I often tell people that we
don’t need to worry about the next generation. I know this because I spend so
much time with high school kids. Today’s story is a perfect example of that.
After a racist social media message was sent to a player from Minneapolis North
during the state tournament, Lakia Manska reacted with grace, heart and
fearlessness.
Here's the story, originally
posted on April 17 …
Lakia Manska is a busy senior at Morris Area High School. She’s a
three-sport athlete, a member of the National Honor Society, a two-time
qualifier for the MSHSL state speech tournament, a dancer and more. She’s also
fearless.
At this week’s Class A state speech tournament, Lakia (pronounced
“lu-KY-uh”) will compete in Original Oratory. The state meet will be held at
Eastview High School, with Class AA competition on Friday and Class A on
Saturday.
Lakia is one of seven Morris Area students who qualified for
state. The others are Aarav Devkota, Alexis Lhotka and Zachary Dietz in
Discussion, Samuel Jordan in Extemporary Speaking and Hailey Lesmeister and
Emily Hamm in Duo Interpretation. Lakia and Aarav are team captains.
Lakia’s skills as a writer, a thinker and a force for good reached
a wide audience recently after she wrote an editorial that was published by the
Stevens County Times in Morris. It spread very quickly online throughout
Minnesota and beyond. You can read it here: https://www.stevenscountytimes.com/opinion/time-to-change/
Her essay was in response to an ugly incident during the boys
state basketball tournament. After Minneapolis North defeated Morris
Area/Chokio-Alberta in the state semifinals, a student from Chokio-Alberta sent
a vile, racist social media message to one of the North players. (https://www.mshsl.org/about/news/johns-journal/johns-journal-i-worry-these-are-my-kids-these-are-my-kids )
“It just broke my heart,” she said. “It’s horrible.”
Lakia, who is Black, was adopted by Stacie and
John Manska when she was three weeks old. She has two
older brothers: Lukus, 22, is in the Army in South Carolina
and Logan, 26, is a teacher and head boys basketball coach
at Lake Crystal Wellcome Memorial.
The social media message was sent late on Friday night of the
state tournament, and by Saturday morning it had been publicized. Lakia said
gathering with her friends to cheer for the Morris Area/Chokio-Alberta Tigers
in Saturday’s third-place game at Concordia University in St. Paul was
difficult.
“The whole year we’ve been watching this
boys basketball team and the energy has been so
explosive and crazy,” she said. “But you could tell we were all
thinking about, ‘How excited should we be today without it being
insensitive?’ It was a whole different atmosphere there.”
As she has gotten older, Lakia learned that she felt better if
she wrote about things that were emotional for her. So after returning home
from the state tournament, that’s what she did.
“I needed to vent,” she said. “And I was so upset and confused and
sad. I ended up writing this paper. I read it to my mom one night and
thought that would be the end of it, or maybe I
would send it to a couple teachers and see if they wanted to
talk about it at school.”
At the same time, one of the editors at the newspaper was
searching for a way to begin a discussion of what had taken place and asked if
Lakia would like to write something. It was already written.
Lakia’s words are powerful.
Wearing “Morris Tigers” across my chest felt like a betrayal. Some
of my closest friends were on the team, yet I felt a pang in my heart each time
I clapped. My body was in the gym, but my mind wandered. I felt nauseous.
John Kleinwolterink, who is a music teacher and head speech coach
at Morris, has a son on the basketball team. After the social media message was
made public, his first reaction was, “ ‘What are we going to do about this?’
Then we have kids like Lakia who say, ‘This is what needs to be done, this is
what I’ve experienced, and we need to address it.’ ”
Lakia had emailed her essay to Kleinwolterink, and he broke down
in tears while reading it.
“I didn’t know all the things she had been through because of who
she is,” he said. “If I could have, right then I would have grabbed her and
hugged her.
“We need to do better. Our community needs to hear these things.
It starts the conversations that have to happen and the change that has to go
with it.”
I have been called a monkey. People have used the n-word to
devalue me as a human being. My successes have been taken away because how can
a black girl truly be successful? I understood what those boys were going
through. Those boys fought their way to the state championship, yet they were
made to feel they did not deserve it.
Lakia, who plans to study English
education at Minnesota State University Moorhead, said
the reaction to what she wrote has been nothing but positive.
“I was surprised at how many people reached out
and asked questions,” she said. “People from the
Morris area asked how they can fix things around here. It’s
crazy seeing how many people I know and people I don’t know talking about it.
It’s cool to know it started a conversation.”
Before writing, Lakis reached out on social media to Minneapolis
North assistant coach Trent Witz. She sent him a private message that read in
part, “I am from Morris and just wanted to apologize and say I am absolutely
disgusted by the message your team received.”
Lakia has had many wonderful moments during her high school
career. She was a member of the girls tennis team that was the first in school
history to play at state last fall. Her first year on the team was in eighth
grade, when the team consisted of just a few girls and they lost every
competition. But the girls worked hard in the following years, capped by their
trip to state.
“That was definitely the highlight of my high school career,”
she said. “That is probably the closest I’ve ever been with anybody, and
we still talk every single day.”
Lakia and her speech teammates are focusing on Saturday’s state
tournament. She has been a member of the speech program since eighth grade;
last year she placed fourth at state in Original Oratory. Just like with
the tennis team, the friendships made in speech are special.
“I really like the group of friends that I’ve made there,”
she said. “There are about 16 of
us on the team, and we talked about it
on the bus ride home from (section speech in) Albany. It’s
such a fun environment. I can tell my confidence speaking and writing has
gotten so much better over the last five years.”
Kleinwolterink said, “I don’t think anybody could write as clear
of a storyline as she does and explain to others what she wants to say. She is
a smart kid and she’s talented. She’s involved, she knows what she wants to do
and she’s driven, that’s for sure.”
Her Original Oratory presentation this year is titled “Getting
Comfortable with the Uncomfortable.”
“I’m talking about uncomfortable conversations and why
we don’t like to have them but why we need to,” she said. “Mental health,
race, politics, all these different things. I struggled coming
up with a topic but I talked about it one day in one of my classes, the
importance of having discussions even when they’re not comfortable.
“I was definitely not a confident kid, not for a long time,”
she said. “Now I’m pretty fearless.”
--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of
Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn
and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts.
Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org
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