A little girl sits in her sunny room looking at the box of crayons that her mother bought for her. They are not the regular box of typical colors, with a variety of primary and secondary colors with one "flesh" colored stick. These are multicultural crayons, featuring jubilant children of several races on the cover smiling and holding hands. The spectrum of colors are meant to compliment many different skin tones, a whole variety of browns and tans grouped together in a nice package that can allow the little girl to draw herself accurately. Simone Crew looks at each crayon, enjoying the sharpness of an unused crayon and the crispness of the paper wrapped around each one. She holds each color up to her skin, trying to find the right match — salmon, burnt sienna and mahogany. But Crew can’t find a color in the box that seems to match her creamy cocoa skin, a mix that comes from her African American mother, who is also a smidge Cherokee Indian, and her Caucasian father. This box of crayons is not "normal" — it was meant as a supplement so she and other children could feel included. The kids on the crayon box do not resemble her either — the girl's pigtails in no way look like her full-bodied ringlets that spring away from her face. After holding up each color to her arm to find a match, she could not feel more left out.

Sitting on the lawn at her high school, 16-year-old Crew reads her poem — starting with the anecdote about the crayons her mother gave her — with a strong, confident, and expressive voice, a shift from her normal speaking voice which is quieter, cheerful and bubbly. As she speaks, she keeps her eyes down on the paper but sits up straight, as if to allow passage for the words to flow more easily. Her voice projects, and her hands gesture appropriately when she wishes to accentuate a particular word or point. Her hair — a perfectly ringleted afro — falls in front of her face as she reads from the notebook that rests on her lap. Her sundress, an olive green and yellow fabric, perfectly compliments the undertones of her skin.

The poem Crew wrote is for Youth Speaks, a non-profit spoken-word organization based in San Francisco that helps young people express their thoughts and experiences, often about issues of race and ethnicity. Youth Speaks seeks to provide a platform for young people to use spoken-word performance as an artistic tool for education and social change, as well as a fun activity and place where youths can meet others who share similar experiences.

"Kids are silenced in a lot of places, including school, and here we don't tell each other what our voices should sound like — so race, culture, and many other personal and political issues inherently come out," says 19-year-old Dalia Rubiano Yedidia, a resident staff member at Youth Speaks.

Being a part of Youth Speaks has meant a lot to Crew, who growing up, describes herself as being extremely shy. She had enough trouble talking to people, much less getting in front of an audience to perform a poem about her personal experiences.
"[With Youth Speaks] it felt like I was proving to myself that I can be a loud person," says Crew. "I can make people listen to me and make a difference, and say what I want to say." For Crew, being involved with Youth Speaks and performing her poetry has helped her become more vocal about her thoughts, despite the fact that she wasn't always as outgoing.

Crew believes Youth Speaks is a supportive place to talk about her conflicts of race and ethnicity because a lot of people there raise the same issues. After seeing other Youth Speaks spoken-word artists verbally express subjects like race, Crew gained the courage to speak up about her own hardships about growing up biracial.

Last year Crew was chosen as one of the top five poets in the Grand Slams poetry contest, where poets perform original spoken-word material in front of an audience while judges score performers as they move through a series of rounds and levels. After her performance at Grand Slams, Crew was chosen to represent Youth Speaks in the Brave New Voices International Poetry Slam Festival, taking place this year in San Jose.

One of the pieces performed at the Brave New Voices Poetry Slam is a duo piece that two members of the team, Isaac Miller and Terry Taplin, wrote together about the connection between the Holocaust and slavery. Taplin, an African American, had the idea to do a piece about the connection between slavery and the Holocaust because of the tension he experienced during class discussions at his high school, where people would argue about which event was worse. Taplin teamed up with Miller, who is Jewish, and made the purpose of the poem be how slavery and the Holocaust are similar in that they are both tragedies, but their legacy is used as a justification for inaction today.

"With this piece, I wanted to support a dialogue and make people think critically," Taplin says.

The poem is performed with Taplin and Miller speaking lines both individually and in unison. Taplin's line, "I'm not trying to belittle anything, I just want to tear these shackles from my wrists," leads into Miller's line, "And carry this heritage like a coat of arms." They finish the stanza with both in unison: "But, not this suffering." Certain words evoke pantomime-type gestures from Taplin or Miller. During the line "Tear these shackles from my wrists," Taplin gestures this action with his wrists.

Miller and Taplin have performed the piece before at open-mic performances, but when they first performed at the Brave New Voices International Slam, they were worried about the audience's reaction to such strong subject matter. Despite their worries, the piece was well received, and continues to garner positive attention in subsequent performances.

"It's easier to discuss these issues because we're using poetry, as opposed to giving a speech. It's more of an emotional comment, so a lot of the audience's judgments and political biases are removed," says Miller.

Besides belonging to the Brave New Voices team, Crew and Taplin are members of Spokes, a board of program participants who work directly with the Youth Speaks staff to set up events, inform them of what projects they and their peers want to work on, and to keep up the staff's communication with and understanding of young people.
A fellow Spokes member, Erika Kent, 20, uses her writing for Youth Speaks to deal with the racism she has experienced. Kent was raised in Garden Grove, Calif., a predominantly white, middle class city in Orange County. Kent's peers often assumed she was Mexican because of her Latina features, though she is a first generation Columbian. She remembers being angry because in her community, Latinos are stereotyped as people meant only for service and labor. Even as young as the third grade she remembers kids refusing to play with her because of her skin color, and ridiculing her with nicknames such as "spic," "brownie," and "wetback" on a daily basis. Although she can laugh about it now, at the time Kent felt alone in her experiences and unable to express her feelings about being ostracized.

"It's hard to explain or talk about issues of white privilege, racism, or oppression in an area where social consciousness isn't even a priority," says Kent.

Although she has always been interested in art, Kent never considered herself a writer before she became involved in Youth Speaks. She first became aware of the organization by attending an open-mic performance when she first moved to San Francisco. At that first open mic, she was in awe of seeing people who were even younger than she was speaking with consciousness. Previously she thought that for her to have an opinion, she would have to be an expert on the subject she was discussing. Watching these performances and being involved in Youth Speaks has made Kent realize that she does not have to know everything — she can have her own opinion and voice it now.

"With those experiences I know I can write about my perspective, my family’s perspective, Latin American issues, social injustice, racism, who I hope I grow up to be...It's limitless," says Kent. "And all of it is individual — because no one else can produce the same thoughts as me. It doesn't have to be fact-based. It doesn't have to be anything. I'm my own standard."