Thoughts on My Imperial Education: A Disquisition in Emotions and Blood
[Content Warning: This piece of writing expounds on the horrors of the Middle Passage & Chattel Slavery, and discusses modern American Viral Lynchings & Mass Incarceration, the Genocide of the Native Peoples of the Western Hemisphere, Sexual Assault & Predation of Minors, Suicide & Suicidal Ideation, Underage Alcohol & Drug Use, Extreme Poverty & Starvation, and the continuing legacy of Traumatization & Tokenization of Black & otherwise Marginalized Students at the College Preparatory School in Oakland, California — a legacy which its writer, Aliko Carter (Class of 2007), finds distressing and utterly indefensible.
A primer for this disquisition, It’s Past Time We Dismantled the Ivory Tower, lives on my Patreon. I highly suggest reading it before taking on this much more expansive piece of work. Ultimately, what’s written below is the real story of a boy full of natural ebullience and long-stored pain, and the nuanced musing of a man who cannot help but to openly favor truth and equity over hypocrisy and rank cowardice. From time to time, I also endeavor to make my readers chuckle (but not about the aforementioned heavy subject matter, of course).
Here’s the TL;DR: I and many other alumni have lost all trust and confidence in the leadership of the current College Prep administration. I am calling for the Head of School, Monique DeVane, and the Dean of Students, Steve Chabon, to resign from their positions by the end of the 2021 academic year, so we can finally begin the real work of creating a safer learning environment for current and future Black students, students of color, students from poor & working-class families, non-male students, queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming students, students with disabilities, and students born outside the U.S. Each one of them is as full of dynamism and potential as I was back in the day.]
***
As we envision a near future defined by comprehensive liberation for the world’s subjugated peoples, I’d like to begin this assortment of personal anecdotes and long-marinating ideas crafted in American-English prose with a respectful acknowledgement of all the Black bodies that have been controlled from without to fuel the growth of capitalist economies, and those Black bodies whose destruction is routinely erased or rationalized by the perpetrators and accomplices of all-too-common acts of heinous human-on-human violence.
Though the most privileged subjects of capitalist empire are conditioned to believe in our inherent merit, capitalism is a system of societal construction whose greed-based ideologies can be extricated from white supremacy only in poorly-conceived theory, supported by massive and self-retrenching cognitive dissonance.
Today and every day, I recognize the many millions of tortured, malnourished, and diseased brown-skinned bodies tossed into the ocean during the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade, and the souls which inhabited them. I recognize the survivors of this journey, who passed down a foundational trauma, who toiled in bondage and squalor separated by a cosmic distance from everything they knew and loved until they took their final earthly breaths, and for whom my existence is an incalculable affirmation.
Further, I recognize the continuing legacy of American slavery in the form of the massive carceral state, as well as the purpose of viral lynchings in reifying the dominance of white supremacy in the United States today. I observe that our imperial march of technological progress has not in fact been accompanied by a corresponding moral evolution of individual outcomes. My spirit cries out for every Black & Brown person held inside cages for “non-violent offenses.” I hold space in my still-beating heart for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, Erik Salgado, Sean Monterrosa, dozens of other Black & Brown folks whose names I recite regularly in my head and in my writing, and thousands more who’ve been murdered without protest — countless worlds unto themselves, whose ongoing anonymity is injustice at its most insidious.
In the spirit of shared indigineity, I also acknowledge the rightful residents of the land from which I write, currently known popularly as Berkeley, California, United States of America: the humans of the Chochenyo-speaking Huichin Ohlone tribe. The stewards of the stupendous natural wonders of this place I’m fortunate to call my home lived in peace with the stately coast redwoods for dozens of generations before an invasion of blue gum eucalyptus — and the Europeans who introduced these pungent, proliferous fire hazards from another conquered realm once tended by aboriginal humans — transformed the landscape forever. I make room in the crowded halls of my soulspace for the many millions of victims of the ongoing Western Hemisphere Genocide, perpetrated in accordance with the myriad unsophisticated justifications for empire.
We honor them. And they honor us in turn, as we live on to face our yet unvanquished foe, together.
***
I often feel as though I was born on the precipice of insanity, and that ever since, I’ve been nudged forward along a tightrope strung over the abyss by the frigid palm of a transparent phantom.
While I no longer utilize the term “insane” to describe individual human beings, I find the concept of sanity particularly useful in my personal idea formation. I have often felt abnormal, because I can only conclude that the natural culmination of global capitalism is the destruction of the biosphere’s ability to support human civilization. It has been suggested to me through every seemingly credible medium that innovations directed by capital markets, and the governments which enable them, can and will solve this rapidly encroaching dilemma.
Deep breaths. Take it slow. Yeah, that’s good. The invisible hand on your back can’t spook you. One foot in front of the other.
Once upon a time, my mother was driving me to Kindergarten and I noticed a Black man standing on the median of an intersection with a makeshift sign, waiting patiently for passers-by to show him some generosity. It was cold out, so it must have been late fall or winter. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time I’d seen a houseless person asking for money, food, or assistance, but on this occasion I distinctly remember feeling confusion about why he had to do that. Certainly if I had a house, so could this person, right? That little boy I used to be simply knew that poverty was unnecessary. In the quarter-century that has passed since then, this elemental knowledge has remained seared in my brain.
I was late to school that day. My mom and I stopped at Target to buy that man a sleeping bag. He was incredibly grateful; our sincere back-and-forth held up traffic in the turning lane for more than a moment.
But even a five-year-old knows a sleeping bag is not the same thing as four secure walls and a roof. Though I was aware that Mom and I had done a good thing, the man maintained his post on San Pablo Avenue for quite some time afterward, holding up his humble cardboard message. Our little Subaru passed him again and again and again. Observing his continued presence there left me unsettled.
Though there are fewer than eight billion humans alive today, and we produce enough food for ten billion humans to fill their bellies every day of the year, two billion experience sustained periods of hunger due to poverty. Per The Divide, nearly 4.3 billion live on less than $5 a day. According to the United Nations, nearly 700 million humans are currently starving.
Keep your head up Aliko. Keep your fucking balance. If you lose it, you might be falling for the rest of your life. Don’t. Look. Down.
When that inquisitive Kindergartener asked his mother, “Why aren’t we white?” I’m sure for her it felt sudden. I don’t think she was ready, though I have no doubt she knew the subject would come up eventually. By that point I was already dealing consciously with tough concepts, such as not having my father around like the rest of my classmates. I remember asking about whiteness from a space of hurt more than pure curiosity. Just as I knew poverty was unnecessary, I also understood that I and my fellow brown-faced, kinky-haired little friends were different, that we were worse somehow.
Try as I might, I can’t recall what she said in response. Perhaps it’s for the best, as my discomfort wasn’t permanently abated by her answer. If she had that ability, well, that would’ve made her some sort of superhuman.
By the time I was five my mental, physical, and emotional indoctrination into the rules and regulations of American-style white supremacy under the auspices of free-market capitalism was well underway. But 20 years later, after I had made my way through a series of predominantly white educational institutions — schools deemed a part of the “ivory tower” as much for their affluence as for their reputations of academic rigor — this indoctrination hadn’t stuck.
Beyond my brain’s chronic struggles with permitting my attention and skillset to be directed toward a deliverable for the appropriate period of time as to… deliver, it felt truly insane to watch the carceral state vacuum up humans who looked like me while I performed white-collar labor for a corporation and saved my pennies to get on a plane and fly somewhere far away, only to come back after ten days and sit down at my desk with my lips twisted into a smile.
But the rules have always been clear. Chief among them is that I must take responsibility for myself. If the only way to succeed as a human is to participate in capitalism with enthusiasm and vigor (and that’s still no guarantee of success, for a Black man or anyone else), but I am so fundamentally opposed to participation that I routinely sabotage my own advancement in ways great and small, then I should surely seek treatment for that.
And I have.
I’ve been navigating various psychotherapy situations for most of my adult life, teaching myself ways to survive my mind’s assaults on the operations of my body and spirit, and spending years at a time exploring pharmacological solutions. Though I remain a layperson psychologist, I have achieved a PhD in my own emotionality. The insights and contexts I glean from this self-examination help me reframe my perceptions of the world toward ideation designed for the humans to do better, to be better. I learn every day.
Though loneliness and confusion were a part of my life before high school, I began consciously leaning into emotional intelligence as a coping tool for these maladies following my introduction to the ivory tower. My parochial K-8 school, Zion Lutheran (which was forced to close during the fallout from the now quaint-seeming Great Recession), featured a diverse student body — a representative slice of the East Bay’s middle-class in the ‘90s. A variable assortment of white Lutheran women directed my learning. Little Black me was certainly not immune to the many problematic elements of white Protestant educational environments, but all of my best friends from Zion were Black or otherwise melanated. Most of them matriculated into the secondary schools run by the Oakland Diocese; a few of us had parents who felt the need to seek alternatives.
The Catholic high schools were significantly more expensive than Zion, and the Diocese wasn’t exactly known for generous financial-aid packages. Though she was a hard-working public-health professional with a doctorate of her own, my mom, who attended schools run by the Oakland Unified School District in the ‘60s and ‘70s, wouldn’t be able to swing that. Ever the resourceful parent, she discovered A Better Chance (ABC), a national not-for-profit organization that funnels kids from diverse, marginalized backgrounds into the kinds of high schools I’d never imagined existed before entering eighth grade.
I spent much of my final year at Zion taking standardized exams (which ABC facilitated and funded), sending out applications, and leaving class early dressed in conspicuously formal attire to interview and take student-led tours at some of the most prestigious independent academic institutions for young people in the San Francisco Bay Area. After consulting Mom about the pros and cons of each school that accepted me, including of course how much financial aid they had offered me to attend, I chose to enroll at the College Preparatory School. (Since a 21st-century marketing shakeup the school has exclusively used the shorthand “College Prep” in promotional materials. In the interests of brevity, nostalgia, and general pettiness, going forward I shall refer to the school as “CPS,” as it was regrettably known while I was a student there.)
Nestled into a valley in the Oakland hills surrounded by eucalyptus and multi-million dollar homes, CPS is both as aesthetically beautiful and as socioeconomically elite as you’d imagine. Though the highest points of Northern California’s Coast Range only rarely receive light dustings of snow, the school’s grounds evoke images of an upscale ski lodge. The outdoor pathways of its campus are lined with redwoods, immaculate landscaping, and an assortment of buildings featuring sloping roofs and rustic wood siding. The gym, auditorium, library, and various academic buildings feature plaques dedicated to wealthy donors and former school administrators. Most of the doors I regularly traveled through open directly to the temperate NorCal air outside.
Founded by career-teachers Mary Harley Jenks (who served as the first Head of School) and Ruth Willis, CPS opened in 1960 at a modest site not far from its current location. The school places a strong emphasis on its history of promoting a deep learning environment, praises the dynamism of its past-and-present students, and fancies its legacy as progressive and meritocratic; its motto is mens conscia recti (which translates to “Minds Conscious of What Is Right,” for those who weren’t fortunate enough to spend their high school years learning Latin like some of my friends from the Class of ‘07).
Following his retirement, CPS’s longest-tenured former Head, Robert Baldwin — who’s been lionized by the school for spearheading its move to the hilly eucalyptus-redwood paradise described above, among other achievements — published a book titled Becoming a Real School, 1960–1990: The Story of the College Preparatory School. When I was living in New York after completing undergraduate school, I received a copy of the “Anniversary Edition” of the book at a CPS alumni event in Manhattan from its current Head, Monique DeVane. To this day, the glossy paperback is in pristine condition, as I never attempted to even skim it. (The only reason I still have it is because it’s worth zero dollars at the used bookstore and worth even less than that in the donation bin, and I strongly believe one should never throw away a book.)
