Getting A Little Personal: Education Epilogue

The Prelude
Part 1: Early Education
Part 2: MisEducation
Part 3: Educating Them & Us
Part 4: Home Schooling
Part 5: Return to Education
Part 6: Education of a Mayor
The Epilogue

I was sure that I was finished with this series of articles but last night one of my childhood friends called me and I was telling her about the articles that I wrote. She was one of my neighborhood friends that had spent all of her time on the normal neighborhood track. Although she is about to begin a PhD program at Duke, she talked about how much she missed in those early school years and that today she is still playing catch up on so many fundamental things that were never taught to her.

I think I left off at the revelation that I had in high school about the advantages I had because of the unusual access that I'd been given to the white educational system. It's amazing what little things I'd learned sitting at the table of white families and interacting with the good doctors network. Be careful here, there may be a tendency to say, "well that was so great for you." I'd say it was fortunate for me and the reason why is that I was privy to private conversation. The only analogy that I can think of is a beauty pageant. Imagine that we are all competing in a beauty pageant but I've been hanging out with the children of the judges for years. Pageant talk is common at the dinner table and as a child I don't only get to go the pageants but I also get a backstage page to hang out with contestants. On a couple of occasions I even get to have my picture taken with the winners. Now, after 10-15 years of this you, the neighborhood kids, and I decide to compete in the same pageant with other young women. I have a little bit of advantage don't I? I know what the judges like, how the judges think, how other winners prepared, and have seen first hand what not to do. A couple of the pageant winner even volunteer to coach me for free because of our relationship. That was the benefit that was given to me. Good for me but how would you feel if I won! Fair and square right? After all, do you even have any idea of what I had been absorbing over the years?

With that in mind here is the quick rundown. The day that I showed up for high school advanced placement, I was given books like Homer's Odyssey that we had read in seventh grade. I'd already been through much of Shakespeare but I got to do it over again in high school. It was a cake walk. A new socialization program began. This is the first time that I noticed that even in a school that was mixed, but predominately white students didn't mix socially. What I mean is that we attended classes together but in the cafeteria there was a white side and a black side with an invisible line down the middle. We didn't hang out with the white kids after school unless we were on the same sports teams and even some of the sports were segregated.

The school was predominately white, but my class had more black students than the school had ever had. It was the first year that the entire student council was black. There was a little problem when the majority (first time ever) had a black prom committee There was some discussion about having separate proms or some foolishness because OTHERS didn't like some of the decisions that the (black) committee was making. Now for 30 years there had been all white student governments, all white prom committees but when we elected a black prom queen, it's the first time I heard they, "they voted for her because she was black" line of reasoning. There wasn't much mention of the fact that she was also smart, attractive, funny, and the first black valedictorian. For point of reference, this was the same year that Vanessa Williams became the first black Ms. America.

Back to education. I was accepted into Michigan State University in the second month of my senior year of high school. Even in college I found that I had been well prepared and exposed to much of what I was learning. It seemed that was not the case for many of the friends that I made that had come from Detroit Public Schools. For many of those students it was the first time that they had been in a school with so many white people. My roommate was from some small Michigan town, within five minutes of meeting me I wasn't even shocked by what she said. Here is the introduction:

Her: Hey I'm ... You're black. Cool.
Me: I'm Valarie.
Her: Well, my parents told me that it was okay if my roommate was black but if you start bringing black men around here I'm supposed to get the hell out.
Me: Glad to meet you.

We didn't make it till the end of the year. We ended up in student court months later after she called me the ultimate N and it got really ugly. This definitely wasn't the first time that I'd heard it but it was the most explosive because she said it out in an open hallway where other students black and white heard her and I watched some of the black students cry from being hurt so badly.

