This Week @ UC San Diego: Homegrown Campaign to Combat Hate on National Stage

#USvsHate spring 2019 youth vote winner for poster, by Alexis, Grade 12, San Diego.

#USvsHate, a student- and educator-led anti-hate messaging project, was the lead story in the October 24, 2019 issue of This Week @ UC San Diego. #USvsHate was designed collaboratively by CREATE Director and UC San Diego Education Studies Professor Mica Pollock, UC San Diego doctoral student Mariko Cavey, CREATE Digital Specialist Minhtuyen Mai, and educators throughout San Diego, including early project champions Sarah Peterson, regional director for the California Reading and Literature Project, and Kim Douillard, regional director for the San Diego Area Writing Project in CREATE.

Read an excerpt below or the full article here.

Homegrown Campaign to Combat Hate on National Stage
by Inga Kiderra, Director of Communications, Social Sciences Division, UC San Diego

It’s a simple premise with a powerful effect: Help young people use their voices to speak up for justice and equity—then amplify the messages they make. That’s the basic M.O. of #USvsHate, a messaging project germinated at UC San Diego and grown in local schools, now branching out nationally as part of Teaching Tolerance, a program of the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center dedicated to anti-bias education.

“While adults sometimes get tied in knots over complicated issues, youth can successfully cut to the core. They cut to the chase,” says Mica Pollock, a professor of education studies at UC San Diego and director of the university’s educational research and outreach center called CREATE, who initially conceived #USvsHate in 2017.

“Everyone belongs.” “Being Mexican isn’t a crime.” “My body is beautiful.” These are just three of the hundreds of messages that youth have made so far through the #USvsHate project. All three have been turned into stickers. There are also posters—and essays, poems, videos, art installations and songs. The messages—which address all forms of hate on the minds of youth, from racial slurs to shaming someone for their religion or their body shape—live on the #USvsHate website and are shared through social media. They have a physical home in participating schools. And critically, they all represent the product of candid and sometimes difficult conversations in classrooms. Read the full article here.

To learn more about #USvsHate, visit the website or contact Mica Pollock (micapollock@ucsd.edu).