Interview with Sundiata Enuke: Speech & Debate

Sundiata Enuke, a mere freshman here at Viewpoint School, has been the first Viewpoint student ever to get a national bid for the debate championship. Her speech highlights the experience of being a Black female student in a predominantly white school every year since she was four years old. These aspects of her life inspired her to write the speech that would win a national bid. She felt the need to write this speech for herself to attempt to analyze and find closure for her own experiences and convey this not-often shared perspective of the young Black female to a predominantly white community. Sundiata further expressed her reasoning and inspiration for this specific speech: “When thinking about my prompt for this year’s speech, I knew I wanted to keep on the topic of race and blackness. For so long, I was afraid to show it. (One instance that had occurred years ago was when my teacher asked me to lift my red headband from my forehead after it had slipped because he claimed I looked Like I was in a gang). Now that I am older, I look back at my school teacher, who insinuated to a 7-year old that she looked like blood, and it fills me with anger. I wish I knew what my teacher meant at that moment instead of just being embarrassed for being chastised in front of my classmates and moving on. My school life trained me to keep things inside, tone it down, and give people the benefit of the doubt. That made me ashamed. So many young black kids deal with this too in much more extreme ways, and it has a big effect on mental health as well as self-image.” (Sundiata Enuke). 

Enuke has stated that she feels proud of herself for finally being able to express deep-seed traumas and experiences that commonly affect Black children such as herself, along with the fact that this speech success has brought her more self-confidence around her already undoubted talented ability for spokesmanship. For many girls, harsh self-judgment had been an enormous part of the creative and presentation process for Enuke’s Speech and Debate experience in the past. Sundiata also explained that Coach K (Jordyn Kuehn- VP’s Speech and Debate coach) played a huge role in building inspiration and self-confidence for her school speech/debate process and progression during her 8th Grade year, and was a large factor in Sundiata’s motivation to achieve the highest success for herself with her speeches.