Opinion: We Don’t Have to Choose Between Racial Justice and Academic Excellence
By Leslie-Bernard Joseph
I lived in the gaps and broken promises that my beloved, rich but segregated New York City has to offer. But when I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s vulnerable and piercing essay this weekend describing the educational, ethical, and emotional obstacle course she maneuvered for her daughter’s education, my heart dropped into my stomach, Simone Biles style, and stuck the landing with a hard swallow. I don’t know Nikole or her daughter, Najya Hannah-Jones, but I know the choices they describe.
And yet I cannot shake the heartbreaking but somehow comforting feeling: parents like my mom, the Hannah-Jones family, and others like them need not navigate these impossible choices anymore.
My early educational experiences sent a clear message to me: opportunity did not live in neighborhoods like mine. I was raised in Jamaica, Queens, in a single-parent household. My mother had me zig-zagging our segregated school district in search of the best schools. I was in my third public school by third grade. Early on, I benefited from gifted and talented programs in my predominantly Black district. But when it came time for middle school, it took two city buses and a Jamaica Avenue transfer to get to school, having commuted out of district to predominantly white and Asian Bayside, Queens. Even as a child, I was old enough to understand the message behind my educational odyssey: opportunity does not live here.
Our city’s broken high school admissions process was no help either. Shut out of “specialized” high schools, I won acceptances to two of the nation’s top boarding schools through Prep for Prep. The diversity of my schools, the privileged “luck,” left me with the values and commitment to kids like me and the communities I came from. So I became a New York City public school teacher.