Gyona Rice

Gyona is a graphic designer with curly green hair. Fascinated with how a creative outlook plays a vital role in life – a great album cover, an inspired building, a business card – encourages her to tease out, dream up, and urge the pursuit of great ideas. Her work distinguishes itself with bold, unexpected materials & color combinations, while her love of fine art is peppered throughout with the inclusion of multimedia art forms such as illustration & printmaking.

Mind Your Speech // Senior Thesis

Whether subtle or aggressive, the effects of microaggressions can be physically, emotionally, and psychologically pejorative. They can result in harmful psychological effects such as anxiety, nausea, resentment, isolation, and depression. On predominantly White college campuses and communities, the continuous action of racial microaggressions can ultimately lead to high declining rates of minority students, faculty, and staff. Studies that tend to focus on microaggression especially on college campuses suggest that they are occurring on the campuses, oftentimes resulting in black students feeling distressed which can have an impact on their academic performance and mental health.

Prejudice, ignorance, and even fear creates racism that damages the whole society, not just the ones having to face racist attacks. The Mind Your Speech Campaign was created to contribute and work systematically against racism and discrimination to assure that all ethnic groups have an equal sense of belongings while living in Bowling Green. Through its body of work, this educational awareness campaign hopes to decrease the use of microaggressions on and off-campus. This campaign promotes equality for everyone because no one wants to have to be in an unaccepting environment, especially in college.

The campaign’s posters showcase real microaggressions said to black students. They visualize how inconsiderate and rude the comments are by allowing the viewers to not only read the comments but to view those awkward situations, by putting them in the POV of black students’ experiences. Their QR codes link them to the videos for this campaign which animates that poster’s real-life situations, to further impact the viewers on how wrong and common those negative sayings are while advising on how to correctly give a compliment or advice without being demeaning or inconsiderate towards blacks.

Within the Mind Your Speech website it an interactive game, A Day in her Shoes, takes you through a regular day for a black person. This game guides you into thinking about your privileges and biases, as you are faced with the decisions to react or not to the daily negative comments and situations a black person experiences throughout their day. It puts, the viewer in the shoes of a black woman, and invokes your emotions while you experience the hardships that come along with being black.

Through this campaign, I aim to ensure that more people recognize that microaggressions are unacceptable in our community, give more individuals the tools and resources to take practical action against microaggressions and other forms of racism and empower individuals and PWIs (predominately white institutions) to prevent and respond effectively to microaggressions.

To learn more about the work, feel free to visit mindyourspeech.com