work late nights.
0:11:30 Lizzy Ray: That's always when I'm in the library.
0:11:32 Kaila Seger: Exactly. Kind of doesn't matter what I do at the desk because not that many people come up to the desk to need things, and if they do, they're like, I need this book. And I'm like, which book? And they're like, for my history class, and I'm like, can I have information please? Yeah. So that's how I got working at the library. I love it. I come back every semester. I get the same hours every semester because I like my hours. No one else wants my hours and I would fight someone over them.
0:12:06 Lizzy Ray: Hey, that is so valid. What's your favorite food at Cup and Gown, since you're here so late? I'm assuming you like to have a little snacky snack.
0:12:15 Kaila Seger: Oh, I do all these snacks ien my carol. I stay strapped with snacks.
0:12:25 Lizzy Ray: Usually I have more in my backpack, but it's Saturday and so I forgot to restock.
0:12:29 Kaila Seger: That's fair. My favorite thing to get at Cup and Gown is the chicken tbm. If we're going like little snacky thing, lemon bars, I live, when they have the lemon bars, I will go feral over those. Sadly, I'm out of flex dollars, so I just look at them and I go a lot.
0:12:46 Lizzy Ray: I think we all are.
0:12:47 Kaila Seger: Yeah. At this point in the semester, it's like, who has any left? I think I had a few cents left on my thing. I had 10 cents last time I tried to buy something and I was like, you know what, just take it off.
0:13:00 Lizzy Ray: It's fine.
0:13:08 Kaila Seger: At this point, I don't, I don't really get copy it cutting out all that much just because I'm like, I can make it better in my dorm.
0:13:15 Lizzy Ray: You a Yerba girl?
0:13:16 Kaila Seger: I am a Yerba girl.
0:13:17 Lizzy Ray: What's your Yerba?
0:13:18 Kaila Seger: The Enlightenmint. Okay. I love the Mint. Okay.
0:13:22 Lizzy Ray: My favorite is the sparkling cranberry pomegranate. The little cans.
0:13:28 That's my thing. It's like addiction.
0:13:32 Kaila Seger: I know. I want...
0:13:34 Lizzy Ray: Sometime you'll see me sometimes in class if you've ever seen me shake because I haven't had one for about an hour.
0:13:39 Kaila Seger: I need more Yernas.
0:13:41 Lizzy Ray: Yeah, need more Yerbas. Awesome. Okay. Well, you've lived in Tennessee your whole life, but how have you experienced international cultures?
0:13:50 Kaila Seger: So I have traveled abroad before
0:13:54 I went to Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Lichtenstein.
0:14:01 Lizzy Ray: Oh wow.
0:14:02 Kaila Seger: And Switzerland.
0:14:03 Lizzy Ray: Where's Lichtenstein?
0:14:04 Kaila Seger: Lichtenstein is a tiny, itty bitty micro nation squished in between Austria and Switzerland.
0:14:11 Lizzy Ray: Okay. I know we're Austria and Switzerland.
0:14:18 Kaila Seger: Umm. God, did I go into any other country? Cause I think there was seven overall that I went into, but I can't quite remember. I think that's all of them. I went on that trip, oh god, it's summer of freshman year. Freshman year here. It was a wonderful trip. It was a little bit of a mess because we had a lot of things go wrong. Our luggage got lost.
0:14:48 Lizzy Ray: I feel like everybody's been there. One of our bags got lost one time while we were flying to another state across the country.
0:14:58 Kaila Seger: It was even worse just because we were in a foreign country and it's like we need those. So I have been abroad. I did get to experience cultures in the sense of being there. However, I would consider myself someone who has a decent amount of general knowledge, and I tried to learn stuff in general before I went to get an understanding of how things work over there. There are obviously culture shocks and stuff, but it's just, I feel like being able to travel and experience it as well just adds on to general understanding of I get how people can be different and cultures can be different, and that is okay and that is fine. I am able, as someone who had the privilege to travel, there is no reason for me to get angry over a cultural difference that I don't understand. It is just as simple as going, this might be a cultural difference and I don't quite understand it, but that's okay because I'm not back home.