Even as a young adult, I wasn’t one for wasting my time with saccharine histories or obvious self-serving propaganda. However, I’m privy to a few gems that I’m sure didn’t make it into Baldwin’s 275-page volume. Some time before I graduated from CPS I recall learning from a woman faculty member I respected that Baldwin perpetuated a gender gap in salaries for faculty and staff while he directed the school’s expansion in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It always bears noting that both our capitalist economy and our civil society are as entrenched in heteropatriarchy as they are in white supremacy. Though the patriarchy goes back much farther than Eurocentric megalomania, they began morphing into conjoined-twin philosophies long before the present day. Even an institution founded by two white women couldn’t avoid being strong-manned into adherence with the essential tenets of our inequitable systems.
By the time I matriculated, CPS had grown to about 85 students per class. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have attended high school with kids from all sorts of backgrounds. Depending on the year, roughly 60–65 percent of the student body was white, with a little under half of those identifying as Ashkenazi Jewish. Students identifying as Asian and/or Pacific Islander made up about 25-30 percent of the student body; the largest share of these kids were divided roughly equally between East Asians and South Asians, with a smaller but significant number of Filipinos. MENA (Middle Eastern or North African) students were neither numerous nor nonexistent. Less than ten percent of the student body was split between Black and Latinx students hailing from a rich assortment of ethnicities. Black students were as likely to be the children of West African or East African immigrants as they were to be the children of Americans descended from West Africans held as chattel in the United States or the Anglophone Caribbean (or both in my case). Though California’s history and current demographics feature heavy ties to Mexico, lands as disparate as Puerto Rico and Honduras were claimed by students within my various friend groups.
Mixed-race students were also represented; as is the case with America at-large, most students with parents from different races had one white parent. In keeping with the United States’ long history of “one-drop” sentimentality, during my time students with one white parent and one melanated parent were considered part of the melanated group on a de facto basis by students generally, e.g. mixed students with one Black parent were Black, though the school’s racial quotas were self-reported, and I have no doubt “mixed” was chosen quite frequently. Among other benefits, embracing mixed-race families allowed CPS to tout its diversity while designing its student body to maintain comfort in its relationships with parents. In recent years as the browning of America has become a more popular liberal talking point, the school has made its marketing of mixed students more prominent.
Aside from the Latinx students who owned and honored their legacies of indigineity, I cannot recall attending classes with any students who identified as Native, nor were there noticeable numbers of Afro-Latinx students or Haitians (though I can’t profess to have had strong relationships with all of the many hundreds of students I shared the space with). The vast majority of students were natural-born American citizens, but a few had immigrated with their parents as younger children from Iran, Ukraine, China, and other countries. The Class of ‘07 even had a Chinese exchange student join us during our final two years. He was eventually elected to represent us on the Student Council.
While I was there, CPS prided itself on offering grants to about 30 percent of students, most of whom were heavily subsidized, including myself. Though full yearly tuition ran about $25,000 at the time of my graduation (and has spiked well north of forty grand in 2021), a grant facilitated by a family fund connected to the school ensured that my single mom never came out of pocket for more than $1,800, not counting the extraneous costs of non-academic activities like equipment for team sports, the school’s annual inter-semester Snow Trip (more on this later), and Intraterm, a weeklong springtime event wherein students had the opportunity to take artistic, obscure, or even wholly made-up classes.
(Intraterm is the kind of program that exemplifies the ivory tower’s stupendous obliviousness to how it is perceived by the outside world. As a freshman I learned a ton of new information about the Reagan-Era zeitgeist during an Intraterm class aptly titled Eighties Teen Movies. A couple years later I joined a class where we just watched and discussed The Simpsons all morning. And that doesn’t even do the incredible superficiality of this week justice. The most highly coveted Intraterm classes were just trips to cool places put into a “learning” context. When I was a senior, my friend and I tried to convince a fun-loving science teacher to sponsor our idea to embark on an educational tour of SoCal’s historic amusement parks. No dice. In hindsight we dodged a bullet: it turns out that teacher, who would occasionally treat his classes to a show by drawing words and designs on our lab tables with a slow-burning chemical and then lighting them on fire, is also an alleged serial sexual predator of underage girls. More on this later.)
The financial-aid kids were a community unto our own. Though a notable number of white students came from under-resourced families, the Venn diagram of students of color and students receiving financial aid often felt like a circle inside of a circle. While my mom’s professional career enabled her to send me to private schools from Kindergarten, some of these students came from middle schools run by Oakland Unified. In some ways, their acclimations to CPS were more difficult than my own. In addition to the massive increase in academic rigor, the wealth displayed in this new place was often equally jarring and intoxicating. Most of us, like most fourteen-year-old kids, only wanted to belong. Even though many (not all) of the monied students were great kids and great classmates, we were constantly faced with implicit and explicit examples of how we didn’t quite fit in. But we fit with each other. There were a few other ABC kids in my class, who I got to know better when the organization held its orientation and check-ins. I came to value these events very much, as they emphasized that I was far from alone. ABC also gave my mom a community of parents she could lean on.
Though I could make the uphill walk to CPS from the house that has been in my family since 1967 in about 15 minutes, often I felt like I was traveling to another planet. I despised walking to school, but my mom’s job was in the opposite direction, and she was often old-school in her parenting methods. To her my walking to school was a character-building exercise. Occasionally, I’d be picked up by a student who was getting dropped off by their parents or driving their own car, but often I would see students drive past as the sweat trickled down my back owing to the weight of my backpack. (Mom suggested a rolling backpack. That was a “Hell No” from me.) When I arrived at school I’d often see the Audis and Beamers that had passed me sitting in the parking lot. It didn’t feel good.
Making matters worse, the walking vs. driving dilemma was a double-edged sword. For the first time, I was embarrassed of my mom’s car, a white 1990 Volvo sedan with fleece seat-covers — the kind of car some of the upperclassmen drove as hand-me-downs after their parents had long-since upgraded. Mom could sense my embarrassment, and was insulted by it. However, by the time I was a junior, she had not only (mostly) acquiesced to my desire to be driven to school, she had also upgraded to a hunter-green Volvo sedan from 1995 — a more modern-looking vehicle (complete with leather seats), with which I was more comfortable being associated. These days I’m thankful for many of my mother’s lessons, not least of which was to never buy a new car off the lot, unless I had a desire to throw my money away.
As I continued my path of acclimation to the ivory tower, the distance between Mom and me became more and more tangible. At the time she could not understand my code-switching, a natural byproduct of any well-acculturated child’s development, and of my ease with American English. The first time she heard me speak like I did at school she was unnerved, and let me know it. That didn’t feel good either. But she didn’t like what she saw CPS doing to her son. Though a little compassion would’ve been greatly appreciated, I can’t blame her for being worried for me. These days, she occasionally opines that perhaps it would have been better for me to attend Oakland Technical High School, the public school closest to our house.
While I disagree, owing to the many great friendships I formed at CPS that continue to this day, as well as the academic knowledge and opportunities afforded to me during that time and afterward, I cannot say CPS was a safe place for me to learn, grow, and be myself. As time went on, I unconsciously designed one mask to wear at school, and another to wear at home. I often felt like I didn’t have a space that was my own. I was most comfortable during the occasions I’d get together with my Black friends from Zion, during my after-school Oakland Youth Chorus (OYC) practices filled with other Black kids from CPS and different schools, and during my National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) UC Berkeley junior chapter meetings, where I developed friendships and was mentored by some of the only Black engineering grad students that Cal had to offer. If you haven’t noticed, there’s a theme here.
The notion of “Blackness” is a fickle thing. Americans of all races sport opinions masked as definitions. Some folks are still married to the one-drop rule. Others openly question the Blackness of Black folks who don’t “look” Black. For others, Blackness is antithetical to being a good student, enjoying “nerdy” media, or having money. Even in 2021, the types of clothes someone wears, how they speak, what neighborhood they’re from, and who their friends are can color how Blackly they’re perceived in various environments. Can’t dance? Can’t ball? Flat butt? Penis smaller than a bottle of Axe body spray? In many spaces, these are demerits on your Black Card. Even presentations of masculinity or femininity that don’t match up with notions of gender or assigned sex can elicit questions. As a kid, I was often confronted with the frustrating belief that you’re not really Black if you don’t like hip-hop.
Unlike many of the white male students with whom I shared space at CPS, I was not a big hip-hop fan in high school. My mother despised the misogynist and violent lyrics she heard, and especially the use of the n-word. To this day, so do I. (I’ve come to understand hip-hop as being much more dynamic than these very real qualities inherent in some of its examples can make the genre seem. For that, I am thankful.) But I do consider myself a musically inclined person. Mom indoctrinated me into the Black musical tradition by osmosis from an early age. During her weekend cleaning binges she’d fill our house with the luscious sounds of Sarah Vaughn and Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner, Bob Marley and Miriam Makeba. I loved those days.
Despite my obvious phenotypical ties to Africa, by the time I entered high school I had become used to the occasional questioning of my Blackness from Black children outside of the Zion Lutheran environment. Among other keen observations, I was told I “talked white,” and that I was an “oreo” (Black on the out… eh, it’s obvious). These kids had never seen me naturally slide into the Southern-inflected Black Cali drawl I used around my mom’s extended family, because they weren’t my family, and I didn’t do it consciously. No one defined code-switching to me until I took Linguistics at CPS as a senior. Most of my Black friends at Zion sounded like me, so I chalked it up to socio-economic differences and went on with my life.
While being raised by a single mother was a gold star on my Black Card for the folks who placed importance on such things, I was deeply damaged by my father’s relative absence in my childhood. Socially, this damage manifested in me a need to be liked and accepted by everyone. During elementary school it was not uncommon for me to cry when I perceived rejection. “For a boy,” I cried a lot. I cried when I was sad or lonely, and when my mom yelled at me, and when I was taunted at school (mostly for being the shortest boy in my class). I’d blame my regular shows of emotion on my late-June birthday, but I’ve never put much sincere stock in astrology. Sensitivity was just a part of who I was. However, as my tweens gave way to my teens I began to see that part of me as a flaw, as something to be cut out.
In seventh grade I made my first uncomfortable strides into conscious emotional regulation. I’d picked up a consistent bully, an eighth-grade boy with a Black dad and a white mom who was new to school and acted like he owned the place. He was a pretty boy; though his skin wasn’t much lighter than mine, he had green eyes, styled his short brown curls with some sort of gel, and accessorized his school uniform with a gold chain (no crucifix). Upon his arrival, the rest of us quickly realized he was the best basketball player at the school. And infamously, he was already sexually active. I’m sure today that he was masking his own insecurities by targeting me, but he was such a little asshole.
One day during recess I was playing hoops with him and a group of other kids on the blacktop, and he decided to just lay into me with taunts and jabs. (It would’ve been pretty hard to get away with physical bullying at Zion, but I’m sure his bark was worse than his bite anyway.) Before long, hot tears began to stream down my face, and I ran away from the court. His girlfriend, also a year above me, came up to me with sympathy and compassion in her eyes. She put her arm around me and told me I had to stop crying all the time. Her insinuation was that the bullying would never stop if I showed weakness, and even though she was dating my bully, I listened to her. I resolved to be strong, and to never cry again.
Around that time I also began dealing with juvenile questions and declarations about my sexuality, which I internalized, along with an unhealthy dose of passive queerphobia. (This queerphobia later contributed to my stoic reactions on the occasions CPS students would bravely come out as gay or trans at school.) That I could like both boys and girls was not something my little tween mind could comprehend, nor was the idea of pansexuality anywhere on my radar. Besides, I was certain that you couldn’t tell someone’s sexuality by the way they talked any more than you could determine their race. Though I was deeply uncomfortable with the suggestion that my sexuality was divergent — a discomfort that would morph into a repressive denial only fully unpacked after many years, a fateful psilocybin mushroom trip, and two months in an intensive outpatient program — I knew that my Blackness wasn’t tied to anyone’s perceptions of my behavior. Though I find the concept ridiculous today, as a kid I faced the tacit linking of Blackness to heterosexuality in many social environments, infecting my already fragile belief in myself, and my understanding of how to be accepted as Black man.
