Before I continue with my family’s story, I’ll take a moment to wish all the mothers, mother’s to be, and grandmothers a very happy Mother’s Day. I hope your family expresses their love and appreciation for all you do. And if they don’t, I encourage you to give yourself a pat on the back and treat yourself to time off or a special treat. You deserve the recognition.
Now I’ll continue our journey as blacks in America.
Our family had moved from Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley foothills to escape the growing dangers from multiple directions. My brothers transferred from the affluent, primarily Jewish high school they attended in Los Angeles to the less affluent, but overwhelmingly white high school available in the area. I, on the other hand was given a choice between the white junior high (middle school) in the same neighborhood as my brothers’ high school or the predominately black junior high in a different neighbor. My mother left the decision to me and was considerate enough to allow me to tour both schools.
So, after walking around both schools during a quiet summer afternoon when no one was around except for a few administrators, I chose the predominately black middle school (grades to 7th-9th) back in those days. I didn’t choose it because the campus was nicer; it was decidedly inferior, but because I had never been to a school where most of the kids looked like me. Up to this point in my life, I had been one of the only black girls among Mexican, white, Asian, and Jewish children. The only time I got to interact with black kids was on rare play dates with my few black classmates and at church or family gatherings, so I thought this was going to be a great experience.
I was in the eighth grade. Had I been paying attention, I would have realized something was amiss when the counselor said that they would place me in the highest academic track, considering the school I was transferring from. I distinctly remember asking myself why they had an academic track at the junior high level? They didn’t have that kind of thing at my previous junior high. My previous school was filled with wealthy white, primarily Jewish kids and only a small handful of my Asian friends from elementary school. I loved the beautiful brick buildings and the academic rigor as well as the exposure to yet another culture that valued academic challenge as much as I did. That was my mindset.
In fact, as far as I could tell, all of our black family and friends valued education and so I assumed it was part of our culture as well. I soon learned that other players had somehow stripped education from our grasp and poisoned our collective academic aspirations. We valued education, but it was often denied to us.
When school started that fall, I was shocked to see that each of my classes were filled with the only white kids in the school and small handful of other black kids. I didn’t know enough to question why only a small number of black kids were receiving the best education they had to offer. Looking back, it didn’t seem to be a lack of desire among the kids for academic rigor, but rather a lack of expectation on the part of the white teachers and administrators in charge to provide it. My black friends were creative, intelligent, and ambitious. And sadly, I came to realize much later that black children and often their parents were not even aware that they were being offered a below standard K-12 education. I was a lucky kid who slipped through the cracks of a prescribed oppression scheme.
Interestingly, it was at this middle school that I, along with the other black kids in my class were tested for the gifted program. Were we such an anomaly? I didn’t think so. Or were we an experiment? Only two of us passed the test and we were given the distinction as being a “state-identified gifted student”, a designation that would later become the weapon my mother needed to fight for my academic placement at the white high school I would attend the following year.
I was proud of my mother’s boldness when she marched over to the high school and demanded that administrators enroll me in honors courses as well as the German language class that I had requested but was flatly told was probably too difficult for me. Armed with my straight A report card and a certification that I was state identified as “gifted” she also reminded them that they were being paid extra to have me at their school. I got my classes.
However, the message was clear to me that as a black person, I had to be more qualified than my white peers to gain access to white spaces and to gain any sort of recognition for my work. Thankfully, I thrived academically and made my family proud. And I earned an “A” in German for the entire six semesters. You’d think that with my stellar grades and extracurricular activities and awards that I’d have an easy time selecting among the best colleges and universities in the country, but that wasn’t the case. I was Ivy League material, but never even heard of the Ivy Leagues.
My one and only visit to the college guidance counselor proved futile. The counselor hardly looked at me and offered me zero guidance on my college choices. I only really knew of the local universities our gifted program toured, and so I ultimately ended up following the footsteps of my older brother who attended the University of Southern California. It was the only school I applied to, and I was accepted with a full tuition scholarship. Affirmative Action was in place to provide people of my skin color the opportunity to attend top schools if qualified and I was definitely qualified. Some still think Affirmative Action takes spaces away from qualified white students when legacy admissions have long been a form of Affirmative Action for white students, and no one bats an eye.
I understood that a few turns of luck and my mother’s advocacy made it possible for me to be qualified. The K-12 educational system was designed to track black children out of higher education at every stage with inferior schools, substandard curriculum, and low expectations. For most black children, especially if they are poor, the system was not set up to provide them with adequate college preparation. Affirmative Action was of no use to most of them. However, it cracked open the doors for the exceptionally lucky few like me, but literally opened the flood gates of higher education and job opportunities for the academically prepared Asian students and white females.
As black people finally realize just how rigged the system has been against us, we are finally taking steps to increase our numbers in higher education, corporate America, and politics. The diversity, equity and inclusion policies found in medicine, education, and corporate America, designed to mitigate the actual harms of racism and white supremacy are under attack before their full benefits can be realized. The pre-Civil Rights racism and white supremacy that severely limited black opportunity, ravaged black communities, introduced drugs, denied access to the building blocks of generational wealth, underfunded schools, and destroyed black families with police brutality and incarceration were neither benign nor unfortunate policies of our historical pass. We are just digging out from their effects but there are some who want to drag us back.
It’s very clear to me that people need context for understanding that programs like Affirmative Action, and laws like the Voting Rights Act and fair housing and police reform and educational equity and the push for sentencing reform are not a form of reverse discrimination. Nor do they pretend that racism and discrimination never existed, and that the U.S. has always lived up to its ideal of a colorblind society as some would have us believe. The lingering white supremacists among us want to erase this context along with the history of discrimination in America as they work to pass policies that stop black and brown economic and social progress. They seek to introduce a false narrative that America is now and forever has been a fair country where hard work and ingenuity will make anyone rich.
I’ll conclude my family story here. Of course, I continued the challenge of being black in America as I raised my own children. I had to be just as bold of as my mother and on this Mother’s Day, I want to express my sincere love and gratitude to my late mother, Juanita Joni Ball, for raising me and being my biggest source of inspiration and my greatest advocate.