When It Comes to Education, Black Children Can't Win A Rigged Game

"I hate this school," I said.

It was 1991, and I wasn't yet 14. My parents had moved us from what was then the"Black" end of one of the largest school districts in North St. Louis County to the white one.

The culture shock was, to put it mildly, a lot.

I'd gone from being a bullied, friendless nerd for most of elementary school until my Black peers gave up and begrudgingly accepted my quirks to now being isolated and ostracized at a white school where no one could be bothered to learn my name, let alone make friends. I ate lunch alone. My teachers often lost my homework or tried to thwart my success. And my mother, a former school teacher who was well-versed in navigating the public school system, was constantly at the school, demanding I be treated fairly.

But my father didn't know any of this because, in my youth, I couldn't articulate it, and my mother never told him.

So my father scoffed.

"You don't hate the school," he said, arguing semantics: the building wasn't the issue, he said, but the kids inside it.

But to me: What was the difference? We were saying the same thing in different fonts.

I hated the school because of the kids. And I hated the school because it was racist.

Systemic Racism's Sacrificial Lambs

I thought about this a lot while reading Nikole Hannah-Jones' story in The New York Times Magazine about the systemic inequities that exist in the New York Public School system, which is probably one of the most confounding, inequitable, and enraging public school systems I've ever seen. I don't have children of my own, so the only person I could relate to in the story was that of her daughter, as I too had been a Black girl who went to segregated schools—both majority Black and majority white.

Throughout the story, her daughter repeatedly challenges her mother's beliefs and says she does not understand the collectivist motives behind putting her in the schools her mother chose for her—one an underperforming, under-resourced majority Black school in Brooklyn where homework is rarely assigned, and teachers are dealing with disciplinary issues all the time, and later, a majority-white school her daughter is initially underprepared for due to going to the underperforming school for so long and the sting of racist aggressions from her white peers.

To Hannah-Jones' credit, she apologizes to her daughter for not considering her desires, and for trying to fight systemic issues by enrolling her daughter in a deeply flawed system where she thought her wealth and influence could overcome decades of neglect by the New York Public School system.

It woefully does not, as Hannah-Jones admits defeat at something never designed to support Black children, who become sacrificial lambs to systemic racism.

The 'Good' School District

Like Hannah-Jones and her husband, my parents had the means to put me in almost any school they could have wanted. My father made good money in the aerospace industry as an engineer and later, in management. But the St. Louis metropolitan area is very large and full of private and public school districts—some good, some bad, some in between—and my parents purposefully moved us into a large, accredited school district in North County because it was considered a "good" one. And in St. Louis in the 80s and 90s, a "good" school district was suburban and majority white.

Still, our elementary school stood out after it went from racially mixed to almost all-Black by the time I got to kindergarten, as white families fled our neighborhood, which was filling up with middle-class and working-class Black homeowners.

My mother was constantly at war with the district over our elementary school and, to her credit, these were battles she and her PTA often won on behalf of the Black students there. This was likely because my mother was a stay-at-home mom who had worked in St. Louis City Public Schools before having kids, and during her time at Philander Smith College, was an education rights advocate who volunteered under Civil Rights Activist Daisy Bates. She easily organized the other mothers because she had every parent's name and phone number, plus the district superintendent's, and regularly rallied the parents around issues like homework and textbooks.

The district labeled her and the other mothers "militant parents," which she wore proudly as a badge of honor.

Because of the mothers' organizing, unlike other schools in the district, we were taught our history. We had Black History Month and Martin Luther King Day programs, and had a Black Santa Claus at Christmastime. We got new playground equipment and better books, and we had quality teachers. My mother also created the Friday Folder program that the school adopted, so parents could see all their kids' weekly homework and sign off on it when they brought the folders full of graded assignments home at the end of the week. She pushed for this because so many Black parents were shocked when they would only learn how far behind their kids were when they received their report cards. This way, no parent would be surprised by their kids' progress or lack thereof.

But there were still some things beyond those radical mothers' reach—namely that we had a Black female principal who regularly told us how "dumb" and "bad" we all were, who was a harsh disciplinarian, and who put many of my Black male peers on the path of the School-to-Prison Pipeline. She regularly carried water for her bosses who created the systemic racial issues that existed in our larger school district, as she cared more about looking "tough" in front of her white superiors than our safety or education.

As a result, none of our teachers—mostly white women—liked her, and they didn't bother to hide their disdain. And when I was in the sixth grade, when she announced she was taking a job elsewhere, the kids cheered.

