When the bell rings in my school, there isn’t a single white student among the mob of rowdy kids rushing to class. In fact, none of my friends in New York have gone to school with white kids. I find a lot of kids are just used to their own schools, and their own neighborhoods.
I spoke to teenagers — both black and white — around New York City to find out how they imagined life in schools different from their own. On the Upper East Side, one white teen asked “Are there many predominantly black schools?” Her friend added “I don’t think I’ve had much experience because I’ve always gone to school in this area.”
Back in Brooklyn, a black teenager told me he imagined the schools would be mostly same, except there’d be “just all white kids.”
It’s frustrating to see so few students know there are differences. My older sisters and I know. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, I went to seven different schools in Minnesota, Atlanta and New York.
In poorer neighborhoods, the schools were black and broke. When we lived in more middle class and whiter areas, budgets weren’t an issue because parents were able to contribute to things like field trips and computer labs. But having nicer stuff wasn’t everything for me.
I connect more with kids in predominantly black schools. My friend Janelle said she doesn’t think she would like going to a white school.
“I like the soul in the school, and I don’t think we would have the personality,” she said.
At my school now, when there is a school dance kids hype me up and join in. But in middle school, with mostly white kids, I’d be the only one dancing and the other students would just stand there watching me.
But my sister Little told me what she saw as the biggest difference between mostly white and black schools: “For some reason in black schools there is so much more discipline. They are always trying to keep you just in check more.”
Tene Howard is an administrator at The Packer Collegiate Institute. She used to work in predominantly black public schools. “I remember the first time I had to walk into one of the schools and the security guard started to scream at me,” Howard said. “I was like, ‘I work here. I’m a teacher here.’ And because, I think he had assumed I was a student and that blew my mind even more because you should treat students better than anyone else when they walk in the building.”
It was such a shock to everyone, including me, when a teacher yelled in the white schools I attended, but in my black school that’s normal to my classmates.
When I spoke with Carla Shedd, a sociologist at Columbia University who studies race and education, she told me that she thinks it could be the teachers are trying to actually protect students by using harsh discipline.
“There's the old saying, you know, I beat you because I love you.” In other words, Shedd says the teachers might think, “If you learned it from me then maybe you won't go out into the wider world and act in a way that could have fatal consequences.”
Except it doesn’t work. Students don’t respect teachers who yell, so it starts an unrelenting cycle that makes it hard for teachers to teach and students to learn.
My school now, The Young Women’s Leadership School, is a predominantly black school in Brooklyn. Some teachers do sometimes yell about small things. But other teachers are like my seventh-grade English teacher, Ms. Stevens.
“Teachers definitely have connect with the students, especially our students because they’re not going to want to work with somebody they can’t connect to," she said. "So I’ve seen them give teachers a hard time here, not because they’re terrible people, but because they couldn’t connect.”
My schools prepares us for college. We have six AP classes, but last year they had to make cuts, so we went the whole year without a chemistry or art class. My perfect school would have all the classes that I need. There’d be cool teachers (like Ms. Stevens) with organized lesson plans. The kids would feel respected. And, my perfect school would be diverse, with black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and African students who would learn from each other.
But since integration doesn’t seem to be happening, more than anything I just wish me and my friends could go to a school without the burden of worrying about what we don’t have.
Imagine that.
Alexia's story was produced in partnership with Brooklyn Deep.