What I Learned in Integrated Schools

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This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.

I was not raised to see race. My mother was very proud of the fact that her class was the first integrated class at her high school. In fact she’d be very disappointed in how I view things now. She wouldn’t be lying if she protested that she didn’t raise me that way.

It was easy not to be the way I am now when I was attending an all-white private school or a majority-white school up north. Public school back home down south was a much more eye-opening experience.

I had my first black teacher in fifth grade. She was a math teacher, and I failed her class for the first half of the year. I had never failed any class before. I was an A/B honor-roll student and one of the smartest in the school. I failed for small things like not showing my work or having answers marked wrong because she claimed they were illegible. That sort of thing. I had to take tutoring in math, which sent me into a panic attack because my grades were very important to me.

It wasn’t until middle school, when I started getting bullied for specifically being white, that I started to become aware of racial differences. Once, a girl shoved me down in the hallway and said “Move, white bitch!” After a black boy threatened to shoot me and the school did nothing, I had to switch schools. I went to a private school for a year and later was homeschooled.

I went to public high school for only a single year. During that time, someone burned down the band room. There were rumors of gang members hiding guns in the burned room. Some white kids who had become aware started a gang they called the redneck nation. How some people make it out of public high schools without becoming aware is a real mystery to me. Maybe it’s just because I went to majority-non-white public schools for most of my life.

You learn to cope. You learn to adapt, but you don’t ever forget. It’s always there in the back of your mind. Always on high alert, you read everything into every interaction when you are aware. Because once, you allowed yourself to forget for just a moment and got burned.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, or about your firsthand experience with race, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Please feel free to use a pen name and send it to us here.