But then, to my mother's frustration, our family moved to the then "rich" (and very white) end of the school district to a brand new home in an unincorporated part of Florissant, Mo. The move was our father's idea, as he had always wanted to move us to a larger home, bristling over how small our old house felt with three growing girls running through it.

He surmised that since it was all the same school district, how bad could it be?

Vibe Shift

The kids you go to school with, the teachers you have, the principal who rules all, determine the vibe of the school, and unlike the elementary school where my mother was the most beloved, respected, and feared parent there, the vibe of my new middle school and my baby sister Deidre's new elementary school could be summed up in one word: toxic.

The white kids were full of aggressions, both macro and micro. And the few Black kids there were "odd" in how they seemed to think the only true Black identity was one of poverty and struggle—one that, as well-to-do suburban Black kids in the 1990s, they did not have—and they were "disappointed" when I didn't sound or act like I was from "the hood." Then they starkly contradicted themselves by telling me how my old Black neighborhood outside of Black Jack, Mo., was "poor" and "bad."

The internalized racism they had towards my younger sister and me was as confusing as it was maddening. Over time, I began to feel sorry for them because they'd never experienced what we had in a Black school that, despite its issues, did do things that affirmed our intelligence and talents.

The move to the white school was a devastating blow to both our self-esteem, and the racism we experienced from both our Black and white peers stays with us to this day. In fact, my sister and I wrote about it for HuffPost earlier this summer in a piece about Nolan Wells, where my younger sister revealed one of her elementary school teachers was a Klansman.

In the end, we conclude that Black parents must do their best to protect their children's fragile mental health in these fraught environments.

It is critical for Black parents to not take a back seat when it comes to their children’s schooling. Our mother was vocal and active, and even she never knew the full picture of what happened in those schools until we were adults who could finally articulate what took place.

Parents of every race need to talk to their children about what they’re experiencing and seeing. They need to talk to their children about race. Because the kids are talking. The teachers are talking.

Will you, as a parent, protect them and listen?

Both my sister and I have come to believe that Black parents, if they can, should try to enroll their children in diverse schools with access to resources—which can, at times, be woefully hard to find. But they do exist. As rough as our experiences with segregated and integrated schools were, whether on the Black end of the district or the white one, by high school, there were enough Black students there that we didn't feel completely disenfranchised and alone.

Bootstrapping Systemic Racism

But there's another issue that came up for me when reading Hannah-Jones' story. One that can be summed up by the many social media responses where one maybe-unrelated, maybe-not post on BlueSky stood out.

"Americans: oh, look, a systemic issue. I will solve it individually."

Black and white people in this country are often told to tackle these monstrous issues as individuals as if racism is simply a matter of a few bad actors who can be rounded up by the end of a Scooby-Doo mystery. That you just need to unmask the Klansman among us and all would be healed. But it's much more complicated than that.

It's hard to fight a systemic issue as an individual, yet America often encourages us to do that. To reduce complex issues like economic inequity, racism, sexism, bigotry, and capitalism to something you can bootstrap. It's a painful fallacy, a burden to put on Black parents like Hannah-Jones. It's not their fault New York schools are this way. Policymakers, school administrators, government agencies, teachers, and the public all need to address this issue together. While Hannah-Jones' efforts are understandable, or even commendable, carrying the burden of fixing a broken system alone is too incredible a weight for one family to bear.

You can't bootstrap this.

Even my mother—with all her experience, knowledge, and resources—needed the other mothers at her school, plus a superintendent and school board willing to listen and create change. And even then, she could only create change at our one elementary school. Yes, it positively impacted hundreds of Black students who came out of that school when we went there, but what happened after my sisters and I left? I do not know. My mother retired from her education activism once my youngest sister graduated from high school, exhausted after two decades of battling an unjust system.

My hope for Hannah-Jones and her daughter's story is that all of New York City will read it and take action. That they will recognize how flawed and inequitable this system is and that it will take all of us to fix it. That it will take decades of organizing and investment, education and development, and that the greed and racism that drive New York City's segregation will finally be dealt with.

Black parents and their children shouldn't have to become David versus an inequitable Goliath. The monster we face is as old as this country and even more deeply entrenched within it. It's admirable to think one person can change the world, but the reality is that it will always take all of us.

Let us rally around the children and lift them up. And let us listen to the children and act on their words, because they hold the promise of our futures.