My experience with definitions of Blackness was somewhat different at CPS. There, no one could simply deny my Blackness. That would be both illogical and uncouth. But they could count me as an exception rather than the rule. (And they could, of course, question my sexuality, implicitly and explicitly, to my face and behind my back.) I was constantly faced with examples of Black culture and art flowing down into my affluent white environment to be displayed in careless, disrespectful ways. Some students appropriated Blackness for “cool points,” twisting their hair into locks with gels and chemicals, donning styles popular in the ‘hood, and reciting skits performed by Black comedians with pride — completely missing the significance of these cultural expressions. (Locks were only dreadful once white folks deemed them so; Black fashions have always been a way to carve out distance from the oppressive demands of white America; Black comedians write their jokes as much to comment on the inequitable eccentricities of whiteness as to make Black people laugh.)
In one egregious example of cultural appropriation, as a junior I had to confront a white classmate to tell him he needed to change the name of his fantasy sports team. I had heard what he’d done through the grapevine, as I’d not been invited to join the fantasy league myself. When I learned that he’d named his team after the Jay Z song “Nigga Jigga,” I was properly incensed. As if this made his actions acceptable, the student informed me he’d been given the nickname “Nigga Jigga” by a Black classmate in middle school. I told him the truth: I didn’t care at all about who he knew or who gave him permission. I’m not sure he understood the intensity of my demand, and I know he didn’t understand its necessity, but mercifully he did change the name without further confrontation. I didn’t take my concerns to CPS faculty or the administration, as that would’ve accomplished nothing, and I was still concerned with fitting in at school. But this completely oblivious case of casual racism reinforced my belief that I did not fit in, and perhaps never would.
Making matters more complicated, I began developing stronger relationships with my dad and my two siblings from his first marriage during this time. While I was raised as an only child, I had always wanted to have stronger relationships with my sister (19 years older) and brother (15). I longed for their approval, and was over the moon whenever I got to hang out with them. But as my brother was a member of Souls of Mischief — an underground rap group associated with the Hieroglyphics crew which had made its name out of East Oakland in the early ‘90s — some of my white classmates wanted to know him too.
As I desired their approval, by the time Adam Carter first came to one of my recitals with the CPS Advanced Vocal Ensemble, it was common knowledge that I was the little brother of A-Plus from the Souls of Mischief. Ever as cool as the other side of the pillow, my brother lit a cigarette outside the auditorium during intermission, during which time he was accosted by a number of white and white-passing students who wanted to talk to him and share their own hip-hop aspirations. While Adam was certainly aware of the density of the ivory tower, he had never been a part of it. Seeing these kids surround him — and knowing he surely didn’t actually want to entertain their advances (he was begrudgingly gracious) — tapped into some of my deepest insecurities as well as my most fiery emotionality.
Through a mix of pain, limited interest in rap, and immature logic, I had distanced myself from Adam’s music in an effort forge a more unique relationship with him than the ones he had with his fans. These white boys could not possibly understand what it meant for me to have my brother come see me sing, and insultingly, they knew more about his career than I did. But it was I who caused the throng in the first place, by outing my brother as a popular rapper long before he ever visited my campus. It was another damaging episode I internalized, and those preening teens never knew.
I know all these dreadlock-wearing, jeans-sagging, Chappelle-quoting, hip-hop-loving kids just wanted to be cool; and being Black is definitely cool — until you get stopped by the police, arrested, and held for questioning, as happened to the only other Black boy in my class when we were juniors. This student, who was and remains brilliant, and whose family was much more well-resourced than my own, was told he “fit the description” of someone the cops were looking for, because of course he did. After his mother secured his release and wrote an op-ed in a local paper discussing having to give her son “the talk,” faculty and staff (led at the time by Head of School Murray Cohen) stumbled into a white-guilt fest, engaging in some hand-wringing about how terrible what had happened to this student was. Because of course they did. I have no doubt that my white and non-Black schoolmates had some deep and important thoughts running through their heads, if only until it was time to study for their next exams.
Around the same time, I began seeing signs posted throughout CPS’s monied neighborhood warning of a string of crimes committed by someone whose hooded police drawing looked very much like a Black man. Though I’ve embraced my curls in recent years, back then my hair was almost always cut into a short fade or dark caesar (extremely common cuts for Black boys and men after the passing of Joe Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill that still remain in style). I dealt with my own streak of carelessness and was constantly losing clothing items, so I’d essentially abandoned beanies and caps to keep my skull warm in favor of hoodies, which I loved wearing. (I still appreciate my hoodie days nearly nine years after the murder of Trayvon Martin, a boy whose appreciation for Skittles I also share.) One brisk day, I was walking through the neighborhood with a small group of classmates after school while the sun set over San Francisco. As we strolled, my on-the-level Chinese American friend noticed one of the signs on a post, then suggested I pull my hood down. I hesitantly but knowingly heeded his advice, and went cold until we made it to a safer environment.
As a freshman, another Chinese American friend had a well-intentioned but passionate argument with me about how Chinese people had suffered more than Black people in the United States, due primarily to the racialized brutality involved in the westward expansion of the railroads. Even at 14 I knew how utterly unfounded his argument was, and was insulted that I had to play Oppression Olympics with someone who couldn’t possibly understand my context. I made a number of important points I didn’t want to have to make, but he stood his ground. Ultimately we agreed to disagree.
It was one of the first examples I’d faced of the casual denial of Black attrocity and struggle present within non-Black communities of color — a seemingly benign but rampant form of anti-Blackness that has only been popularly daylighted in the past decade. As I wasn’t in the habit of throwing away relationships that early in my CPS career, I remained in that student’s circle, and ended up developing a sincere bond with him that blossomed even before our shared time as undergrads at Columbia University. He remains one of my best friends to this day. But he had to come a ways before he understood how wrong he was then, and I’ve since learned much more about the Chinese experience in America as well. (E.g. San Francisco’s beloved Chinatown was once a walled-off ghetto. And Angel Island, the “Ellis Island of the West,” was essentially a prison for prospective Asian immigrants.) In 2017, I joined him and two other Black CPS alums for his first trip to Taiwan without his family. We still marvel over the wonders of that impactful trans-Pacific sojourn.
Beyond literal arguments, meaning well could not keep my schoolmates from stepping into the shit of anti-Blackness from time to time. When I was a freshman I’d developed a friendship with a white senior. She wasn’t my Senior Advisor, but she took me under her wing, dropping me home after school occasionally. As I’ve mentioned, I was a short kid. (“Shortest boy in the class” was a tie between me and another student of color, but as I walked with solid posture and he had a tendency to slouch, I was surprised to find out I was perceived as being taller than him by many classmates.) This senior tried to allay my sensitivity over my height by assuring me that I would grow, using the example of a Black senior who was quite short as a freshman, but had grown to be six feet tall. She had no idea that my mom is 5’3” and my dad is 5’7”. But “Ricky grew,” so I of course still had a chance. Confirming what I silently imagined would be the case at the time, as an adult I remain of below-average height for an American male. That senior and I made a very welcome reconnection in 2020 owing to CPS’s newly prominent role in the Movement for Black Lives.
I wasn’t a perfect kid, but I was a good kid. On the few occasions I was part of conversations centered around slut-shaming and other juvenile misogynist foibles promoted by both boys and girls, I was more of an observer with two cents to provide than an instigator. I wasn’t close enough with most of the kids to confirm the veracity of anything I heard. I had my crushes, but I didn’t date (who was I going to date?), and I wasn’t sexually active myself. I knew these conversations were wrong then, and by the time I was a freshman in college I’d committed to avoiding them, as well as to subtly informing victims of clandestine misogynist actions (e.g. filming sex) that their trust and privacy had been violated. Unfortunately, the many examples of misogyny, racism, queerphobia, and ableism present within the student body were rarely if ever addressed by the adults in the room. CPS preferred to praise its students than to do the hard work of shaping them into better people.
Part of being Black in the ivory tower is learning to understand the importance of maintaining one’s grace, so as to not put oneself in a position to be ostracized, losing access to opportunities for both academic and social development. I wish greatly that non-Black students in these environments are one day afforded the necessary tools to put into context their own privilege and imperfection, so they may act on this new knowledge with the same grace I was forced to begin pursuing at such an early age.
To be Black in an environment that desires your essence but not your spirit or reality is to be torn between worlds. As race is a social construct linked to culture, phenotype, and ancestral origin, the rules and regulations of Blackness vary from person to person, place to place. Contrary to the many physical, social, and financial markers assigned to what makes a person Black, the simple truth is that you’re either Black or you’re not. Regardless of who I’ve been, who I am now, and who I’ll be in the future, I’m Black, because I’m Black. I’ll be Black until the day I die, and my spirit will hold its Blackness into eternity. No one can tell me otherwise.
If the ivory tower can’t accept all of what we are, it either needs to change from within, or we must avoid its perilous nature by rejecting its outstretched hand, and its legitimacy.
I’m hoping and fighting for change.
***
Given its monstrous scope, far-reaching legacy, and sheer brutality, the Middle Passage is perhaps the worst thing humans have ever done to other humans.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to feel comfortable saying that out loud in mixed company. Many of my Black friends feel the same. In our private conversations we decry the continued anti-Blackness present in even the most mundane activities and environments. My friends and I are quite conscious that the culture we know is made up of what we’ve lost as much as what we’ve built. And we are fully aware that we each individuate the great American fetish. Our ancestors replaced our stolen languages with songs of freedom that powered our heroes’ darkest nights, whose latest sampling by a white artist just notched fifty million streams as millions of my people continue to languish in carceral slavery and cycles of poverty. Whether through tokenization or profiling, in the United States Black people are born to be consumed and discarded.
But of course we also know anti-Blackness is a global enterprise. The combined reach of European colonialism left very little of the earth unclaimed. With the gift of histories of hindsight, the post-Columbian frenzy is easy to see coming. For centuries before the beginning of the mass genocide of the civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, European empires had reached into Asia and Africa with ideologies that relied on unearned arrogance and xenophobia to maintain their legitimacy. Today, colorism is rampant around the world. In keeping with capitalism’s utter lack of soul, we have proliferated one massive global industry for making melanated people lighter, and another massive global industry for making white people darker.
I vividly remember overhearing (and participating in) frivolous conversations about Michael Jackson’s vanishing nose as a kid. Twenty years later, white socialites can easily generate millions of dollars in yearly revenue by promoting their artificially inflated assets and hawking cosmetics designed to give the image of plump, luscious lips. I imagine there are plenty of Black and/or indigenous folks from Brazil who’ve gone through their own convulsions over their lifelong learnings and unlearnings. Angola too. And India, and Australia, and the Korean peninsula. The mindfuck of white supremacy has left no land untouched.
One of the essential tenets of global white supremacy is downplaying the Middle Passage as the historical key to the sensibility of spreading free-market philosophies and practices. The Middle Passage — wherein so many lifeless bodies were nonchalantly flung overboard that predatory sharks permanently shifted their migratory patterns to follow shipping lanes — laid the foundation for our current system of globalized capitalism, whose colossal levers have always been operated by an influential and dangerous few.
My ancestors were chained together and packed into hellish wooden barges without regard for any human necessity or comfort, only receiving respite from their chains to be raped or beaten. Assembled like sardines in order to maximize their captors’ return on investment, they were left to drown in their own urine, sweat, mucus, menses, stool, and vomit, suffering a collective trauma that manifests today inside the DNA of their progeny. They languished, usually without the verbal ability to communicate with their captors, though even if they could speak the various languages of the civilized monsters who were stealing their lives away, there was little chance they weren’t going to end up where they did — either alive at a “New World” port to be sold into permanent bondage, or as dust lining the pitch-black floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
Millions. And Millions. And Millions.
My people. The Ancestors.
