Our nation’s widespread conversation about race and racism continued at WHS on Tuesday as a Winter Week school-wide event. Speaker Jabari Asim shared his first-hand experiences with racism and spoke about widespread impact of racial profiling in the United States.

Asim, an author, poet and writing professor at Emerson College, spoke both about events in the news and his own personal experiences with racial profiling. He presented twice during the day, each time speaking to half of the student body.

According to Asim, his childhood affects what he writes and talks about.

“My role model was definitely my dad, and it still is my dad,” Asim said. “He is my hero, and I’ve tried to conduct my whole life like he did.”

He was drawn to writing as a child because English was the subject he found he was good at.

“Like a lot of boys in my generation, if I had been good enough to be a baseball player, that’s probably what I would have become because I really loved baseball. At some point, I realized that I wasn’t good enough [at baseball], but I was good at school. so I was like, ‘Let me keep working on that,’” Asim said.

According to Asim, he enjoys talking to teenagers because he feels that he helps them understand the true power of race relations. After his lecture, several students say they walked away from Asim’s lecture with a better understanding of racial justice.

Junior Andrea Ponce feels that his approach of talking about current events might have been confusing for students who did not have background knowledge of the issues he was talking about.

“I knew a lot coming in because this is one of my favorite subjects, but for many people it just passed by their heads, [like] people who didn’t know [about the racial issues] in the Boston Latin schools or anything that is going on in the world around them,” Ponce said.

Other students, such as freshman Andrew Mitty, feels that the way he interwove personal experiences and current events brought clarity to the issues of race in the United States.

“I liked how he told us about modern day problems by using personal, first-hand experiences,” Mitty said.

According to freshman Jack Gaddis, the talk was impactful.

“He really opened my eyes to modern day racial problems,” Gaddis said.