0:16:21 Lizzy Ray: You an always educate yourself on it even more.
0:16:23 Kaila Seger: It was like, I am the outlier in this situation. I will conform to how they generally do things. Instead of throwing a hissy fit about, oh, you want me to do X thing? How dare you think? That's just dumb, to me. Have a little self-awareness. Truly don't get pissed at people when they have different perceptions that you do, especially when it comes to just really minor cultural differences and stuff. Just go along with it.
0:17:01 Lizzy Ray: Awesome.
0:17:02 Kaila Seger: Do it. It's fine. Everything will be okay.
0:17:06 Lizzy Ray: Yeah. Beautiful. Okay, now we're going to get into the Black Lives Matter questions. How do you receive the news?
0:17:18 Kaila Seger: I am not a big news watcher. I'm also not a big news seeker, shall we say. I don't really use any specific outlets. I don't really turn on the news. The most news input that I get is honestly when I'm back home because both my parents, when my dad comes home from work, my mom puts on the nightly news or she'll be watching a few outlets on YouTube that are actually really good, like Midas Touch and oh, what is it? It's called something like the Daily Report with, it's with one specific guy, but I can't remember his name right now.
0:18:11 Lizzy Ray: All good.
0:18:14 Kaila Seger: Oh, David PackMan. The David PackMan show. That's what it's called. That's normally where I'll end up getting a lot of my news just because when I'm home, my mom will put it on and I'll watch it. They're all very like liberal sources or middle ground sources. Just kind of looking objectively of what is this? What's going on? What are people trying to twist about it more kind of actually looking at what's going on? Obviously there is bias because every news source and place that you can get this information from is going to have some sort of bias, but I appreciate how they attempt to limit some of that bias, or at least look objectively at a lot of the issues. While I'm here, if I'm honest, probably a lot of TikTok, because I have a lot of people on my feed that are giving out information about specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that's going on right now. A lot of stuff about history, all that mess. Obviously, I am skeptical because you shouldn't 100% trust everything that you see on TikTok.
0:19:36 Lizzy Ray: Yes, obviously. You shouldn't trust everything you read anyway.
0:19:41 Kaila Seger: You shouldn't trust every piece of media that you come across, but when someone is showing here is primary source footage of what the Gaza Strip looks like right now versus what any of any parts of Israel looks like right now, that's pretty damning evidence. And then I can form my own opinions on what's going on based upon gathering bits and pieces from a bunch of different voices.
0:20:12 Lizzy Ray: And that's a good thing about social media.
0:20:14 Kaila Seger: So I can see the bits and pieces coming in from all different social media platforms. Twitter as well. I feel like Twitter's kind of fallen out of the relevance of breaking news to the public. But Twitter, honestly, I'll get news from there, but I'll get the conservative news from there because I made the mistake of making a parody account so that I could just tell Elon Musk that he's dumb, and then somehow it managed to become like all alt-right? Feed and stuff. So anytime that I open it, I'm like, no, I hope no one sees this because I don't actually think that this is real. But whenever I do, I'm like, I get to look at it and I'm like, they're really saying this. They I'm, they really need some critical thinking skills now, don't they? So I'll kind of get that alternative other side news to see what the other side is trying to say about any given issue or any given person that I'm like, my man, can you just stop? Can you just not, but I don't really watch any main news sources or consume any newspapers or articles from any of the main outlets. I mean, maybe on TikTok, because a lot of them have accounts now, otherwise I don't.
0:21:51 Lizzy Ray: Yeah, they got their young old Gen Z young millennials,
0:21:58 Kaila Seger: And I'm like, okay, you're a little bit on the trend
0:22:03 Lizzy Ray: They're trying. It's all that matters.
0:22:05 Kaila Seger: You're making an attempt. So that's kind of my news.
