Title: A Stranger in Two Worlds: Moving from Segregated to Integrated Schools Proved to Be a Mixed Blessing
Abstract: In 1960 my world changed radically when, as a 2nd grader at P.S. 121 in East Harlem, I learned that I was among a group of students who would help fulfill the integration mandate of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. My principal and teacher announced that from then on my largely African-American and Latino classmates and I would be riding the bus to P.S. 183 in Yorkville, a predominantly white community on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My inaugural day at P.S. 183 included indignities like having my hair rubbed by one of my new classmates, a white girl who asked how I managed to comb it. I was also informed that while my academic performance had placed me in the highest track at my East Harlem school, I would be educated with the average kids at P.S. 183. My new teachers believed that it would be harder for me to keep up with the privileged students at my new school. One-Way Integration Though the goal of the busing program was to integrate P.S. 183, the students there remained predominantly white and from high-income families. Thus I had to adjust to a whole new set of realities. On a regular basis I was forced to battle my white teachers' and classmates' low expectations and negative perceptions about blacks and Latinos. Meanwhile, as one of the relatively few minority faces in the classroom, I was routinely called on to serve as the white person's lens on the Negro experience. Likewise, attending school in a well-to-do community aggravated my sense of my own poverty and forced me to engage in multiple, mostly futile attempts to mask it. Each September I dreaded writing about my summer vacations and cringed when we were asked if our parents might visit the class and talk about their careers and educational experiences. To students like me, integration came to mean sending a small phalanx of mostly poor black and Latino children to attend schools in white neighborhoods. I never took the opportunity to learn what integration meant to my white classmates and teachers, but it certainly did not mean asking any of them to take my place at P.S. 121 in East Harlem. Moreover, none of us, including teachers and parents from the sending and receiving schools, was given much preparation. My parents literally prayed that they were doing the right thing. Some of my white teachers and classmates shared their prayers, while others barely hid their discomfort or disdain. If life as a disadvantaged minority student in an essentially white school was complicated, coming home provided little respite. Time spent away from my East Harlem neighborhood was time lost in the complex negotiations required to maintain one's social status--that is, being considered someone who could hold his own in sports, street games, adolescent verbal jockeying, and the occasional physical confrontation. Until my freshman year of high school, I attended integrated schools where I shouldered the dual burdens of learning a new culture while keeping up my skills in the neighborhood. Don't get me wrong; the experience had a tremendous upside. Going to school outside of Harlem exposed me to the successful actors, authors, scientists, diplomats, and artists who were the parents of my white classmates; I was often invited to spend weekends at their homes. We were also taken on trips to nearby museums and universities. And I should mention that I was promoted to the highest track for 3rd grade and thereafter. Nonetheless, by the time I reached Stuyvesant High School, I was tired of the effort and stress involved in maintaining dual citizenship. I soon reached a mutual agreement with my guidance counselor at Stuyvesant that I would be better off at Brandeis, a comprehensive neighborhood high school located on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Despite its name, Brandeis served a predominantly poor and working-class black and Latino population (at that time schools were named without paying much attention to the culture and history of the surrounding community). …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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