My mother also had another daughter. The way my birth story goes, while she was delivering me, my grandfather was in emergency surgery because of his appendix. My mother got to go home and he and I stayed in the hospital and came home with nurses to take care of us. I had a heart murmur that required at-home medical care. The family joke is that he delivered me and brought me home. We were inseparable. He would take me to upstate New York to visit the farms he owned and then down to the beach house in New Jersey to enter me in baby beauty contests. He would drive me down to Drakes Branch, Virginia to meet my great great grandmother (his wife's grandmother’s mother). She asked me to call her Oma (The oldest mother). I remember running through tall grass and even though she was very old she was strong enough to pick me up. Oma would tell me stories of picking tobacco and dreaming about me. A child that was free. She told me about her bargaining with God so she could withstand the beatings and live long enough to meet me. She would say, “I prayed for you child and here you are!” Oma lived long enough to meet and take pictures with my older sister’s daughter. Her great great great granddaughter.
My father’s mother was a Native American. Grandma Chrissy. She was very caring, always happy to spend time with me but she was sad every day all day. Eventually when I got older she told me her story. “She was blessed to have seven children but the “white” man took 5 of them from her.” She ran up North and claimed that she was a negro because back then no one wanted negro children. She asked me to find her children one day and tell them she loved them and that she never forgot them. I was able to honor her wish years after her death.
I never felt different or less than or othered until I started school. I started out in a private school wearing a uniform, and to me, looking like everyone else in my class. But my teacher never liked me. My work was always wrong. I didn’t stand in line correctly in the hall. I didn’t clean my desk enough to go play during recess. I was just a “bad” little girl as she would say. I asked why she thought I was bad and she called me up to her desk and she hit me multiple times across my hands. I was embarrassed, scared, and in pain. But what I remember most about the incident is the new “understanding” that I was a bad girl.
Fast-forward to my youngest daughter Destiny. In her first grade classroom she asked her teacher “How did Christopher Columbus discover America if there were people already living here?” Her teacher said she was being rude and defiant and bad and made her change her green card to red. Destiny has told me that from that point on she “knew” she was a bad girl. And the teacher mistreated her for an entire year. This same teacher would confront her in the hall and on the playground her entire time in elementary school.
Our education system was never created for BIPOC children. Especially our Black children. What I have come to witness is that Black people are expected to be grateful for any education that’s available, and to accept the racism and a white-washed history that is built into it. We are made to believe that white people automatically live in great neighborhoods and go to great schools whereas Black people “get” to live in a good neighborhood and go to good schools if we work real hard and pull ourselves up.
It’s time for an upgrade that starts with a reboot. We need healing to happen first. Then, and only then, can we move forward. My hope for The Destiny Education Project is that we radically change our education system by supporting our children, teachers, and staff.