0:22:10 Lizzy Ray: Awesome. Well, you kind of dove into my next question about social media, but what is your experience or social media, not just in a news source? But just in general?
0:22:22 Kaila Seger: So I didn't get a phone that I really did anything with social media on until I was in eighth or ninth grade. In eighth grade. The phone that I had really was just like my mom was going to work again, and so my parents were like, okay, here's a phone so that if you need to reach us.
0:22:47 Lizzy Ray: I feel like that was everybody's parents.
0:22:50 Kaila Seger: Some of 'em, not so much nowadays.
0:22:52 Lizzy Ray: Well, not nowadays.
0:22:54 Kaila Seger: When we were kids, but I think once I finally got an actual phone that I could really do stuff on or that I wanted to do stuff on, it took me a long time to get, Snapchat took me a long time to get Instagram.
0:23:14 Lizzy Ray: I got Snapchat last summer
0:23:19 Kaila Seger: Even longer to get Twitter even longer to get TikTok. Snapchat was mostly just like, oh yeah, my friends are on here and they're just posting random little things about their life, just scrolling through their stories. Instagram was where I started to get more of, I guess a political awareness on there as well, because now I follow a few accounts that here's the state of the world, here's the politics that are happening. Here what's going on. And then Instagram was where when the Black Lives Matter movement came about, and a lot of other movements and social movements in general that were happening around the same time, for me in my area, that's where I got a lot of that information from and saw a lot of that lot of stuff about it on Instagram, because that's where people were posting. That's where people were talking about it. I'm sure they were talking about it on Twitter as well, but I didn't get Twitter until, God, 2021. TikTok probably got it in 2020, 2021 as well.
0:24:34 Lizzy Ray: I got TikTok this past summer.
0:24:36 Kaila Seger: Yeah, so it's kind of for most of my social media time, it has been, oh, I'm keeping up with friends because that's how I mostly use those platforms. It's like, oh, I want to keep up with friends. I want to see how they're doing, make sure that they're okay. I have a friend who absolutely refuses to get Instagram or something, and every now and then we'll be like, oh yeah, so-and-so from high school is done this or this important lives over. He's like, how do you know that? I'm like, maybe because we follow 'em on social media, maybe it's that easy. But he won't do that.
0:25:18 Lizzy Ray: And that's the great thing about social media. You're able to keep up with those people that you might not see every day or maybe even every month, but you're able to keep in contact and see what's going on in their life, which is so great. What was your first encounter with the Black Lives Matter movement?
0:25:37 Kaila Seger: I would have to say seeing it on the news, if my memory serves me correctly. A lot of things happened back to back in Nashville, and then the Black Lives Matter movement was being talked about heavily. I remember seeing on the news, like news outlets talking about specifically the riots that happened following a lot of the big marches or big demonstrations. They would only talk about how, oh, there's been a lot of looting. Here's all these pictures. I think the famous picture of a man throwing a Molotov cocktail yet, what most people don't know is that I believe that he was throwing it... It had been thrown at protestors and he was throwing it back at whoever had thrown it. It wasn't that he had made that, it's either like that or a tear gas canister. So it was initially a lot of just news outlets being like, Hey, look at this. Look at this, look at what's going on. They're protesting the death of George Floyd is what they would always center it around George Floyd and the backlash from his murder, and then looking at the negative sides of it of, oh, well, they're rioting. They're looting stores. Oh, it's Antifa or whatever that's doing this. And it's like, oh, well. It's like, yeah, they can march for their rights and everything, but also they're doing all of these morally corrupt things that they shouldn't be doing, therefore painting it in the kind of light of more of a negative light than a positive light.
0:27:54 Just a lot of that. And then people on Instagram talking about it a lot once it really picked up speed and really started to chug along just a lot of things of the blackouts on Instagram of just everyone posting...