American primary and secondary schools, including CPS, aren’t big on educating their students about the common horrors of the era of chattel slavery. Sure, we learn about “house slaves” and “field slaves,” the endless back-breaking work, and my people’s singing to the North Star. But the torture and murder for sport, the complete lack of privacy, the constant examination of our bodies and genitals, the rape, the abject powerlessness of being forced to breed (yes, we were bred, like animals) only to see your children sold off — these are rarely part of the curriculum. Particularly, CPS’s emphasis on Advance Placement tests and college-prep-style learning was not the same thing as teaching History comprehensively.
Luckily I had my mom, who made sure I knew who I was long before I first set foot on CPS’s campus for my interview. Mom adheres to the principles of the Village, born from West African communal practices and perpetuated in the Black communities she inhabited. Her good friends were my Aunties and Uncles even though we didn’t have shared lineage. My childhood home was filled with Afrocentric art and music. I was provided with children’s books and media published for us, by us. She nearly always wore her hair in a natural style. (I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen Mom’s hair straightened; I can’t overstate how much observing her personal style has bolstered my pride in my heritage.)
Even my given name, Aliko, pays homage to the Motherland. It’s a boys’ name from the African country formerly known as Zaire, meaning “one who forges his own path.” Its colloquialisms in Bembe, the language of its origin, are “a lamb plant without a stick,” and “a goat without a tether.” In the spirit of my blood and my name, I continue to grow in my own direction, in my own time. Mom had a name picked out for a girl too, but she always told me she wanted a boy and was thankful to receive one. Though my views on gender have shifted heavily since I was that boy—informed in part by my knowledge of pre-colonial West African reverence for trans-ness—my mother had a vision, and I am it.
Following the perilous forced journey across the sea, hundreds of thousands of future chattel ended up in the European colonies of North America. This is where my mother’s family comes from. Her ancestors picked cotton every single day under the heavy radiation of the Southern sun while facing the omnipresent threat of the lash.
The third of seven children, Barbara Ann Green’s family moved to Oakland when she was about nine from a rural area outside of Gulfport, Mississippi as part of the last wave of the Great Migration of Black folks escaping the racial terror and limited opportunities of the American South. Her father was an Air Force veteran who served American Empire during the Korean War; during his service the family moved around. Mom was born in New Mexico; for a short time she lived in London, where her mother bore one of my uncles. Mom has told me stories of having to use the outhouse on our family’s land on the Gulf after her parents made their way back to the South. (Even more uncommon for Black folks back in the day than it is now, my maternal great-grandfather secured 15 acres before my grandmother was born. My extended family still lives on the land, though Granny tells me it looks a lot different than it did when she was coming up during the Depression.)
After living among Black folks in West Oakland for a few years, my family moved into the house where I was raised in the Rockridge area of North Oakland, one of the city’s first integrated neighborhoods. Though my mom has since made many improvements to the property, her parents and their seven kids originally shared three bedrooms and one bathroom featuring a porcelain bathtub. (Knowing this, I cherish both showers inside the house’s current iteration.) Mom’s dad Johnnie Lee was eventually dishonorably discharged from service for having the audacity to be a Black man and be an alcoholic at the same time. I’m unclear as to when my grandfather was discharged, but my understanding is that my grandmother divorced him around 1970, and he left her to raise the kids alone while he drank. He died of cirrhosis when my mom was a teenager.
Despite receiving only an 8th-grade education from segregated schools, my grandmother worked tirelessly to put food on the table, and continued to work well into her eighties. What she may have lacked in natural warmth, she made up for by ensuring her kids had a secure home until they graduated high school. Last summer as we watched a multiracial group of thousands of protesters completely fill the six lanes of the Golden Gate Bridge in support of Black lives on the local news, she said to me, “They gon’ burn this place to the ground ‘fo we git equality heah.”
“Ah know Granny, ah know,” I replied solemnly.
But of course, she knows much better than I do. Dora Lee Green (née Reed) made 94 in October 2020.
Many more West African people were deposited in the European colonies spread across the Caribbean Sea. This is where my father’s family comes from. His ancestors shucked sugar cane in sweltering tropical conditions as wealthy British colonists looked on from the shade while sipping casually from their teacups, as though all was right in the world.
Olric Frederick Carter was born in the rural parish of Hanover on the northwestern side of Jamaica, a little over a decade before the island gained its independence from the grand empire whose propaganda machine manifested the spirit of eternal sunshine, backed by naval supremacy that wasn’t quite so eternal. His parents were proud folks who valued education, but their union was certainly not a source of that pride. While my paternal grandfather Eric garnered economic success and raised a family with his genteel wife, Alice, he also juggled dalliances with women outside of his marriage, including my grandmother. My dad, called “Pops” by his kids, was raised in Kingston primarily by my hard-scrabble paternal great-grandmother, whom he often tells me he wishes I could have met.
My father’s existence was a physical manifestation of his father’s infidelity; as such, his childhood was peppered with various psychological and physical traumas related to stigma and poverty. Even so, he was able to attend a prestigious Kingston secondary school, Wolmer’s Trust High School for Boys, while his mother worked to build a life after immigrating to America, sending money back to the island when she could. Shortly after his graduation, Pops followed his mom to Brooklyn as a newlywed with a baby on the way. My sister Erika was born there in 1970, six days before our dad’s 19th birthday. My brother Adam followed a few years later in Denver as our father did whatever odd job he could find open to a Black foreigner lacking higher education. Ultimately, Pops and his wife parted ways and he settled with my older siblings in Oakland, where his mother had been busy cultivating a community of like-minded Jamaican immigrants.
Olive Constantia Jacobs (née Burke) was an imposing, brilliant, and exacting woman. By the time my father landed permanently on the west coast in 1979, Grandma Olive had already married a fellow Jamaican, bought a home in East Oakland, and co-founded the Jamaica Association of Northern California (now the Jamaican American Association of Northern California), which still functions to unite the many Jamaican families sprinkled around the Bay Area. I have fond adolescent memories of spending time with my family among the redwoods at the association’s massive picnic in Oakland’s Joaquin Miller Park, held annually on the fourth of July. (There was, of course, no picnic in 2020.)
Grandma Olive was an old woman by the time I got to know her, though my siblings often speak of her prime with a mix of respect and perturbation. She took no prisoners in her personal assessments of their development. Unlike my mom’s mom whose smooth face evokes ebony wood, Olive was fair-skinned, with silver hair always pressed perfectly straight, and brown eyes featuring bright blue rings around the iris (a trait my father shares). Like many Jamaicans (and Black Americans, and white Americans, and other groups around the world), she was beholden to colorism. I’ve heard many stories of how she favored my sister to my brother, because my sister is lighter, and my brother is darker. Adam was an incredibly smart kid full of potential; our grandmother’s effortless vitriol deeply affected his self-worth, and informed Erika’s development as a protector.
Though initially when my mom revealed her pregnancy Olive shared her dubious assumptions about my parentage unapologetically, both my mother and father have confirmed that the first time she met me as a newborn she exclaimed “The Jew is back!” My father has often spoken of our white Jamaican ancestors. (A few years ago 23 & Me revealed that about 20 percent of my DNA comes from Europe. In addition to being ten percent English/Irish, I do have at least one Ashkenazi Jewish ancestor, who lived during the 19th century. Later on, Pops’ DNA kit confirmed that about one-third of his blood is European.) Though he finds it important to recognize all of what we are, I’ve never been particularly impressed by his enthusiasm. As a lifelong mentor and friend who served as CPS’s first Diversity Coordinator once told me, “Black is and has always been a mixed-race category.” (More on this mentor, Tigress, later.)
Though I was indeed a very light Black baby, my skin reached its current burnt-sandy hue by the time I was a toddler. But it was enough for Olive. She loved me. Her eyes lit up whenever Pops brought me to see her. She was impressed by my proper English and my excellent grades, and often gave me learning-oriented gifts for my birthday or Christmas. Unlike my mom’s mom, whose nonagenarian body still functions fairly well, Grandma Olive was in poor health for most of the time I knew her. By the time I was ten, the skin on her face had earned an amount of wrinkles that would’ve given Dora Lee a heart attack. She had acute diabetes, and had suffered multiple strokes by the time she passed away at age 76, during the spring semester of my sophomore year at CPS. I quickly came to regret not asking Pops to take me to visit her more often as she deteriorated.
My mother and father met each other in the mid ‘80s at an Oakland reggae club called The Caribee, which has long since shut its doors. It’s always tickled me that they met dancing; Mom plays it down, but I find the story legitimately romantic. Incidentally, they were both recent divorcées. She, a grad student at Cal and full-time public-health professional, had just seen her union to a charming and intellectual Nigerian man fizzle after a year. He, a father of two and middle-manager at a nutritional supplements company, had escaped an unhealthy second marriage with a Black American woman that lasted an even shorter amount of time. Mom had been dragged to the club by a group of good friends who were trying to cheer her up, while Pops was exercising his habit of going out alone to blow off steam on the dance floor. They didn’t know they were looking for each other.
My parents’ relationship lasted about as long as necessary for me to be born. During the time their paths intersected, my mom’s younger brother, named for his father Johnnie but called “Chuckie” by the family, killed himself using a rope. From what I understand, Uncle Chuckie was highly intelligent and charismatic, but was also a very troubled, lonely man. In a story that’s familiar to many Black folks, he’d gotten caught up in the ‘80s crack-cocaine epidemic, and had spent a good deal of time in San Quentin State Prison owing to a series of burglaries and other petty crimes. When I was a teenager, Mom told me that he’d come to her in a dream shortly after his suicide. In the dream he was perplexed, telling her, “Ann, why does everyone keep sayin’ I’m dead? I ain’t dead!” Shortly after this dream, my mom discovered she was pregnant. It took until 2020 for my dad to reveal that I was conceived after Chuckie’s wake. My parents had recently broken up, but my uncle’s untimely death had brought them back together.
I’ve always believed Uncle Chuckie’s spirit found new life inside of me. But last year, Pops confirmed it.
The Ancestors live.
***
Even before the wealthy slavers the United States has immortalized established their new white-supremacist settler empire, the British colonies’ economic growth depended on their leaders counting Black folks as real people only as a matter of convenience, while propagating vicious anti-Black practices in all other cases. This tradition continues today, nudged occasionally by our social movements and the politics of decorum into incremental or superficial improvements.
I really don’t want to have to write what I know about the Middle Passage and its far-reaching consequences. To put it graciously, it’s an uncomfortable position to be in. I want people to already know. I resent having to explain myself repeatedly, and have little desire to plead for my blood to be recognized.
But write I must. My cohort is but the latest generation of Black thinkers to explore how best to quantify the effects of the white-supremacist essence of America. As DuBois wrote famously (but not famously enough), “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” Here we are, nearly 120 years after The Souls of Black Folk was published, and the seemingly indelible barrier of the color-line yet cages our progress.
All natural-born Americans have been delivered an imperial brainwashing. Because I’m Black, and because I’ve been educated adjacent to the halls of power, the brainwashing is easier for me to undo. While anti-Blackness in Black American (and Caribbean) communities is certainly both pronounced and damaging, we are quite conscious of our self-hatred; an appreciable subset of us are always working to address and unpack it. Conversely, anti-Blackness in non-Black communities is largely de facto, and, as I’ve stated previously, went largely unquestioned until very recently.
Most of the Black people I grew up around don’t need to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to understand the depths of pain and perseverance that led to our current state of existence in this land. Opened in 2016 with a ceremony led by the first Black president of the United States, the latest addition to the federally funded Smithsonian Institution sits on the National Mall a stone’s throw from a prominent monument to a prolific slaver in the heart of the federal district dually named for that man and for a genocidal European conquerer. (I always wished Columbia University had a more original name.) With the museum’s dedication, the political capital of the richest, most powerful empire in the history of human civilization has finally officially recognized its wretched hoards.
