Step In My Shoes

Inspiration

When I first saw the prompt about creating connections between communities, I thought back to one of my favorite TED talks by a black man who became close friends with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Daryl Davis, a musician, set out on a quest to determine why prejudice exists. He decided that the best way to do this would be by getting to know the head of one of the most prejudiced organizations in the world- the KKK. He traveled around the country meeting KKK members and clan leaders. Eventually, he was allowed to meet the Grand Imperial Wizard- Roger Kelly. He met with Roger Kelly and other KKK clans several times. The results were astounding. The KKK accepted and befriended him despite the principles of hatred that the KKK was founded on. One clan leader even made him the godfather of his daughter. Through his friendship with Roger Kelly, he eventually convinced the Grand Imperial Wizard to leave the clan. The greatest lesson he learned was that prejudice is just fear of the unknown. With the rise of anti-black and AAPI hate crimes, this lesson is more important than ever. We wanted to create a website that spoke to this rift between people of color and white people by taking the unknown and helping our users learn more about people who are different than them. We want to show our users that instead of siding with their natural instinct to be scared of people that are of a different nationality or ethnicity than them, we should all acknowledge our differences as beautiful and unique.

What it does

Our website bridges communities by displaying a range of characters of different ethnicities and nationalities. Our users can click on our characters and- as the name of our website suggests- step in their shoes. By allowing our users a window into another viewpoint we are creating empathy rather than hate.

How we built it

We built this website using HTML, CSS and a variety of CSS and JS libraries such as Swiper JSS, Bootstrap CSS, Animate on Scroll, GLightBox and CSS Animations.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges regarding the time constraints but, after tackling this challenge as a team, we completed our submission on time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're so proud that we were able to create an impactful hack in a short amount of time.

What we learned

We learned that collaboration is essential. We also learned not to give up. Despite running into bugs, we persevered as a team and managed to get past our hurdles.