0:28:17 Lizzy Ray: All on like one Tuesday,
0:28:19 Kaila Seger: Just everyone posting a black screen onto their Instagram and it's like you scroll through, it's just black screen, black screen, black screen, black screen over and over again, and on their stories too. A lot of people posting like hashtag Black Lives Matter, all that stuff. And obviously I didn't get Twitter until after it kind of started to die down. So that's where I saw a lot of the stuff about it would be on Instagram and then the initial stuff of the news, talking to my family about it, all that stuff.
0:28:57 Lizzy Ray: Awesome. What is your opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement?
0:29:03 Kaila Seger: I think that it is a good thing. I support people's rights to protest because they deserve it. They're human beings too.
0:29:12 Lizzy Ray: It's also part of our constitutional right for free speech.
0:29:16 Kaila Seger: I was like, people have the freedom of speech. They have the freedom of assembly. They have the right to be able to march to protest for their own rights and to be recognized essentially as human beings at this point. I mean, looking at a lot of the police violence that we see to protest to defund the police and that Black Lives matter, because historically it's been something where it's like black lives don't matter to the general public because we view them as something like an expendable body, as someone whose life doesn't matter because if they did matter, then the police wouldn't just open fire on. So I think that it is a good thing. I think that it is needed. I think that Covid really helped it along of people being inside and forced to consume media because then you open yourself up to all of these social media channels and these news channels that are already talking about it and are already trying to raise awareness to it, and what are you going to do cooped up inside your home all day? You're going to scroll through social media, you're going to like watch YouTube, you're going to watch the news. You're going to see these things that are happening and you're going to actually have the time to sit and think about it. A lot of people couldn't go to their jobs if they weren't essential workers. What are you going to do all day? You're just going to be able to sit there. And I think it gave people the ability to really think and reflect upon our society as it is and then realize that, hey, a lot of fucked up stuff has been happening to this community and other communities like them for years, and we've done nothing about it. And then having that catalyst to kind of just, especially because George Floyd's death was so televised and so moving in the sense of, I remember seeing bits and pieces of the video or the audio and being able to like hear him say, I can't breathe, is you as the viewer, become so outraged that it happened. Because if you sitting there knowing the context of it and just as a human being, being like you're hearing someone say that they can't breathe, there is no reason for you to be applying this amount of force onto them, much less onto their neck. It is ridiculous and it sort of lights that spark in you to do something about it. And given that if you can't go work well, then you can spend more time learning, educating yourself about the movement, about why it's happening, about what they want. So I do think that overall it is a positive thing. I think that it's been a long time coming. I think that it's good to be able to highlight the racial disparities that we have within our society today, and I think it's a necessary thing to have.
0:33:16 Lizzy Ray: Awesome. Thank you for answering that. What was your community's reaction, not just Nashville, but also like maybe your softball's community's reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement.
0:33:30 Kaila Seger: Softball didn't really talk about it much. We would maybe see each other once a week really, and especially during Covid couldn't do travel ball. We had to stop our school season and everything, so it didn't necessarily have a lot of contact with those people, and I can't remember any specific instance of someone from one of my teams posting about it online. I think I remember mostly people in my school posting about it. So it's like. I would say in general for my community, it was a pretty positive outlook on it as well. I also got a lot of people thinking about it. My parents are very open-minded as well, and so it's like we would be able to talk about it over dinner, watching the news, everything, to just kind of discuss what's going on. And for a lot of our discussions, it's like acknowledging that this has been happening for a while. This police violence that has sparked, or at least to us, has sparked the movement. This is a long time coming. You've seen this over and over again. My mom has talked about before how she remembers seeing and hearing about the death of Rodney King. Like she remembers that very vividly. I think that at least community as far as my classmates went is that it For some of us, I think it was our political awakening, for some of us I think that it was just a continuation of our political awakening because around the time that it was happening is where you kind of really gained sentience as a human being and start really forming opinions for yourself...
0:35:44 Lizzy Ray: That high school maturity was coming out...
