Black children experience racism long before most white children learn about race.
It happened on the yellow bus. I was 9, in 5th grade, and the only Black girl riding to North Side Elementary School. As far as I know, I was the only Black person — child or adult — in the whole school. I felt alone, utterly alone, as a brown-haired, freckle-faced white boy laughed, pointed, and called me the N-word, over and over and over again. I will never forget his white, freckled face contorted in a menacing smile. He was laughing at me.
attended the International School of Brooklyn from 1st to 8th grade. “ISB was an international baccalaureate school,” Hinds explains, “which meant that I was in a French language immersion program for 8 years. Because of that, I became fluent in French at a very young age.” After she graduated from ISB, Hinds attendedin the country, The Dalton School, where she graduated in 2019.
Without some form of accountability, there is no real lesson learned, and learning lessons is the whole point of school. More importantly, Black children bear the weight of white adults’ decisions. “I felt violated after this incident,” Hinds says, “and did not feel like Dalton made any efforts to protect their Black students.”
Racism is entrenched in American schools because too many Americans hijack any attempt to eradicate it. When grown-ups refuse to learn how policies, systems, and laws have been constructed to subjugate Black people and other people of color through time, kids in school have no chance at being free of them.
Educators across racial lines want to teach this truth in validating ways. Shannon Macaulay is a white 9th and 12th grade English teacher at Meadowbrook High School in Chesterfield, Virginia. She says that Meadowbrook has 92.8 percent BIPOC, mostly African American and Latinx, enrollment. Macaulay runs the yearbook and journalism programs in a classroom that reflects the school’s racial demographics.
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