“I love living here. Honestly, this is my Wakanda.”

A Black man said this to me in March, in Flossmoor, Illinois, where I live. I’d just given a speech on Black Lives Matter, the role of allies, and the myth of Wakanda, a fictional country in the heart of Africa, flourishing under immense wealth and prosperity, from the Marvel movie and Black Panther comics. A key feature of Wakanda is the long-standing peace among its five tribes and outlook of justice with the rest of the world, something I don’t think it shares with Flossmoor and its surrounding area.

“Your Wakanda can’t be predicated on the harms of others,” I told him and the audience of predominantly white, well-to-do suburbanites. “It can’t be a place where some people don’t get to exist or survive or thrive.”

While he meant well, grandiose statements like this man’s are harmful, misleading, and extremely dismissive of the experiences of Black and Brown folx in suburban safe havens like Flossmoor.

For five years, I have lived in the Homewood-Flossmoor community, which spans two suburbs roughly 25 miles south of downtown Chicago. We moved here from California when I got into graduate school to study political science. We were attracted by the quaint houses, high performing schools, and the neighborhood’s overall feel of calm.

After having lived in Orange County, California, where I experienced the recent history of overt racism — a long-running phenomenon — firsthand, Homewood-Flossmoor felt like a place of respite. It felt like a place where the color of my family’s skin, my piercings, and the nontraditional way my partner and I view gender wouldn’t be an issue. But reality has shaped up much differently than those initial feelings led me to believe it would.

Over the weekend of April 27-28, a video emerged which appeared to show several white students in the Homewood-Flossmoor neighborhood wearing blackface, visiting a local McDonald’s, and enjoying a few other exploits. One of the students was wearing a hoodie with the Homewood-Flossmoor (H-F) high school logo on it, signaling that he may be a student or alumni member; CBS Chicago reported they were sophomores, but didn’t say where or further identify them because they’re minors.

H-F High School, the one public high school serving students in both towns, is a highly awarded, well-accommodated school known for its fine arts and athletic programs. But the students and parents at the school told the Chicago Tribune at the April 30 protest that they have long felt that Black students are treated more harshly than their white peers.

The week’s blackface incident only heightened those concerns, and prompted the April 30 mass walkout of about 1,000 of the school’s nearly 3,000 predominantly Black students.

Ronald Williams, a class of 2016 alum of H-F High School and a member of the youth-led movement organization GoodKids MadCity (GKMC), helped organize the protest on Tuesday. After speaking with the school’s principal on Monday, Williams and members of GKMC worked to bring young people together to protest the conditions they say they have been facing at H-F High School. At first, school administrators weren’t on board with the protest, according to Williams. Initially, he said, they threatened to suspend or expel students who walked out, but Williams says students “were going to do it anyway.”

Williams tells Teen Vogue that he sees himself as a “big brother” to current students and that he was concerned when he heard that students were being told they would face punishment if they supported the protest.