The museum is architecturally unique and innovative in its interior design. As far as being a piece of art, it does service to its inspiration: the Black experience in the United States of America. Its basement labyrinth tells our history through an extensive and well-curated set of exhibits featuring primary and secondary sources from 1619 to the present day. Its above-ground floors are focused on our immeasurable artistic, athletic, and military contributions to American political and cultural hegemony.
In my first truly surreal moment of 2021, I watched the news as white supremacists who were determined to overturn a semi-democratic election walked along Constitution Avenue adjacent to the Mall, on their way to bust into the United States Capitol, fill its halls with their stench, and leave many of our imperial representatives in terrified stupors and righteous furies. Media cameras followed them as they proudly made their way, many of them carrying (and/or wearing) the stars-and-stripes, while others brandished “Make America Great Again” flags.
One of the NBC News cameras was positioned directly across the street from the NMAAHC. As I watched from my bedroom in Berkeley, desiring to be dumbfounded but knowing too much about our history and the present moment to conjure such an emotion, I wondered if anyone in the mob knew what they were passing. Many folks have rightfully pointed out that never before in U.S. history had the Confederate battle flag been flown at the Capitol, but I was more alarmed that this symbol of brutal subjugation and frothing hatred was being waved back and forth mere feet from the most prominent official symbol of my people’s forced and voluntary gifts to American Empire. I was equally disturbed, angered, and utterly unimpressed.
I’m old enough to recall the blowback Michelle Obama received during the 2008 Democratic Primary when she said she was proud of her country for the first time in her adult life. It was certainly a gaffe, unworthy of the spouse of someone aspiring to become the foremost representative of the empire. But I imagine for her it was also the truth. If we were to privately poll Black Americans on their “pride” in their nationality, I think what we’d get is a mixed bag, if not a solid anti-American majority. If I took such a poll today and answered truthfully, I would say “no, I am not proud to be an American,” and I can think of more than a handful of Black friends and family who’d say the same.
If pushed on the subject, I’d pose a few questions of my own: What American achievements do we have to be proud of? “Democracy?” The will of the majority has been subverted in ways official and surreptitious ever since this nation’s founding, not limited to state-encouraged anti-democratic racial terror, and two presidential elections won by the loser, just in my lifetime. “Triumphing over fascism and communism?” An achievement to be sure, but Black GI’s helped liberate the surviving European Jews while serving in segregated units only to return home to American Apartheid. Later generations saw their impoverished neighborhoods saturated with drugs and violence as a result of pro-capitalist imperial machinations. “What about sending men to the moon?” Marvin Gaye shot that notion down through his sonic genius over forty years ago, capturing the sentiments of much of Black America in the process. While imperial propaganda is insidious and pervasive, pride is a difficult emotion to conjure for the Black folks who are aware of the tragic truth of our legacy and the current state of Black affairs.
If afforded the opportunity, I might ask some follow-up questions: Do you ever notice the head nods and easy rapport exchanged by Black strangers? What do you think that’s about? Can you comprehend the basic respect of calling an older woman who isn’t a blood relative “Auntie?” What does the term “Black Lives Matter” mean to you? Is it merely a slogan for yard signs? A rallying cry for protests? Could it perhaps be something deeper? Do you believe Black people work hard? Are we intelligent? Are our facial features attractive? Is there a special quality to the kinks of our hair? What would you say we’ve offered since we began arriving on this continent? Are you familiar at all with the essential solidarity between Americans descended from Black folks held as chattel in the U.S. and Americans whose Black parents immigrated to this land from Africa, the Caribbean, or Latin America? What about the divisions among and within these groups? If you are aware of these divisions, do you believe they are self-reinforced, or could they possibly be influenced from the outside?
I tend not to waste my time working to develop friendships with people who show themselves unwilling or unable to comprehend the simple fact that my experience is fundamentally different than theirs. When someone comes up in an environment that caters to them in the ways America caters to whiteness, they become conditioned to obliviousness. In few spaces is this more true than the ivory tower.
Before I matriculated at CPS I had already visited Africa twice with my mother. During the summer of my tenth birthday, we traveled to Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. Two years later, I spent two weeks in Tanzania. Though it was not readily apparent to me as a child, these vacations shaped the way I viewed the world. For a Black American boy to see Black people governed by Black people — to observe the relative ease with which folks walk down the street, to soak in their practices and idiosyncrasies as they conduct business and care for their children, to feel their natural regard for him — is categorically self-affirming.
My mom and I were hosted by familiar faces during each trip. Her connections in the public-health field included a Zimbabwean sister-friend from UC Berkeley who worked for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention in Malawi, and a Black American sister-friend who led up the CDC’s HIV/AIDS prevention efforts in Tanzania. Without their generosity of home and spirit, the cost of our travel would’ve been prohibitive. The Village provides.
Notably, I went on safari on both occasions, visiting the Zambian jungle and the Tanzanian Serengeti respectively. Out in the bush I discovered that wild African fauna are absolutely nothing like their captive counterparts Stateside. Observing our white safari guide chide and belittle the Black folks who served us in Zambia, I also discovered that anti-Black behavior is commonplace in post-colonial Africa. As an American tourist I was immune to this man’s entitled gaze, as well as to the features of racialized poverty all around me. Owing to my imperial privilege I was free to wade in Lake Malawi, hike to the plateau of Mt. Mulanji (the tallest African peak south of Kilimanjaro), explore the curio markets of Lilongwe and Dar Es Salaam, bask in the equatorial waters of the Indian Ocean, and tour a point of embarkation for the East African Slave Trade on the island of Zanzibar. “Powerful” doesn’t begin to describe it. I consider these memories priceless.
Of all the landmarks we visited while abroad, Victoria Falls was the most magnificent. I’ll never forget the journey there. It was the summer of 1999. My mom and I had arrived in Zimbabwe via London and Johannesburg on the most ample jets I’d ever ridden, where we stayed in Harare with my Auntie Kate’s extended family for a couple nights. Kate’s sister’s two tween children assumed we were rich (and I’m certain that in relative terms, we were.) They excitedly asked me to send them all sorts of Black American fashions when I got back to the States. I felt bad because I knew I wouldn’t be able to meet their requests. But they were the first African kids I’d ever met and it fulfilled me to learn about them, even if I was too young to be able to explain the term “cost-of-living” with effect and grace.
From Harare, we travelled alone on a bus to a Zimbabwean city called Bulawayo. When I say this bus was packed, trust that I could not possibly exaggerate. In addition to being overfull with radiant dark-skinned faces, we were accompanied by several caged chickens. Mom and I shared our two-seat row with a Zimbabwean man who was holding two small children of his own in his arms. I was barely ten, and had never been prone to taking up a lot of physical space, but it had been a long day and I was exhausted. I started to drift toward slumber as we made our way down the country road, and rested my head on our neighbor’s shoulder as I sat on my mother’s lap. Mom shook me ever-so-lightly, telling me not to be rude and to give the man some space. He looked at her and said, “It’s fine, of course,” with a preternatural warmth I’d never observed a white stranger show in America. His easy smile soothed me; I napped well.
When we arrived in Bulawayo that night we took a cab from the bus station to a train station where we were to board a sleeper car. We were running late and my Mom was stressing; I assured her we’d make it, calming her somewhat. By the grace of the Motherland, we climbed aboard just as the train was set to depart. When the ticket-taker realized we were American, he overcharged us. Even so, our tickets ended up costing the equivalent of about $15 each. Thankful that we were on our way to our final destination, my mom found it easy to check her privilege in the face of this man’s prejudice and opportunism.
We shared a sleeper car with a kindly older Zimbabwean Shona woman who was on the way to visit her family, and had a lovely conversation before retiring. (Nearly everyone we met spoke English. These days I’m never unaware of the privilege my command of the global language of capitalist empire affords me. Though I was reading at a sixth-grade level by second grade, I do owe my current Anglophonic skills in part to the rigor of my ivory-tower English, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Political Science classes. Unlike the woman on the train, I speak no other languages fluently.) We arrived in the town of Victoria Falls the next morning, and I nearly had a conniption when I realized our room at the modest but beautiful resort we’d booked had no television. But given that I was in paradise, I got over my distress pretty quickly.
That evening we took a sunset cruise on the Zambezi River. I’d never seen a river so wide, with banks so densely packed with flora. Its placid waters teemed with life; I became giddy when I caught my first-ever glimpse of a herd of hippopotamus. Our small canopy boat was filled with other tourists, whom I noticed were nearly all white. My mom had brought a few disposable cameras in her pack, and the sunset was so engaging that we’d run through all of our snaps before it reached its breathtaking zenith. I believe that moment was the first time I consciously harnessed the power of memory to take a picture. Though we were a ways away from the lip of the world’s largest waterfall, I could sense the the crashing of its millions of gallons of water in the distance.
The next day we ventured to the gargantuan natural water feature the native Shona people had dubbed Mosi-oa-Tunya (“The Smoke That Thunders”) long before British “explorer” David Livingstone slapped Momma Vicky’s name on it. The area of the Zambezi that houses the falls, which run along a 350-foot cliff for over a mile, makes up part of the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Mom and I viewed the falls from the Zimbabwean side for much of the day. I was enthralled by their splendor, and got as close as I could to the edge of the other side of the cliff before my worried matriarch yelled for me to step back to safety. To this day I’ve never laid eyes on anything more breathtaking than the scope of that thundering smoke. Despite my tender age, I instinctively understood that I was peering into one of the many faces of The Mother of All Life (though I might have called Her something different back then).
Pondering it now, I don’t believe my two trips to Africa ever came up in class or friendly conversation during my time at CPS. I doubt I had the social wherewithal to fully explain their significance back then, and though I was active in the school’s Black Student-Faculty Union (BSFU) and Pride In Diversity club (PID), I wasn’t in the habit of throwing the fact of my Blackness around in such an unapologetically white environment colored by the prideful immaturity of adolescence. (Things were different when I was in my own environment. When I was an upperclassman, my small clique of ‘07 boys of color would routinely use a free period or cut the morning forums and assemblies to drive down the hill and play middle-of-the-road first-person shooters on my PlayStation 2. I’m sure my African excursions came up about 10 seconds after they first noticed the art strewn delicately about the place. Sometimes I miss the days when 40 minutes felt like 400.)
Without having to think it over, the Fern Gully of the Parish of St. Ann, deep in the dense center of Jamaica, comes in second on my list of beheld earthly splendor. By the time I was 24 my father and I had grown close, and I was very much looking forward to our planned 10-day excursion to his homeland in March of 2014. I was living in Brooklyn and working for a sports media company in Midtown Manhattan that was dominated by socioeconomically secure straight white millennial men (or “bros” as they preferred to be called), whose inherent casual misogyny, racism, and queerphobia had been permitted to flourish. In addition to hanging with Pops, I was eager for a vacation from them. I flew from JFK directly to Jamaica. Pops had come out from California a few days in advance to catch up with his oldest childhood friend (and fellow Wolmer’s grad), my Uncle Roderick. Together they picked me up from Kingston International.
Once again, I had temporarily abandoned the toxic whiteness of American Empire and was able to observe Black folks be freely Black — even if their Commonwealth-sanctioned monarch is an old white lady. (The Brits sure did get around. His Majesty’s military took over Xaymaca in a violent white-on-white engagement in 1655 after their Spanish counterparts had mostly exterminated the native Taino people residing there.)
But of course this trip was different. I was older, and I was seeing the island through Pops’ eyes. Though I can’t produce a decent Jamaican Patois to save my life, I could understand enough to keep up in conversation. Some of the blue-collar Jamaicans I came across were actively unimpressed by my evident yankee-doodle-dandiness, which was inflected not only by my support from diasporan Jamaicans such as Grandma Olive but also by my many years inside the ivory tower. I assumed my Blackness would count for something, and on the occasions it didn’t, I experienced a palpable hurt.
Jamaica receives over four million tourists a year. To some of the islanders I came across, I was just one more foreigner, unless and until I performed the emotional labor of explaining my heritage and the importance of my journey. To my benefit, over my six years in New York I’d perfected the art of people-watching — and my time at CPS and Columbia had conditioned me to speak much less freely than I did as a tween in Africa — or else I might’ve gleaned more disappointment than I cared to carry through such a monumental series of personal events. I sorely wanted to feel at home. Leaning into my learned passive observance helped my acclimation.
