Education

            This last Tuesday, my friend, who I will refer to as Elizabeth, who is bi-racial (Afro-Caribbean and Caucasian) called me and said, “Dude. My back’s really in a lot of pain. You know I’ve had back pain in the past and I’m worried it’s starting again.”

            “Wait. What happened?” I responded.

            “Well… I slipped and fell earlier and my back was in excruciating pain, so I went to the health center and the person I saw there told me there was nothing she could do. She referred me to the hospital. Can you go with me?”

            “Of course love. Do you need to go now? I’m so sorry,” I replied.

This is going to be a short post, I feel as though my energy has been totally spent recently and trying to articulate myself amidst all this just seems so far from what I want to ask of myself.

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive and who had ever been alive. I went into the 130th Street Library at least three or four times a week and I read everything there, I mean, every single book in that library. In some blind and instinctive way, I knew that what was happening in those books was also happening all around me and I was trying to make a connection between the books and the life I saw and the life I lived. I knew I was Black, of course, but I also knew I was smart.

Being a white, upper-middle class student at Bryn Mawr is an interesting experience. Though interesting isn’t quite the right word… When I read about the histories of BMC I am horrified at its not-so-distant past of racism and classism, all the while staying aware that even if I were to attend this school 75 years ago I would be welcomed into the community. I would be affirmed by M. Carey Thomas for my whiteness. I am literally the kind of person who this school is made for. Knowing this, and learning about Bryn Mawr’s history through Black at Bryn Mawr is jarring for me. I learn of oppression at the hands of Bryn Mawr and know that BMC’s history of aggressive exclusion is still echoed today.

where to begin?

i have a lot of feelings and a lot of memories and i just read calamityschild's post and that stirred up a lot of emotions (in case you're reading this, c, it was in a good way, and i love you and your posts v much) and basically i don't really want to talk about this. i don't want to talk about race. i don't want to talk about education. i don't want to talk about my experiences right now.
but here i am. and here we go.

i'm writing this immediately after a conversation with my friends about that ~infamous~ post in the ride share facebook group. i'm thinking about how we have an honor code with basic tenents of healthy competition, trust, mutual respect, individual potential, etc etc. i'm also thinking about how easily that gets misconstrued - today a white girl said, "honor code. be respectful." is response to a Black girl who was confronting her racism. it blows my mind how people will steal your food from the tea pantry but turn right around and say you gotta confront a trump supported/sympathizer respectfully. how!!!

//

As I sit here writing this post, Im sitting with all my roomates, who are black students, in the BCC. The BCC stands for the Black Cultural Center, which is basically a house dedicated to Professor Ira Reid, Haverford's first black professor. Of all the spaces I've lived in, including boarding school dorms, this has been the most comforting to me. It honestly feels like home. 

After class today, I've been thinking a lot about the disconnect between multiculturalism as an educational movement and an actual acknowledgment/discussion of structural racism (like we were describing for our theoretical fifth graders). Multiculturalism assumes that restructering our curriculums to include multiple narratives is enough to enlighten students - expanding your syllabus from Shakespeare to Shakespeare AND Alice Walker; teaching not just Europe in "world history" but Africa, Asia, and (pre-contact) America as well. And while multiculturism makes some strides, allowing students of color to see themselves in these narratives, it doesn't name the structures at work that excluded them in the first place.

For some context: I went to elementary school at a K-8, "alternative" public school. This meant that some classes (1/2, 3/4) were combined grades, and some had two head teachers in the classroom (my 6th grade class was taught by a married couple). As 7th and 8th graders, we had "Humanities" class in place of History & English, and our curricula alternated between "Justice and Dissent" and something related to questioning "American identity" and race in the United States. There's a lot to say about the way race functioned in my elementary school education, some of which I've already mentioned in class (discipline and the beginning of tracking, as well as the masking of systematic and institutionalized racism behind socially conscious curricula, for example).

When I think about my education, the first thing that comes to my mind is never race. Race is actually never the first thing I think about when I think about my identity anyway, but in particular when thinking about education I focus most on what posed the biggest problem for my peers and teachers. My selective mutism (they didn't see race, after all). I did not talk in school. Since kindergarden, from the moment I stepped on the bus in the morning to the moment I stepped off in in the afternoon, I did not communicate verbally with anyone. This 'social phobia' that I (have?/had?) have caused a lot of problems for me academically and socially, but I had no support from my parents or my teachers. My parents don't believe in mental illnesses, so I didn't get treatment when I should've.