0:35:46 Kaila Seger: And so being able to live through it during the time where it's like you're coming into that age where you're forming your own opinions and you're learning how to back them up and how to do research and how to educate yourself, most of us had a pretty positive reception to it and used it as a way to further our own education and our own viewpoints, and kind of helped to shape our political outlooks as well in the modern day. It certainly has shaped my political outlook from when I was and am living through it. I don't think that we ever really organized protest, at least within the school system. And I think that's partially because around that same time, our school district was having a lot of issues with teachers because they did not want to pay our teachers fairly.
0:36:47 Lizzy Ray: My gosh, North Carolina was going through a very similar thing. Yeah,
0:36:50 Kaila Seger: We had had a few days of school where when our teachers went on strike, we didn't have school because our teachers were on strike, and a lot of students joined the teachers in the march. And then we also had, there was a lot going on with school shootings around that time as well. And we did have a walkout for one of the school shootings at the time. I can't remember which one it was.
0:37:18 Lizzy Ray: That's okay. There were a lot of 'em.
0:37:19 Kaila Seger: Like there are so many you can't remember all of 'em, but I don't think we ever organized anything specifically for Black Lives Matter, and I think that's partially because a lot of the steam that pushed people to protest was during Covid and people couldn't really go outside, at least for my area at that time. And it is a very scary thing to want to show up to a protest that your city is putting on, but also trying to keep you and your family safe because there's a global pandemic going on and you don't know like.
0:38:11 Lizzy Ray: And at this time, we didn't really know how it was spread or anything like that.
0:38:14 Kaila Seger: Yeah. Am I going to catch it if I go and be politically active and it's like I'm also not necessarily active, I don't post a lot on my social medias, and so it's like I think about posting something that's for support of Black Lives Matter or any of our modern day issues and stuff, but then I'm like, no, because on one hand to me, you can post about it all you want, but if you don't actually further yourself in education and go out and actually demonstrate that belief, that is just armchair activism. And so I'm like, I would rather devote my time to educating myself and learning ways in which I can help than just blindly parroting stuff that people have already said and also considering, and also, especially with Black Lives Matter, I'm someone who's like, I want to learn from Black Voices and I want to amplify Black Voices.
0:39:30 It is not my place to speak over Black Voices. My job should be to amplify them and direct people to their voices. But at that time, I didn't know a lot of Black Voices who were speaking on it. I didn't know where to direct people. If they went and were slid up on something that I posted on my story and was like, oh my God, this is such good information. Where can I find more? I couldn't direct them towards that, so I felt it better that I just keep to myself, at least on social media and you know further my education on the topic, listen to Black Voices instead of going on to social media and just throwing stuff out there. I would talk about it with people who I know, because obviously opening genuine dialogue is a good thing, but social media can be something to where it's so easy to be an armchair activist to just post a hashtag and then hands up, you've done your duty. Like it's fine. I wanted to be, I didn't want to be that. I didn't want to aid into that. I wanted to actually learn about the movement, know why it's happening, learn the terminology behind some of the things that they're saying and why they're saying it instead of just putting it out there into the ether and leaving it be.
0:41:14 Lizzy Ray: Umm awesome. Well, thank you for answering that. That was fantastic. Which generation, in your mind, was most affected by the Black Lives Matter movement?
0:41:27 Kaila Seger: I definitely think that it is the younger generation. I think our generation in general is probably the most affected by it, just because, as I've kind of touched on, we were gaining that political awareness and that sentance at the same time that this major thing is happening, and I would extend that to probably younger millennials who were in college at the time that it was happening, because a lot of times, especially with movements, you see high schoolers and college students are pretty big proponents of these movements because they are in spaces of education. So I think that it's really affected our generation in that sense of, you know, gaining your own thoughts on politics and the society around you and just everything that's happening at the same time that a major movement that's exposing a lot of these disparities is happening in front of you. You can see it. It's there for you to look at and for you to observe and to further your own opinions on these issues because you're looking at them firsthand. You're not looking at them 10, 15, 20 years removed. We might look at the Black power of movement, and without doing a lot of research, we might just say and go, okay, well, I'm going to believe X person who wrote about this 20 years ago who didn't understand the movement at all. But I don't know that it's harder to form. I think that it's sometimes harder to form your own opinions on things that you don't live through just because you're not there to witness it, and it can be hard to find the sources that you need to educate yourself. For the longest time, my like perception of Malcolm X was that he was a bad dude, only because whenever you hear about the Civil Rights movement in the sixties and the seventies, you hear like, oh, Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X.
