Photo and story by Ryan Fournier
Nitasha Lewis, who spoke at the Studium screening of “I Am Not Your Negro” Jan. 18, is co-founder of PC’s Social Lights club. The club is fresh, having officially begun this quarter. It’s goals are a mix of action and awareness. It’s discussions address issues like inequality, conservation and overpopulation.
The Social Lights also hope to acquire a garden, where they can raise edible and medicinal plants.
Lewis expressed a desire to re-cut the College’s Arboretum trails, saying they’re spreading outward over time, and encroaching on forest space.
Lewis is the only student working in PC’s Upward Bound program, which helps low-income high school students transition into college. Some of the program’s students are first generation college students.
At the same time, she’s working toward an AA in Addiction Studies. She wants to earn a Bachelor of Applied Science degree, a four-year program offered at PC.
“Becoming a witness and a testifier are vital ingredients for change,” said Lewis of Raoul Peck’s film about American author James Baldwin.
She’s taken Dr. Martin Luther King’s message of nonviolent activism to heart as well, and said the film taught her about peaceful tactics with which to address inequality.
Lewis said she connects with Baldwin’s sense of isolation- Baldwin never fully identified with any organized sect of the Civil Rights Movement, though he believed firmly in its cause.
Lewis feels she was “religiously abused” growing up, and wasn’t really allowed a social life. She said she’s felt like a black sheep, but that sense is changing in school.
“Coming to Peninsula College at the age of 40, I’ve found for the first time a sense of belonging, here on campus.”