Scott wants to create change in historically racist Glendale
By: Kevin Colindres
Gabrielle Scott has had everything going for her. She had a remarkable academic career at Clark Magnet High School, graduated early, and got into the University of San Diego, where she is studying mechanical engineering.
“I had a pretty standard white, suburban upbringing,” said Scott, who grew up in the Glenwood neighborhood of Glendale, California. “There was nothing too unique about it, but I had everything I ever needed.”
Scott found a passion in robotics, reading and computer and design at an early age. She was surrounded by two engineers, her mother and father, but it was a specific moment as a 12-year-old that pushed her to pursue engineering even more.
“I remember doing Lego robotics in girl scouts which was fun, but it was a showing at Clark [that] I attended in middle school that made me go ‘wow’,” Scott said. “The robotics team showed off their robots and models and it impressed me because it looked so artsy but also so based in math and science… It was so elegant and beautiful.”
Scott’s ambition manifested as early as kindergarten, where she would tell people that she wanted to grow up and become a neurosurgeon. While that didn’t pan out due to her fear of blood, her work ethic and curiosity for knowledge had been established. Then she would finish second and third grade in the same year to get ahead of her peers. She spent a lot of her childhood building robots for fun, but today her goals have completely changed due to the amount of injustice that has plagued the United States.
“I still don’t know exactly what I want to do, I just know I want to help people,” Scott said.
The 16-year-old set down this new path by organizing the first-ever Black Lives Matter march in Glendale with the help of five friends. Hundreds of protestors, much more than Scott had ever expected, joined the march that began at Doran Gardens-Mini Park and ended at Glendale City Hall. .
“In the beginning, it was just a group of us thinking that Glendale should really have a protest,” Scott said. “One of our friends who does graphic design set up a fancy post on Instagram and I wasn’t really expecting anything to happen.”
Scott’s ability to organize so quickly stemmed from her time as a leader for the robotics team at Clark, where she was always on a time crunch and doing hundreds of things at once. She learned how to send professional emails, give speeches and lead a group of any size. Twice a week Scott would stay at school until anywhere from 2 to 4 a.m., working on robotics and quickly became known as the “robotics girl” on campus. It was a title that she was proud of, and something that drove her to put more time and effort into what she loved to do.
“Before robotics, I was very introverted,” Scott said. “But because it was a close-knit circle I was able to come out of my shell.”
Organizing the march put a lot of new eyes on Scott. While many of her close friends were not surprised by Scott’s willingness to be the face of a Black Lives Matter march, others questioned it.
“There were definitely a lot of messages I was getting through our Instagram page asking if the protest was being organized by Black people,” Scott said. “It was hard for me to answer, but I realized that I had to respect that this is not necessarily my struggle at all.”
A few Twitter users condemned the event publically because Scott had contacted the Glendale Police Department to inform them of the protest.
“Someone on Twitter tweeted out that they came to the protest, saw the organizers were white, and left,” Scott said.
Scott felt a bit discouraged, but that didn’t stop her from organizing the march. While she may have not experienced the sort of racism that she was fighting against, Scott has been surrounded by it her whole life.
“In Glendale and especially Clark, there were a lot of guys who would just yell the n-word really loud in the hallways, Scott said. “A lot of my Armenian girlfriends would tell me that their parents wouldn’t let them date Black people because they think they were dirty.”
With injustice at an all-time high, Scott could not afford to stay silent anymore. With a group of friends, she took initiative to organize an event she thought would be a small gathering at most. Once the event started to blow up through social media, Scott became nervous about what she had created. The next step for Scott, letting her parents know what she had organized, was not an easy one. What was once a small gathering quickly grew at an exponential rate.
“I hadn’t talked about it with my parents until the very last minute and I had forgotten that we were set to go camping the very same weekend as the march,” Scott said. “They mostly supported what I was fighting for, mostly my dad.”
She left the campgrounds and headed straight to the Black Lives Matter march, where she rallied close to a thousand protestors.
Since the march, Scott has received hundreds of messages, mostly positive, which have left her feeling forever grateful. And while she continues to be grateful for the love she has received, she understands that there is still a lot of work to do. Throughout her young adolescent life, Scott was inspired by the works of political activist and author Angela Davis.
“I fear not making an impact and dying unknown,” Scott said. “I don’t want to use up all these resources for nothing, I want to make a positive change.”
Scott didn’t take her foot off the gas after the protest. She lent her hand in working toward educational reforms within the Glendale Unified School District. As a member of GUSD Students Advocating for Black Lives, she helped write a demand letter to Dr. Eckjian and the District Board of Education. The letter detailed specific changes, such as incorporating anti-racist books into the curriculum and establishing a Black Advisory Council. The letter was signed by about 450 students and alumni.
Eckjian now hosts regular meetings with the nascent organization, to work towards creating what Eckjian calls a “culturally relevant and responsive education” (CRRE). Following that was the Sundown Town resolution drawn up by the “Coalition for an AntiRacist Glendale” and passed on Sept. 15 by the Glendale City council, making Glendale the third city in the nation to publicly address its racist past. And with the start of her college career, Scott has found more opportunities to get involved.
“I started interning at CALPIRG, an organization at UCSD that runs political and environmental campaigns throughout the year,” Scott said. “Obviously right now their attention has been focused on turning out the vote, so I’ve been text banking and phone banking to get people registered for the last few weeks before the deadline hit.”
Scott has recently also focused on environmental work.
Since beginning at UCSD, Scott has joined Engineers for a Sustainable World, an organization on campus that has projects dealing with renewable energy, sustainable mechanics, and combining materials science with engineering to find new ways to prevent plastic waste or recycle it in new ways. She is also a part of the campus’s newest Sustainability Ambassadors and recently joined the UCSD Climate Review Board, a newsletter organization specifically about climate change.
“There’s definitely room for the engineering community to grow as well,” Scott said. “Historically it has been predominantly white and male, so opening it up more to women and people of color is something that I want to fight for.”
