Yesterday, in the midst of a conversation with my five year old son about his school friends, I asked him to bring me his class picture so that I could connect faces with names. After pointing to a few people, he looked at me and asked which kid I thought was the cutest. I immediately pointed to his picture (of course) and had my three year old respond to the same question to confirm my assessment. My son looked up at me and said, "I'm not the cutest. I don't like the way I look." As the hair stood up on the back of my neck, I asked him what he didn't like about his looks and he looked at me and said, "my skin, my eyes, ... everything." I knew where the conversation was headed, but decided to make him go all the way there. "What's wrong with your skin?" I asked. ""You have the same brown skin as mommy. Don't you like our color?" His response, "Yes..errrr ... no. I want to be lighter." I wanted to scream, cry and throw up in that instant.
Over the next few minutes, I probed gently and listened as my precious, intelligent, cute as a button, five year old black son told me that he is tired of being different. In his words, "I am tired of only having 3 brown people in my class. Everyone else is white." I had noted this fact very early on in the school year and been
grateful that he had
one other black boy in his class. (I have never met the third little girl and truthfully, her racial makeup is not immediately apparent from the school picture.) There is one other black boy in all of the school's four kindergarten classes. He also told me repeatedly that he wanted to have more "brown people" to play with at school.
This conversation was deeply painful for me because I agonized for months over where to place my son for kindergarten, in part for this very reason. I home schooled him for about a year when he was four and only gave up on that idea when it became apparent that I had to return to work for financial reasons. One of my greatest concerns as the parent of two black males is how to balance their educational opportunities between exposure to a significant level of diversity and access to the best academic environment. Generally I have found that the two tend to be somewhat mutually exclusive. The most academically renowned private and charter schools generally tend to have very low diversity. Equally troubling is that even the "best" public schools typically have jaw dropping achievement gaps when you factor in the performance of their black student population as compared to the whole. We chose my son's charter school because the performance among black students on end of grade testing was on par with their white counterparts in most areas. To me that demonstrated a climate of high expectations for ALL students and was an indicator that my son would be held to (and receive support in achieving) a higher academic standard.
Dear Reader, I must admit that my son's confession shook me. I wonder now more than ever- are my husband and I doing the right thing in terms of his education? How can we affirm his "blackness" in a way that allows him to enter a school with zero black authority figures and a 95% white student population with confidence and a sense of belonging? Should I try to find a school with more diversity and sacrifice some of the academic rigor? Should I revisit the home school option and believe God that He will work out the financial details? Should we keep attending an all black church so that he can be exposed to his peers in that environment? How do other black parents deal with this balancing act?
The scary thing about parenthood is that time only moves in one direction and you don't get a second chance to raise your children. Sometimes I look at my son and pray that I don't "mess him up" because I see such great potential in his innocent eyes.
Is this a gamechanger? What would you do? How do you achieve a balance if your children have encountered this issue?
Looking forward to reading some comments on this one...
Posts