But our trip was a vacation after all. We began by visiting with Uncle Roderick, his younger wife and baby daughter at his grand home atop a hill overlooking the urban core of Kingston. I delighted in comparing the food at a Jamaican Chinese restaurant to its Bay Area and NYC counterparts, and joined my elders for a nostalgic tour of the empty Wolmer’s campus, where unlike myself, the old men had received imperial instruction alongside a predominantly brown-skinned student population. After spending a few days in Kingston my dad and I traipsed all over the island, which is about 150 miles long and 50 miles wide. Our hired driver started by taking us along the southern coast toward the resort town of Negril on Jamaica’s far western end.
(As a queer person in the middle of the long process of unpacking the shame that had been exacerbated by my various affluent white environments, and someone who understands heteronormativity as yet another function of white supremacy, I was unnerved by our Black Jamaican driver’s ease in making his homophobia known. Rather than ruffling feathers I decided to keep my thoughts to myself, though I shared multiple knowing glances with my father.)
After we arrived in Negril I spent a lot of time with Pops, and a lot of time alone, walking for miles along the beachfront. I quickly noticed that high tide encroached on some of the local resorts’ properties. My dad mentioned that the last time he was home in the early aughts there was 40 feet more beach — an exaggeration to be sure, but probably not by that much. Ever since I’d completed a course called Climate & Society taught by a prominent Columbia scientist, I found it both difficult and pointless to try to shake my increased empirical knowledge of the humans’ accelerating damage to the natural environment. Pops knew much more about Jamaican weather patterns than I did, and I was alarmed to hear him speak of each new storm surge washing away more sand. Unlike my ivory-tower climate course, which failed to place blame for the humans’ incipient predicament on the fallacy of endless economic growth, my experience in Jamaica informed my developing thoughts on the connections between white supremacy and capitalist ecocide, a predicament which currently disproportionately affects non-white populations.
Despite dealing with a bit of rumination, I gleaned peace at the edge of the crystal-blue water. I came to appreciate a helping of Bailey’s Irish Cream in my morning coffee at the outdoor bar onsite. Dad preferred to sleep in and take his late breakfast with a Red Stripe or two. It was during these times that I wandered along the beach by myself. As like my father I was raised an only child, I’ve always valued my solitude. I did a lot of good thinking on those walks. I also picked up gifts from beach vendors, including a painting sold by a local artist featuring the silhouette of a Black woman playing a psychedelic set of piano keys, which I gave to my mom. (It now hangs framed in the foyer of the family home alongside a portion of her extensive collection of Afrocentric art, a few of her cherished indoor plants, our family photos, and a large childhood painting inspired by my developing pride in my Blackness.)
After taking in the stunning Caribbean sunset every evening for a few days, we embarked on a different path through the north and middle of the island on our way back toward Kingston. During a quick stop for lunch in Montego Bay I tasted fresh ackee and saltfish — Jamaica’s national dish — for the first time. (I’d only had ackee from a can prior to this delicious experience, though the saltfish was a little too salty for my taste.) As our little cab entered the fern gully I nearly couldn’t believe my eyes. The two-lane, shoulderless road sunken into the ground and flanked by stone walls wound through the most lush landscape I’d ever seen. Though I’d been to the Zambian jungle as a child, it certainly wasn’t a rainforest. The fern gully felt like an alien world.
During our last few days on the island we made a rendezvous with Roderick, who used his business connections to take us on a tour of an unfinished superhighway in his SUV. He provided all the context for what we were seeing, including that the road was funded by investment from China. Though by 2014 I was well aware of the Communist Party’s success at using infrastructure projects as tools of de facto neocolonialism in Black countries (once again, no thanks to the ivory tower), this was the first time I was able to gaze upon the visible product of this shrewd but amoral geopolitical strategy — another function of global anti-Blackness at work.
I’d like to go back one day soon, to visit Uncle Roderick and see how much his daughter has grown, and to take a gander at what kind of traffic this massive now-complete superhighway is facilitating. Part of me hopes it was worth it, that this new road improved the lives of Jamaicans. But most of me, especially the portion that understands history, politics, and capital, feels this certainly can’t be the case.
My thoughts occasionally dwell on my good CPS and Columbia friends who ably followed the paths toward enabling capitalist expansion that had been laid out for them. I used to wish I could do what they do unencumbered by the unceasing and often debilitating unease of anxiety and depression. Contrary to judging them, I wanted to be like them — to be a success. These days I no longer desire such a life, but I still refuse to judge them for participating in and benefiting from an insane global system that will only be upended by sustained worldwide civil disobedience.
***
When I was at CPS, I was not okay. Every day I put on a mask of confidence and nonchalance before I got to school. I spent many hours informally working through my emotions behind a closed door in the office of the school’s Health Educator, a Black man named Ayize who’d been hired a year before I arrived, and who’d also been educated inside the ivory tower. Ayize was my first therapist; without his insightful guidance I would surely have drowned into the sea of oblivious whiteness surrounding me.
Though I wouldn’t accept the truth of my clinical psychological ailments until the year after I graduated from college, my high school years marked the first time I consciously leaned into the pursuit of emotional intelligence. Unlike my years at Zion, where I was one of my class’ top students and felt largely free to be my talkative, excitable self, at CPS I quickly realized that my speech would not be allowed to predominate in frivolous conversation without some passive social blowback from students not accustomed to affording Black kids the space to be themselves. So I talked less, and listened more. Though empathy has always come naturally to me, becoming a better listener was serious work. (When my good Columbia friend told me at a pre-pandemic 2020 bachelor party that I was the best listener he knew, it was a greater affirmation of my experience and labor than he could possibly have anticipated.)
Beyond increasing my listening skills, I also became a watcher. Instead of drinking and doing drugs at house parties (to which I didn’t even begin receiving invites until well into my junior year), I watched as other students downed beer and vodka inside the communal areas of beautiful homes while others partook in higher-level intoxicants behind various bedroom doors. I didn’t take my first drink until the night of my high school graduation (an achievement for which Ayize rewarded departing students with cookies the size of large pizzas). By that point I figured I’d learned all I could from watching my classmates imbibe without care, and that I should start exploring such activities myself before I jetted across the country to begin my time as a guppy in an ocean of coeds.
Alcohol and drugs were also always present at our annual Snow Trip, which has since been limited to seniors on account of the school’s liability issues in keeping the entire student body safe. During my time at CPS, every January after first-semester finals all 330-plus students would pack into chartered busses and take over Bear Valley Lodge in the mountains for three days and two nights. I can’t profess to have disliked Snow Trip. Honestly it was my favorite school-sanctioned event of the year, but it was full of problems nonetheless.
Notably, students from working-class families were taken for granted by the school. Kids were “provided” with old snow bibs and other clothes from a dusty donation pile if they didn’t have them already. As if that weren’t embarrassing enough, these kids often didn’t know how to ski or snowboard. I was aware even then that it required bravery and conviction to take the bus up to the mountain just to rent equipment and practice on the bunny slopes; and I’m sure the students who stayed behind at the lodge the whole time felt the prominence of their absence deeply. Though I had begun learning how to ski with other children of Black single moms when I was five, I wasn’t particularly good at it, and usually didn’t spend too much time on the mountain myself.
During the days, some students who weren’t on the slopes had snowball fights and other powder-related fun. Others played video games on consoles they’d brought from home. The boldest students imbibed from their smuggled contraband. The first night of Snow Trip featured a talent show in the central hall of the main lodge building. On the second night we had a dance. While it was hard to get away during the show, I’ve heard stories about both consensual sex and sexual assaults in the rooms of the lodge during the dance. (It doesn’t take a detective to note the correlations between controlled-substance use and sexual misconduct, though even for teens, the former is a sorry excuse for the latter.)
Besides the big cookie, I had plenty of motivation to keep alcohol out of my system. Once again my mother’s pro-Black, no-nonsense influence was formative, and I’d seen up close how alcoholism can damage lives. Though I had my fun exploring the New York bar scene in my twenties, I stopped drinking a few years ago. It can be an expensive habit, and I had surmised that it wasn’t doing much for me.
But following my college years of socially-encouraged Thursday-Friday-Saturday booze binges and regular cannabis use, I became less hesitant to experiment with other substances. Though I continue to draw a hard line at intravenous drug use (as one does), I’ve come to believe that moderated exploration can be beneficial for thoughtful human adults, that each individual brain and body has unique reactions to each individual controlled substance, and that imperial prohibition is ineffective, hypocritical, and lacks regard for indigenous histories and knowledge.
These days I practice hyper-moderation, a state of near-sobriety punctuated by short dalliances with psychoactives designed for enhancing social experiences and, as you might have guessed, pursuing greater emotional intelligence. If I had fallen into the trap of keeping up with the Rockefellers in high school, I doubt I’d have addressed my variable mental health in such proactive ways in my twenties. In the face of powerful suicidal ideation and other chronic symptoms resulting from the combination of nature and nurture I was dealt, I continue to develop the healthy coping skills necessary for forward movement.
I imagine that current Black students at CPS face similar crossroads today. Though I will never advocate in favor of underage drinking and drug use, I don’t mean to suggest that the decisions I made in high school carry universal correctness. We all have our own paths. I have seen many friends from CPS, both Black and non-Black, thrive in their young adulthood regardless of their various choices in high school. But acclimating to the ivory tower as an adolescent isn’t easy for any Black student regardless of socioeconomic status, and beyond superficial social belonging, there’s no way using drugs and alcohol can help that acclimation. I saw too much unhealthy coping in my time inside the ivory tower to believe otherwise.
***
One challenge I didn’t have to face that haunts today’s marginalized students is cyberbullying. While I first joined Facebook as a senior in the fall of 2006, today’s students deal with cascading daily assaults facilitated by the proliferation and normalization of the use of social media and other web-based services, often informed by the juvenile cowardice of anonymity. I began hearing the horror stories of my younger counterparts long before 2020. Zoomers are native to this precarious digital world. I do not envy them.
But seeing that Black students have embraced social media as a weapon for their defense has filled me with pride and hope. Across the country, kids and young adults have started up anonymous Instagram accounts under the viral #BlackInTheIvory banner to tell their stories and push their institutions to do better.
The main account for current and former Columbia University undergrads is called @BlackColumbiaSpeaks, but accounts for Columbia Law School and the assorted Columbia graduate schools in the medical field exist as well. Locally, UC Berkeley and Stanford have both seen their reputations come under fire via this outcropping of the continuing Movement for Black Lives. But these accounts are run by adults associated with massive public and private corporations featuring multi-billion-dollar endowments. As much as I would like to be a part of change at my Ivy League alma mater, there I remain a guppy. Besides, the students running these accounts have, like myself, been inspired by the kids.
Ivory-tower high school students across the country are putting their emotional and physical safety on the line to bring daylight to their treatment and demand change. At Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire founded five years after American Empire and attended once upon a time by one of my best Black friends, a fellow ABC scholar from Zion, the administration has responded to the woeful true stories and legitimate demands of current Black students in a way that might be described as admirable by those who are easily impressed. Closer to home, notable Bay Area schools that haven’t been as forthcoming as Exeter include Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, Marin Country Day School (K-8) in Corte Madera, and the Head-Royce School (K-12) in Oakland. But in my estimation, no local ivory-tower institution has been as disingenuous, callous, and bumbling in its response to the righteous cries of its melanated charges as the College Preparatory School.
