I don’t recall what provoked me, well into adulthood, to ask my parents what the hardest part of their more than 50-year journey together had been. It was an impromptu inquiry spurred by nothing in particular, but I remember how astonished I was by their answer. “Choosing schools for our Black children,” they said, with no hesitation and in full agreement, as though they had considered and resolved this question long before I asked.
By the time I arrived in the 1980s, the American schooling landscape was still a rocky racial terrain of post-segregation, and lagged far behind the fair and equal education promised by 1954’s Brown v Board of Educationdecision. My parents are fortunate and had the means to opt in to private schools, but they decided that independent schools were responsible solely for the academic preparation of their children. They would be the ones to supplement the cultural curriculum about Black life and heritage that was also required for their daughters’ development.
Black parents have never gotten off easy when it comes to school choice, but the issue was reignited last month when the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones laid bare her family’s regrets in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. In a remarkable display of vulnerability, Hannah-Jones followed up on her and her husband’s 2016 decision to place their daughter, then just six years old, into a predominantly Black, low-income, underperforming school in New York City. The couple’s decision was largely based on the hope that sending their high-aptitude upper-middle-class kindergartener to an underresourced school would help balance the scale of racial inequality. A decade later, the gamble, by the family’s own estimation, had not paid off.
Like her classmates, Hannah-Jones’s daughter suffered from an overburdened staff and fundamental gaps in her K-8 curriculum. Those issues set her behind considerably, and by high school, she struggled to pass comprehensive state exams. Ultimately, the Hannah-Joneses were sobered by the reality that individual choices by one privileged Black family don’t fix systemic issues.
But beyond their goal of helping fix New York City’s failed public school desegregation efforts, Hannah-Jones and her husband also made their decision based on what they thought their daughter would be taught culturally. They feared that she wouldn’t get exposure to Black life and other Black children if she were sent to majority white schools. It’s a consideration many Black parents weigh: from where will their children’s cultural curriculum of Blackness, Black life, Black history and Black community be sourced?
Black parents, especially mothers, ardently seek out and create the proverbial village that raises a child. Even in my Kentucky community’s relatively small Black population growing up, my mother found every African dance class, science fair, children’s theater, summer camp (recognizing a void, she founded her own and ran it for over a decade), music lesson, Saturday math school, pediatrician, dentist and teen leadership club that centered Black children and was led by other Black parents, educators, coaches and volunteers in our community.
Dozens more of my playmates were signed up for Black church camps, children’s choirs, field trips, talent shows, library story hours, Girl Scout troops and youth recreation leagues at the Black YMCA. Every holiday season they were driven across town by moms determined to mail out Black holiday photos in search of the lone shopping mall with a Black Santa Claus. Black mothers, almost always conspiring in consultation with each other, mapped out entire geographies for children they knew would otherwise be emotionally defeated by the unyielding daily racism of white schools.
Even the most well-resourced Black parents continue to approach majority-white schools with skepticism about the academic advantages their children might gain alongside the cultural harms they will inevitably suffer. Still, as Black parents increasingly risk losing their liberty to spare their children from failing schools, the national discourse on the racial achievement gap in education harps on a narrative that Black parents are not doing enough for their children’s futures.
In reality, majority-white schools are doing far too little. Even in high-achieving white schools, Black students still fare the worst. Research on white teachers reveals an alarming deficit in their expectations for Black student success, while Black students assigned to Black teachers in grades K-3 have improved reading and math scores, are 9% more likely to graduate high school, and 13% more likely to attend college. When majority-white schools fail to provide the culturally informed learning that could address the racial gap in these outcomes, it’s Black parents who are tasked with making up the difference both academically and beyond the classroom. In the Hannah-Joneses’ school, the resource deficit that burdened its majority Black educators was obvious. But the highly consequential cultural deficit Black students experience in even the most resourced majority-white schools is also a costly setback.
Thousands of Black parents read the Hannah-Jones essay and empathized. The illusion of a safe racial choice between “good” or “bad” schools is exactly what WEB Du Bois cautioned against more than 90 years ago. He wrote that “[T]heoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad.” Irrelevant of choice, the fair and equal education promised to Black children still lingers out of reach for millions. But their parents should be acknowledged – not blamed – for providing the cultural education their children deserve.