0:44:03 Lizzy Ray: Yeah, you hear the verses. You don't hear anything in between.
0:44:08 Kaila Seger: You just hear like, oh, this person versus this person, we know that MLK is a good guy because that's what you've been taught for your entire life, so then since he's versus this other person, they must be bad. That's the sort of logic that you go through, and so it's, my original perception on Malcolm X was that, oh, he's bad, MLK or something. That's what you're taught, and then no one expands upon it. No one actually teaches you.
0:44:41 Lizzy Ray: It's that plain old barely touching the water.
0:44:44 Kaila Seger: Yeah, it's just like black power existed, but they don't go in depth about it of what is this movement actually about and how we've learned through our class. A lot of the stuff that black power leaders were saying that the NAACP didn't necessarily disagree with it. It's the same sort of things that they're gunning towards. They're just doing it with different words and through different ways.
0:45:13 Lizzy Ray: They had to keep a certain profile picture.
0:45:18 Kaila Seger: Yah, but it's so much harder to form that opinion for yourself when you have to sift through, for this example, 70 years worth of secondary and primary sources. A lot of stuff which has been censored or lost purposely left out of your education makes it hard for you to form these opinions on things. But for the Black Lives Matter movement that we're living through, and especially our younger generation growing up during and forming our own ideas and thoughts at this time, it has a big effect. My political stance has been heavily affected by watching the Black Lives Matter movement happened. It's heavily affected by watching the Israeli Palestinian conflict happen. All of these things have shaped us into who we are today and has pushed a lot of us towards being more open-minded and making sure that we're educated about the topics that we're talking about before we talk about them in any sort of authoritative sense. I always try and put disclaimers on things that I'm like, look, I can speak on this to some degree, but I don't know everything, so take my words with a grain of salt and do your own research. Don't just take my word for God, and I think that's helped a lot of us
0:47:00 And has affected a lot of us because you look at a lot of other generations, I mean older generations, they're still kind of stuck with, well, the civil rights movement happened. Why do you want more? I don't think it's really influenced them as much because they keep looking back instead of looking in the now and forward. I do think that there are some middle-aged generations that most definitely it has an effect on, but I don't think that effect is as large as it's been on our generation.
0:47:41 Lizzy Ray: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, you kind of touched on this, how the Black Lives Matter movement has affected your life by influencing your political mind and kind of just growing your knowledge in general. Is there anything else you'd like to touch on about how it has impacted your life?
0:48:06 Kaila Seger: I try and be more aware of, I try to be more aware of what's going on. I try to educate myself more about the past and how we've gotten to this point. That's the whole reason that I wanted to take this class.
0:48:23 Lizzy Ray: Yes.
0:48:24 Kaila Seger: I was like, I knew stuff about reconstruction. I knew stuff about slavery in general, but I wanted to fill out that kind of the sort of sixties to present day gap that I have concerning major historical events that are about racial disparities and how do we see this evolution happen. I try to be aware of myself as well, because I think that it is very easy to forget that our words and our actions speak a lot to how we are as people, and that sometimes what could be a harmless joke is not so harmless.
0:49:29 Lizzy Ray: It can be interpreted a completely different way.
0:49:31 Kaila Seger: And that a lot of things that we may use in our language today stem from really hateful origins and that we can do better and we can educate ourselves. There are obviously some things that I think that I've learned since the Black Lives Matter movement really took off to now where it's like, I might not use a word or something, or I will try and be more conscious of how I phrase things because I can do my due diligence. There we go. We got it beautiful. We got there eventually. That was beautiful.