I’ve learned a great deal about the former and current states of affairs at CPS since the launch of the @BlackatCollegePrep Instagram account early last summer. Initially I merely watched the account with interest as emotional testimonials poured in from current students and young alumni. Most of the posts were short (one or two slides), and anonymous, though I hear that anonymity hasn’t kept their authors from being targeted for speaking their truths. But the Black students are not alone, at least in their digital support; in keeping with the necessary principles of intersectionality and anti-racist accompliceship, the teenagers behind @BaCP didn’t limit their posts to Black testimonials. As the movement progressed, I also began to see more testimonials from alumni of all races who’d attended CPS in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and aughts.
(For a brief time last year, another Instagram account called @CPSprotectors, supported openly by @BaCP, brought daylight to stories of sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape committed by CPS students. There are only 21 posts — a tiny sample to be sure; the most recent post is from 7/24/20. I’m not privy to why it never took off, but it’s still live.)
Though I remain unaware of the identities of the account’s creators, I did reach out to them in support; we’ve developed a cordial, knowing dialogue, if limited. In the interest of providing an in-depth example of the racism perpetuated by the ivory tower separated from the emotions of the moment by time and space, on 7/6/20 I sent my own testimonial to @BaCP, which they published a few days later, spread across eight slides:
When I was a sophomore, a white male junior decided to read a fake letter he’d written at our school-wide assembly. The letter was written and delivered in the voice of a former CPS student, another white male, who (I would learn) had been known for appropriating the aura of Blackness, and was raised “in the hood.” He had graduated by the time my class arrived, so that bit of humor didn’t even land for the younger classes.
The letter was a full-on “ghetto” Black stereotype. The Asian male sophomore I was standing beside was laughing right along with many others, even though the real comedy of it all went way over our heads. As I saw it then, and as I see it now, my classmate was laughing at a purposeful caricature of my culture (and not a well-written one at that). When he looked at me and saw my face, he stopped laughing right away.
I went to find Max Delgado immediately after the performance was over. Max, the Assistant Dean of Students, was my Faculty Advisor. I trusted him in part because he was a sincere male mentor of color. He is Latinx, and was one of the only faculty of color at the time. He stood beside me as I got in the announcement line to make a statement about why what had just happened was not okay.
I was nervous, but I knew what I knew. When I called out the blatant racism I had witnessed, the clique of white male juniors around the original speaker started heckling me. I was talking on the mic, and they yelled from across the courtyard, interrupting me. I said, “It’s not funny!” One of them yelled “Yes it is!” I couldn’t control the flood of emotions I was feeling. I began crying on the landing of the library stairs in front of the entire student body, then left the stage quickly.
It became a thing at school — a moment — but the administration did not call my mom, who they kept at arm’s length while they gaslit me about how wonderful CPS was. My mom learned directly from me what had happened that evening, and was livid that she hadn’t been contacted. If their goal was to support me, the administration utterly failed in the handling of this incident.
And that’s just the most public incident of racism and gaslighting that I dealt with in my four years at CPS — the thing I just couldn’t let go. After that, my Chemistry teacher (white, male) scheduled a meeting with me to ask me what racism I had experienced at CPS. It was uncomfortable for me because I was 15-year-old Black student, he was hesitant to accept my lived experience, and I basically provided him free therapy.
Attending CPS during the age of Chappelle’s Show and “Gold Digger,” my Blackness always felt both conspicuous and invisible. A white student from my class recently reached out to me about @BlackatCollegePrep, and admitted to not remembering this incident at all, which he understands now to be a huge part of the problem. My support at the time mostly came from other students of color on financial aid, with Ayize [Jama-Everett, then School Therapist & Health Educator, now a prolific author of Afrofuturist novels] also being an important advocate for me.
This (racist bullying) incident was not a part of the reason Tigress [Osborn, a mixed Black woman and accomplished Fat Liberation activist] was brought on the next year as the first Diversity Coordinator [and subsequently the first Director of Diversity & Inclusion]. The then-Head of School resisted hiring her, and she learned about [the incident] after her hiring, from faculty who had not reached out to me in support. Her arrival was great for me personally, but we know how CPS handled that… [If you’re unfamiliar with this story, keep reading.] The admin did hold discussions about student autonomy at assembly, but other than that did nothing to make what happened to me right, or prevent pain for future Black students.
Aliko Carter, Class of 2007
As you my have noted, my fateful middle-school decision to permanently suppress my crying was conspicuously unsuccessful. I can think of at least two more times I burst into tears on campus following disappointing interactions with other students directly related to both my Blackness and crushes or friends who were girls. (The “nice guy” variant of toxic masculinity dies really hard...) Mercifully, on both occasions I was able to escape to Ayize’s office before I was seen.
At CPS I also experienced the confusing pain of feeling like I was in competition with the only other Black boy in my class. I had been taking piano lessons for six years before arriving at CPS, and my ability to read music allowed me to jump past Chorus directly into the school’s Advanced Vocal Ensemble (AVE) when I was a sophomore. But this boy was a prodigy: he was both a stupendous pianist and upright bassist, and had been composing his own music for years by the time he arrived at CPS. We both loved Michael Jackson, and we even sang the same voice part. (He usually took the Tenor I part while I took Tenor II during our time together in AVE and the senior octet, which we dubbed “Aurally Fix8ed.”)
And, in a case of unfortunate race-based animus I doubt many students at the school would’ve understood had I revealed my feelings, I resented him for having a white father. Though open jealousy is never a good look, the way some folks reacted to his hazel-green eyes taunted me. I was rarely explicitly compared to him, but I won’t pretend I wasn’t aware of the implicit racial dynamics present at the school. Next to him I felt… mediocre. There were only two of us, and I was obviously the lesser one.
Though we have since become good friends owing to the healing powers of growing maturity, greater understandings of both of our trauma sets, and many hours spent hanging out and singing when we lived within walking distance of each other in Brooklyn after college, I’m still ashamed to admit that I privately considered us “frenemies” back then. A few years back I attended his wedding to his dynamic Black Harvard sweetheart in her family home of New Orleans. His own testimonial also lives on the @BaCP Instagram account (along with 164 others as of 1/22/21).
As I stated before, this student was and remains brilliant. It’s pitiful that we were both “welcomed” into an environment wherein the feeling of competition between us would be allowed to fester without intervention. I have no doubt many CPS classes have featured Black students who had to deal with the conundrum of their conspicuousness and the pressure to represent their race by standing out without this easily discernible issue ever being addressed by the administration.
In addition to this rivalry, my feelings of mediocrity were driven by my middling grades. While today I cannot conclude that I am anything but highly intelligent, back then I was so torn between worlds that I never quite got the hang of the discipline necessary to excel academically. I was always so inside my head, always trying so hard to fit in socially, that I was never able to allow my inherent intellectual gifts to breathe. (I also finally received an official ADHD diagnosis late last year. If you haven’t heard, non-Black doctors have a habit of dismissing the concerns of Black patients.)
My academic situation was exacerbated by life at home; my mom worked long hours and rarely had the appropriate combination of time and energy necessary to sit down with me to support me in my assignments. Plus my moods at home varied widely. Sometimes I tested the waters; I had what Black folks call “a mouth.” (Early on, Mom had made time to participate in the school’s Parent Diversity Committee, but left the meetings behind once she began to feel a lot of the work done there was for show; though I feel the committee did do some important work, and I know that Spanish-speaking parents relied on it very much.)
I was also negatively affected by my white teachers either failing to invest in me the way they invested in other students, or damaging my self-worth with the ways they addressed me. As a freshman, my white World Civilizations teacher told with me thinly-veiled satisfaction that I “used my charm to get over.” (These days casual veiled racism is one of my least favorite varieties.) As I had to scrounge for strong relationships with teachers during the college application process, and had also taken this teacher’s Economics class, I turned to her to write one of my letters of recommendation even though I didn’t want to. After I got into Columbia via Early Decision, I would learn later that my sophomore English teacher expressed snide surprise. As I found both her teaching and our curriculum boring and lily-white, I would’ve never asked her to recommend me anyway.
(Of course CPS’s whiteness problem manifests in the school’s curriculum. I didn’t get to read authors in which I was actually interested until our upper-class AP seminars. Before my junior year I signed up for a class taught by a newly-arrived Black woman teacher called Rites of Passing, focused on novels centered around characters who “pass,” either as white or as a different sex — think Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun or Virginia Wolff’s Orlando. However, after experiencing the school’s “non-racist” environment for only a short time, this teacher chose to leave before I could take her class. Luckily for me (and current students), she was replaced by a white woman teacher who had similar ideas about her curriculum and was sensitive to the learning interests of students of color. This new faculty member taught Rites of Passing exactly as her predecessor had intended. The next semester I took her Chicano/a Literature class. Then I took her Harlem Renaissance class. By the time she chose to teach a seminar on Russian literature during the second semester of my senior year, I was so endeared to her that I took that one too. We still speak today, and she supports me in my writing.
History was my favorite subject going back to third grade, [and became my Major at Columbia once I surmised after a couple semesters that Political Science was too steeped in white-supremacist respectability to provide me with the learning I desired], so you can likely imagine my disappointment in the CPS History curriculum of the time. My aforementioned World Civ class featured a quarter on the Middle East, a quarter on Africa, a quarter on Asia [mostly China], and a quarter on Latin America. Though my teacher made sure to teach us about Mansa Musa’s many tons of gold and additional bling during our brief tryst with the Motherland, we never learned about how he ran the Empire of Mali, his battle tactics, or mandated social structures. As learning about grand infrastructure is one of my passions, and I was not interested in writing about white conquerers after being strong-armed into doing a term paper on the British colonial relationship with Hong Kong during World Civ, I wrote my sophomore-year Western Civilization term paper on European bridges. My junior-year U.S. History teacher told us on the first day of class that “Black History is American History,” but as I stated before, we did not receive an honest accounting of that history. When I was a senior I decided to try to avoid the shadow of whiteness by taking Econ and Linguistics as my History electives. Can you guess which one of those classes I preferred?)
The truth is I was a great candidate for Columbia — once one understands the politics of the ivory-tower numbers game. CPS’s school profile stood out to Ivy League admissions staff every year, and our College Counselor had many warm contacts owing to his previous position as an admissions officer at Penn. Six additional students from the Class of 2007 were accepted to Columbia via Early Decision. (Six kids from my class went to Harvard, five to Stanford, and plenty more to CalTech, MIT, and the rest of the Ivies [except Yale… *shrug*]. Among its many unsavory features, the ivory tower is quite incestuous. I was joined at Columbia by only two students from Oakland Tech’s graduating class of roughly 1500.)
Though grades are obviously important, private institutions held grades and standardized tests in slightly lower esteem than the most prestigious schools within the University of California, and I scored at or above 720 on all three sections of the (racially and socioeconomically biased) SAT anyway. Conversely, the private schools wanted to know about our “well-roundedness,” and I had seniority in many extracurriculars: I was co-president of BSFU, co-president of PID, co-captain of the CPS track team for two years, and president of the Cal NSBE Jr. chapter for two years, while also singing in AVE (three years), OYC (three years), and Aurally Fix8ed as a senior. Beyond that, my personal essay on New York City’s historic architecture was pure fire, and my “charm” clearly impressed the local Columbia alumnus that interviewed me. California might have famously rejected Affirmative Action in the late ‘90s (and again in 2020), but the big-money private universities sported informal quota-systems as well as need-blind admissions; I was being compared with other Black applicants rather than the overall pool. Every item in my application looked impressive except the three-digit number on my transcript.
Those who would claim that ivory-tower college admissions are about intelligence and merit are sorely mistaken. As with high school, I went to college with folks whose natural abilities and intellects varied widely. The admissions process depends primarily on access to opportunity. Harvard would’ve been a stretch, but Columbia was all I ever wanted. Though I experienced and observed more than my unfair share of anti-Blackness on that campus bordered on two sides by Harlem, I don’t carry regret. Besides, I didn’t participate in the activities listed above to get into a good school. They were all extremely important to me, and they were fun.
