Growing Up Biracial in Bellevue

STS Alumna Shares Experience as a Woman of Color

On July 7, 2020, St. Thomas School alumna Marissa Pool published a video on Instagram. It is the first of a series of interviews that discuss Pool’s personal experience as a woman of color in Bellevue, Washington.

“I was feeling terrible in the days following George Floyd’s death, and it was actually my friends who helped me come up with the idea of making a video to address what I was feeling,” says Pool. “They asked what I would be comfortable doing to put myself out there and be heard as a person of color. And then one of them said, ‘What if we make a video about your life?’ Making a video felt like the most natural way to share my story. I thought a video would be the easiest way for people to pay attention.”

Still, talking publicly about her experience was no easy task. “I hate being vulnerable and making everything about me,” Pool confesses. “When I was a junior in high school, I wrote a speech about what it was like to be half-Black, half-Chinese, but that was it. I never felt like I had a place to talk publicly about my experiences as a person of color because no one was ready to receive that yet. In high school, people talked about racial discrimination, but it wasn’t making much of a difference. But it’s everywhere now. It’s changing the country. That made me more willing to talk about my race and where I come from.”

Pool’s friends—and fellow St. Thomas School alumni— Geneva Myhrvold and Corri McAllister helped her plan and shoot her video for social media. The trio made every effort to be intentional with their process.

“We took two weeks to plan it out,” Pool remembers, “and we ended up filming the first episode three times. The first one was kind of a mess,” she laughs. “With any project that I do in life, I think it’s important to feel like I’m doing a good job, even if that means doing it a few times to get it right.”

In their second attempt, Pool says they shifted the structure of the video into a conversation between Pool and McAllister as they sat together on camera. While it was much better than their first try, Pool still wasn’t satisfied with the second take.

“I didn’t want the video to be me explaining race to a white person. We didn’t want to limit the scope of what I was saying to that narrow of a lens. When I texted my friends saying I wanted to do it over again, Corri said, ‘We should have it just be you in front of the camera. I’ll stay behind the camera and just ask the questions.’ I thought that the question-and-answer approach would be more simple and effective than our original conversation. That third take is what we posted to Instagram.”

The resulting thirty-minute video is a powerful, poignant, and personal interview between a woman of color and her friend of over 10 years. The video has attracted over 2,300 views.

“After I hit ‘post,’ I was so scared of who was going to see it,” Pool admits. “But the amount of people who shared it or direct messaged me, the positive feedback was overwhelming. My friends and I were like, ‘Okay, people are listening. Let’s make another one.’”

Of the people who have reached out to Pool as a result of her videos, a surprising number of them have been her former teachers, as well as current STS faculty. “St. Thomas School’s Director of the Center for Leadership and Innovation, Kimberly Mecham, has a daughter who was in my grade at St. Thomas School. Kimberly texted me after watching my video and asked if I would be willing to talk to the faculty about diversity at my alma mater. I thought it sounded like a great opportunity.”

Pool spoke to the St. Thomas School faculty and staff during their professional development week this past August. “I’ve never done a talk like that before, so preparing for it was a little weird for me. I texted my sister and a few friends asking what they’d like me to say, which was a great way for me to go beyond my own personal experience and talk about some of the bigger issues that affect kids on a bigger scale. Like the importance of implementing diverse education at an early age. To illustrate what I was talking about, I shared the little experiences that I still remember from my days at St. Thomas School, and on through high school and college. Those kind of microaggressions really affect kids psychologically, especially when they’re young.”

Pool’s talk so impacted the faculty that St. Thomas School started a speaker series as a part of their diversity, inclusion, and equity initiative, which will focus on bringing more diverse voices and perspectives to our community.

To date, Pool has posted two interviews to Instagram about her experience as a person of color. “My friends and I are planning to make a third one, but it’s a little more difficult now that one of them has gone back to school in New York,” Pool explains. “The videos that are up will keep being relevant, so there’s no rush to make a third one right away. But once we know what we want to talk about, you better believe there will be more. I don’t think this conversation is going to stop anytime soon.”

You can watch Marissa Pool’s videos at: Instagram.com/marissapool/channel

Marissa Pool circa 2010 as a St. Thomas School third grader.