0:50:19 Lizzy Ray: Don't worry. We all struggle with it.
0:50:21 Kaila Seger: I can do my due diligence to better myself so that I can be a more understanding person, a better ally to those who need it, and to just keep myself from going down the sort of rabbit hole that I think can be really easy to fall into of like, oh, well, it's okay for me to do this slash say this because of X reason, and then you just kind of start to go, well, I already do slash say this so I can do slash say this, and it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse. I want to avoid that. I don't want to become a hateful person. I want to be able to have an open mind and carry myself with grace and use my white privilege to help people in the ways that I can do so without overshadowing them.
0:51:34 Lizzy Ray: Yes.
0:51:37 Kaila Seger: Also, something that's really easy to do is that it can be really easy for people to adopt the white savior narrative and just kind of use it as a way to go, look, everyone, I'm so good. I'm so cool speaking about issues that they can speak about, but the way in which they're doing it is not appropriate for them to do so because they're not uplifting the people who are the subject of it, who should be speaking upon their own disparities and their own needs. You are taking that narrative away from them, and you are twisting it into your own to make everyone think that you're cool. So I just think that, and kind of in general, the shaping my political consciousness, how I try to carry myself ways in which I research as well to be able to know what's the bias here, like what, what's going on.
0:52:48 Lizzy Ray: Yeah. Awesome. So this is a if, or kind of question. If the Black Lives Matter movement has changed how you interact with people, how has it done that?
0:53:05 Kaila Seger: I don't think it's changed how I interact with people much. I think that think that I am more likely to speak out though against someone who makes a racist remark or spreads some type of misinformation or whatever. I'm more likely to jump in and be like, no, maybe let's check that. Maybe let's cite some sources. It hasn't really changed the way that I interact with pretty much any of the people that I'm around. The most that I could maybe say is some of my family are more conservative, but I don't see them a lot, and when I do see them, most of the time I am not either... We don't talk about politics or I'm not there when politics are being discussed because I will say earlier in my life, I wasn't really well equipped.
0:54:18 Lizzy Ray: That was crazy.
0:54:22 Kaila Seger: Okay.
0:54:23 Lizzy Ray: Okay. Zoom.
0:54:24 Kaila Seger: Okay.
0:54:28 So like when I was a lot younger, I wasn't necessarily equipped to kind of push back. I didn't know as much, but I think that where I am now, I am able to push back and I have pushed back against certain things with my own family or whatever. I love my father to death, but sometimes he will say something that I'm like, that is just so misinformed and dumb, and I will be like, no, let's give you some readings. No,
0:55:02 Lizzy Ray: Check our sources.
0:55:04 Kaila Seger: Let's think, and I have pulled, your daughter is a history major. Who do you think knows better hard on him before I'm studying this right now, genuinely, who do you think knows more about this issue? Thankfully, that doesn't, that's only happened once or twice. Once or twice.
0:55:31 Lizzy Ray: Sometimes you have to check your own parents.
0:55:33 Kaila Seger: Sometimes you really do. I don't know. I'm more willing to speak out and speak up. I don't do it a lot on social media just because a lot of times people want to post things for reactions. They want to troll, and it is, I feel like it's hard to try and police someone on social media because most of the time when someone posts a bad take and then a bunch of people slide up and are like, that's dumb. That's a bad take. You should do X, X, and X thing. They will just respond with LOL get wrecked, like they will not take what you have to say seriously, and they will not take it into account. It's easiest to do that when you are face-to-face with a person and actually opening conversation with them. It's hard to do that over social media, so I don't really fight with people on social media just because most of the time it's a fruitless endeavor, but other than just being more willing to speak out and speak up, I don't think it's really changed how I interact with people.
0:57:02 Lizzy Ray: Awesome. What are some successes or failures of the Black Lives Matter movement?
