Payton Collier,
Woodbridge, VA
“Can you please calm down” is an unwanted sentiment that has been offered to me many times. The most hurtful of these was probably when a friend of mine asked me if I could just “calm down”; I’d gotten “worked up” about a racist comment a classmate had made. As an African American person, I already feel like many people just don’t give a crap and having someone tell you to calm down basically equals telling them to just shut up. If you speak out against racism you suddenly need to calm down and stop being “aggressive”.