I'll skip over much of the rest of undergrad but I had a great time. I did well in my classes and had a great social life. I participated in a wide range of campus activities but I was also a member of the black caucus, a black sorority, and black student choir. Of course we always get the question why is there a black caucus, a black sorority, and a black student choir? My flippant answer is because every other caucus, sorority, and choir on campus is white. The real answer goes back to my point about my teenage revelation and the story of Mayor Young. In the black caucus I was able to bond with and help other students that were struggling with fitting in, feeling accepted, and wanting to give up. In my sorority we focused on and won awards for community service, developing reading programs, sponsoring food drives, any other programming that we thought would help our community and people at large. We as a black people come from a strong culture of giving back. These organizations allowed us to do that, to open doors for those behind and beside us. It was almost a requirement. These organizations gave us an opportunity to celebrate our successes with each other, to pool our resources and collectively work for causes that we believed in. The black choir gave me a chance to sing the songs that were true to our experience, that told our story of our hope and determination. Songs that we sung from the depth of our souls to anyone who would listen.

With that in mind, there was another important thing that happened in undergrad. I started receiving letters from one of the black professors on campus. He had singled out (here we go again) a group of black students that he wanted to work with individually. He believed that this group of students would go on to higher levels of education. He set up meetings for us with admissions counselors from other schools, he took us out on special field trips to learn about interviewing and how to network once we graduated. In a school with 50,000 students, he felt a responsibility to a few of the 5,000 black students to let us know that he believed in us. Dr. Redd was invaluable to me over my four years in college and I maintained a great relationship with him for about 15 years after graduating. He exposed me to an understanding of college that I would not otherwise have had. He was a place for me to go when it got tough. He knew exactly what to say to encourage me along the way.

I did go on to graduate school and I'll make this part short. Well, I'll try. I got into grad school with no problem. The same theme emerged. I was the ONLY one, the only black woman in my classes. That doesn't matter though does it? It was graduate school right? I'd worked my tail off since I was moved to the new school in kindergarten. Graduate school is where the path led me. I finished graduate school in two years while working a REAL full-time job. I drove 40 miles one way to school after working a 10 hour day at my job.

• One professor told me that my writing was not up to par. He asked me what special provisions had been made to get me into graduate school because it was obvious to him that I wasn't prepared to be there. It was my last year and I had a 3.9 GPA at the time and I'd been inducted into Who's Who of America's English students. I'd been published first at the age of 8 and had won ACT-SO for writing as a high school freshman and sophomore. But, of course he could be right.
  
• The same semester in a completely different class we were asked to prepare and present a report. Because I was a full-time working person in an office with many resources I was able to put together a great looking presentation. I was so proud of my color graphics that today no one would think anything of. On a break after my presentation the professor told me that he thought that I was "showing off". If you've read the whole series you know that this is a return to an old theme. He told me to stop trying to make the other students look bad and he took a half-point off of my grade as a warning to, "tone it down."

I know these things have to sound ridiculous to you. Some are trying to decide if they can trust my accounts. All I can do is assure you that everyone of these things happened. They happened in the EDUCATION system. Right next to me through everyone of them were white students being EDUCATED right along with me. What were they being taught? What were they learning? Where are they now? Who are they teaching? Who do these people now have the power to hire, fire, assess, and impact? Did some of these kids become social workers, guidance counselors, admissions counselors, or CEOs?

I haven't explored a lot of these issues in a very long time. What I'd like people to take away is that I am a pretty typical black woman in society. All of my black friends, men and women would tell you stories just like mine. When I meet people in the workplace there is an instant connection and a familiarity because I know some of the hurdles they had to go through to achieve what they have achieved.

Now, my friends who were educated and travailed the same crazy educational system that I did have children that are in school reliving some of the same experiences in 2008. The children in my church attend schools where they are the ONLY black child or one of few. They are telling us the exact same stories from our own childhoods. They are hearing the same types of comments from their classmates and from their teachers in 2008.

My story is not unique among my peers. It's the stories that we only tell to each other and from them the lessons that we teach to our children. What do the white families that were on the other side of these stories teach to their children?

FOOTNOTE: My graduate thesis was on a program that I developed called Project HOPE. The title, "The Development of Culturally Relevant, Community-Based Enrichment Programs for African-American Children."