0:57:10 Kaila Seger: I think getting it out there, they've done a wonderful job of spreading the word of the movement. They've done a wonderful job of getting people to talk about the movement. What I think is not necessarily a failure perhaps, but a drawback is that we have so many issues of trying to define what the movement is or what certain phrases or demands of the movement can be, which we've seen obviously in class with the Black power movement of the phrase black power didn't necessarily have a completely definable definition that made it easy for a lot of people to digest, which led to it being a multifaceted concept that is really hard to condense, to make people understand what it means and why it means that, and now granted, I think that every movement has the same problem because there are a lot of things that can be encompassed under blank movement or so-and-so phrase that they use. So maybe it's not necessarily a failure of the Black Lives Matter movement specifically, but more of a drawback that a lot of movements see is that oftentimes it can be really, really hard to easily define what they are and what certain phrases mean. I mean, the phrase defund the police sparks a lot of controversy because people don't realize that the reason why people are saying defund the police is because they're militarized. It is a militarized group of civilians who are committing acts of terror against other civilians. That is why they're saying defund the police. They're not saying get rid of the police. So many people interpret it to be, they're saying, let's take this funding that we're putting towards the police so they can militarize themselves and put it towards social services that can respond in a lot of these calls that police respond to, but are unable to actually diffuse because...
0:59:46 Lizzy Ray: Becuase a lot of it's mental health and they need somebody that is trained in mental health.
0:59:51 Kaila Seger: A lot of that stuff of like, we can put this money into other social services that help more than the police going out there and killing people who don't deserve to be killed. It's just hard to encompass that sort of thing in a succinct definition and in a way that a lot of people who are initially turned off by those phrases to get them willing to read it, because there are countless things out there that explain what does black lives matter really mean? What does defund the police really mean, but who's going to read it? But the people who are already interested in learning more, the people who have already turned away based upon the name aren't going to go and actually read about it. They aren't going to go and say, okay, well then what do they really mean? Because they've already made up in their mind what it means, and they don't want that to change.
1:00:57 Lizzy Ray: Yeah. Awesome. What is your hope for the future of the Black Lives Matter movement?
1:01:06 Kaila Seger: I hope that it continues on and that it makes the change that it set out to make. I hope that it does not have to remain for a ridiculously long time to achieve the goals that it's set out. Not that I want to see it gone, but it would be nice if we managed to check off everything on the list and achieve everything that they've set out to achieve to be able to go, okay, the movement's over, because we've done what we set out to do.
1:01:53 Lizzy Ray: You would have succeeded in what we were going to do.
1:01:55 Kaila Seger: And I hope that they continue to fight and to bring awareness until what has been meant to achieve has been achieved, which sadly I don't think is going to happen in the near future, much less in the next probably 30, 40 years.
1:02:19 Lizzy Ray: Depressing. Woohoo.
1:02:23 Kaila Seger: It's our note. But yeah, I hope that they're able to continue on, bring more people into the movement and set out to achieve what they've been meaning to achieve this entire time, and then we can say, we did it, guys, even though we probably won't be able to say that in our lifetime, that's okay.
1:02:50 Lizzy Ray: I think a lot of people that I have talked to, they're like, I feel they're like, I don't think it's going to happen because they're generations before us and they talk about how they don't feel it will happen in their lifetimes, but they're hopeful that it'll be in our lifetime, which is something we can always be hopeful for.
1:03:09 Kaila Seger: You can always hope that it's during our lifetime
1:03:11 Lizzy Ray: So we can experience something good change, which do you have anything else you'd like to add?
1:03:22 Kaila Seger: Black Lives Matter. Defund the police. Be skeptical of people in positions of power, especially right now, especially right now. Do your research folks. Be open-minded. Try and educate yourself to the best of your ability and advocate for those who need it, but don't overshadow them.
1:03:51 Lizzy Ray: Beautiful. Beautifully said. Well, thank you so much for letting me interview you today.
1:03:55 Kaila Seger: Thank you for interviewing me.
Part of Kaila Seger