Despite this reality, when Ayize of all people voiced his surprise at my acceptance, my feelings were deeply hurt. These days I occasionally think about how much pressure he must have been under to “get it right” every day. Not only did he have to counsel and teach the white and affluent students, he also had to massage the egos and various strong emotions of the marginalized ones, whose mix of adolescent hormones and obvious tokenization made their time at CPS uniquely difficult. More than doing the best he could, Ayize helped me survive. I occasionally still seek his counsel. (He left the school after he was passed over for the open Dean of Students position for the second time.) I have also maintained a very strong relationship with Tigress, whose office was a welcome refuge for me beginning in my junior year, and who is currently set to become the new Board Chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance (NAAFA).
A few years after I graduated from Columbia, Tigress was discarded by current Head Monique DeVane in a blatant instance of fatphobia and misogynoir (the unique form of racialized misogyny faced by Black women). Years before, Tigress had posed for a series of artful semi-nude photos at a body-positive gallery event. She had informed DeVane about the photos upon the new Head of School’s installation, and DeVane had assured Tigress that this would not affect her employment status at the school. Eventually a group of white students discovered some behind-the-scenes video of the gallery event online, and spread the news with glee. Without getting into more specifics, this caused a stir with which DeVane was quite uncomfortable, and instead of using the incident as a teachable moment for all involved, she reneged on her word to Tigress. My friend has not had a job inside the ivory tower since CPS unceremoniously fired her.
***
I’ve been reminded time and again in the last year that cowardice, hypocrisy, and the illusions of transparency and care for students are all integral parts of the functioning of CPS, which at its core is a multi-million-dollar corporation like any other. Since beginning to expand my circle of activated alumni last year, I’ve learned that the school harbored at least two white male teachers whose sexual predation was known to students during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, in addition to a Nigerian man in the Athletics Department known for levying misogynist insults on his girls’ soccer players and encouraging his boys in their misogyny.
Then there’s the science teacher I mentioned earlier, who was permitted to live on school grounds for years in a modest but well-apportioned apartment underneath the gym. To be clear, this man pursued and engaged in sexual relationships with multiple girls who were enrolled at the school — acts to which the U.S. penal code appropriately refers as statutory rape — and the school has knowingly enabled his filth. As I am not in the general habit of spreading the details or sources of such accusations, out of respect for the victims of this specific set of crimes, and as I carry a legitimate concern of retaliation from an administration I know to be utterly unscrupulous, I will not write at length on this.
Since @BaCP went live, the administration has done nothing but pretend to protect the kids behind the account while coming up with spiffy marketing and superficial events to allay the concerns of easily-fooled non-Black alumni. The school has held multiple Zoom calls for alumni to be updated on the state of “racial equity and belonging” at the school and engage in their own “anti-racism” education. One event was merely a presentation from a Black ivory-tower-educated author filled with trauma porn and designed to assure the white liberals in attendance that they are not bad people. The administration also directed its Alumni Affairs department to reach out directly to palatable Black alumni (a.k.a. not me) to join them in a one-time-only support group for current Black students, while perpetuating the veiled siloing of dozens of alums of all races who’ve made their activation and support known.
After initially welcoming their cooperation in a campaign of gaslighting, DeVane herself targeted alums who were working to help current Black students on their messaging and demands by threatening the kids with punishment for continuing their collaboration, lying about the school’s Code of Conduct in the process. For the simple act of being there for its students, these alums must now hold an appropriate disquiet in the face of potentially harmful responses from the school. DeVane’s deputy, Dean of Students Steve Chabon, whose self-interested and buffoonish behavior is prominent in the @BaCP testimonials, accused an alum of color who took him to task online of being Tigress, likely because this alum’s Instagram handle has the word “fat” in it. The vindictiveness and ass-covering I’ve observed would be infuriating if I was still capable of affording these people (or any self-important white folks with power) such an energy-consuming emotion.
Frankly, I’m not sure I believe either DeVane or Chabon were ever qualified to hold their positions. DeVane has never been a teacher. Her skillset centers around fundraising, though even a lifelong administrator should be expected to show an iota of empathy to the students under her charge. And Chabon was never more than a drama teacher before DeVane made the decision to install him as her Dean of Students. As DeVane makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and lives in a house worth millions provided by the school, it is not surprising that she’s doing everything in her power to preserve her position. As white liberals have always been hesitant to do the work of confronting their own complicity in American Empire’s white-supremacist systems — Martin Luther King said it much better than I in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” — it is not surprising that she’s doing everything in her power to preserve her comfort.
Already knowing that I could not trust the folks in charge, and questioning their basic qualifications for directing the teaching of any children, let alone Black children, I joined a Zoom meeting organized by the school last fall. I logged on specifically to speak directly to the other 175-plus alumni who were present (many of whom I had rallied there myself). The meeting began with a series of prepared platitudes from DeVane, a few members of the Board of Trustees Equity & Inclusion Committee, and school Director of Equity & Inclusion Jeremiah Jackson—a Black man who I’ve been disappointed to see functions more as a glorified custodian performing damage control than as an advocate for the safety of Black students.
I was one of the first alums to speak after they opened up the floor, informing the officials present that I was unimpressed with their efforts, laying out specific observations as to why, and noting how lamentable it was that I had not been contacted by the school after releasing my testimonial on @BaCP — at which point DeVane revealed that she wasn’t aware of its content. In fact, she hadn’t read most of the testimonials. While I shook my head on the inside, on the outside I generously offered to perform the emotional labor of telling the story, saying it would take about two minutes. DeVane said she wanted to hear it, but then kept talking. She passively shut down a Black alumnus who had put himself in the position of potential retraumatization to inform the school of its issues, in front of nearly 200 alumni, and it didn’t go unnoticed. Her smirks and the other dismissive expressions she made when she wasn’t talking were also apparent to many. It was during this pathetic performance that I resolved to never give her another second of my very valuable time.
In addition to being one of the first, I was also the last alum to speak in the meeting, informing my audience in no uncertain terms that the school is not serious about the work of protecting Black students, and that we should cease to entertain the administration’s bogus efforts.
A few days later, DeVane sent me an email with the subject line “an apology” (yes lowercase):
Dear Aliko,
I owe you an apology — two, actually. Maybe more. But let’s start with the basics.
After the alumni Zoom, I went back and reread your B@CP post. Your story was gut wrenching, and I’m sorry that, as a young person in the care of the school, you were exposed to such ignorance and bigotry. I’m glad that you were supported by Max, and I know from others how fondly you were held and regarded here. But you should never have had to deal with such cultural incompetence or defend yourself and your identity. Institutional fail.
And a personal apology: I’m truly sorry not to have reached out to you individually as one of the few people who chose not to be anonymous at B@CP. It was both an opportunity and an invitation, and I blew it. I wish that I’d done better by and for you, both in July and on Tuesday.
Anyway, thanks for being engaged and for your faith in the school, which must be at least part of why you continue to be invested in our improvement. I’m here if you want to connect.
Sincerely,
Monique
Cute. I never replied back to that email, but I’ve got a response now:
Dear alumni, Board of Trustees, and others affiliated with the College Preparatory School,
I have no confidence in the desire or ability of the current leadership at the College Preparatory School to protect its Black students and otherwise marginalized students. Generations of Black students and otherwise marginalized students have been subject to the school’s tokenization, enabling and perpetuation of multiple trauma-inducing elements of its operation, and unapologetic attempts to gaslight this tokenization and trauma away.
White supremacy is not a fringe set of beliefs, but a philosophy inherent in the American way of life. Unless and until the College Preparatory School can admit to and address its own continuing legacy of damaging adherence to this philosophy, it is failing its student body — including its white and affluent students, who would greatly benefit from attending a truly anti-racist school.
With the aim that the College Preparatory School motto, “Minds Conscious of What Is Right,” will one day be more than that, I am calling for the resignation of the Head of School, Monique DeVane, and the Dean of Students, Steve Chabon, effective at the end of the 2021 academic year. Only then will the demands of the Black students who launched the @BlackatCollegePrep Instagram account in the summer of 2020 be even remotely achievable.
If Ms. DeVane and Mr. Chabon have not resigned by the end of the current academic year, I will continue to do everything in my power not only to bring daylight to the unfeeling mistreatment of Black and otherwise marginalized students at the College Preparatory School, but also to discourage the parents of Black and otherwise marginalized students from sending their children to this school.
The students behind the @BlackatCollegePrep Instagram account have my unconditional support, and the support of many other alumni. They deserve better. And they will have better.
With great labor,
Aliko Carter, College Preparatory School Class of 2007
***
As a Black man who was afforded a high-level imperial education inside the ivory tower, I am aware of my implicit status as an exception. I have been taught to consider myself fortunate. While I am indeed fortunate, I kept up my end of the bargain. I represented CPS well, and bolstered their stats by matriculating into one of the most highly regarded colleges in the country, from which I graduated in a standard amount of time. Despite facing a major economic recession, I subsequently built successful careers in both sports media and not-for-profit fund development.
I did my job. I owe CPS nothing. I am not requesting that the school provide recompense for the damage I suffered there. Though my adolescence was difficult, I’ve come to discover that I was actually quite popular in high school, and today I carry more cherished friendships from there than I can count on the knuckles of all my fingers and toes. (Notably, most of these friendships are with non-white alumni.)
My Black face may have stood out among the redwoods and the eucalyptus, but I knew then and I know now that I was never a minority. In all seriousness, it is white people who are in the minority. Though our human numbers have jetted past seven billion, fewer than one billion of us are white. Our global white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist culture has left us purposely confused about what’s real and what’s not. Even now, I must regularly face toxic whiteness in my interpersonal, housing, and professional situations.
Though as an able-bodied, cisgender, English-speaking man with an imperial education and medium-brown skin I am certainly not devoid of privilege, I work every day to keep my vaunted status from guiding my actions. And as a keen-eyed Black, queer, neurodiverse person with variable mental health who struggles financially, I will certainly not allow myself or anyone else to define who I am based on my societal marginalization alone. I am a full human.
Much like my prose throughout this disquisition, the Black children who maintain @BaCP have been very clear in their pain, their demands, and the many dynamic facets of their humanhood. It behooves us as conscious minds to hear them, and to protect them — by any means necessary.
What’s that? Is that a light? Hmmm, there’s def something ahead. And the air is getting warmer. Oop you’re wobbling. Get yourself together.
Hokay, good job. Let’s go.
Yes. Yes! There’s is something ahead! Something… wonderful…?
It’s getting brighter. Such sight! It must be providence. The warmth is in the marrow now. Like unadulterated love.
Okay, okay, chill. Steady yourself. Inhale. Exhale. Your destination is within reach.
One foot in front of the other.
*
[Editor’s Note: I’ve made changes since publishing this piece on the evening (PST) of Saturday, January 23.
Copy & Quality: There’s an asymptotic limit to the editing eye of a writer on their own work. I’ve polished the above words as best I can; external editors are underrated. I also infused some sentences and paragraphs with prettier prose, and switched a few words out for better or more appropriate synonyms. (Meticulous is my third middle name.)
Substantive: 1) In the spirit of intersectional justice, I added the names Sean Monterossa and Erik Salgado to my introductory acknowledgment. I also corrected my mention of the Ohlone people of present-day Berkeley — they are “Huichin,” not “Chochoenyo.” 2) I revised the numbers of students of color at CPS down slightly to reflect a more accurate picture of my time there. 3) I added a couple bits of knowledge about the Chinese experience in America. 4) I reframed the Snow Trip section to reflect the school’s liability issues in keeping track of the whole student body; CPS’s preferred talking point is that the school outgrew Bear Valley Lodge. 5) I enhanced my parenthetical note on the CPS Parent Diversity Committee. 6) I noted that the SAT is biased both racially and sociology-economically (as is all of for-profit education). 7) I changed Tigress’ informal title from “Fat Activist” to “Fat Liberationist,” per communication with her.
Emotions & Truth: I dug into a few of both my passing and extensive anecdotes to share a fuller sampling of the emotions I was feeling at the time, and why. I won’t list them all here. If you’re a re-reader, consider them Easter eggs.]
