From “Dropout to Doctorate: Breaking the Chains of Educational Injustice” By Terrence Lester, PhD
Long before I had any real knowledge about Black history and struggle, I would often ask my teachers at my school, Mary McCloud Bethune Elementary and Chapel Hill Elementary, why Black people had to suffer like Rodney King. Unfortunately, we weren’t learning much about Black history in school. While my teachers would occasionally, briefly point toward Black people who broke through the oppression, these lessons were not in-depth enough to help my young mind understand why oppression needed to be broken through. Despite the teachers’ efforts to identify people who had overcome the injustices of racism, I still felt like something was off – I couldn’t fully grasp the weight of history. And while I believe educators shielded me and my peers from the full truth, it ultimately contributed to burying history and keeping me unaware. All I knew was that those barriers were established long before I arrived.
And furthermore, if this was the landscape that I had to navigate, what about the other Black or Brown children who, like me, were born into poverty in the 1980s and stepped into a world already steeped in such deep-seated challenges? My childhood, sprinkled with dreams and innocence, was also shadowed by a cloud of history that contained systemic injustice, trauma, terror, and fear. Every blow Rodney King took felt like a collective blow to the Black community, each reminding those who watched about the mountains and hurdles we were still facing simply because of the color of our skin. As a child immersed in poverty, the full weight and complexity of this history journeyed with me every single day as I attempted to break the chains of systemic injustice and not get caught up in the cycle of the New Jim Crow.