School of Hard Knocks

I’ve had a lot of surprises throughout my life, but the biggest surprise came when I was a senior in high school many, many, many, did I say many, years ago.

I went to a predominantly white school in the rural South. There were six African American girls in my senior class including me, and three African American boys. My entire senior class consisted of 348 students. Be that as it may, we were friends with everybody. To be honest, during that time, for whatever reason we didn’t see color. We knew that after school and after school related activities, we didn’t venture into their neighborhoods and they didn’t venture into the “Color Section” of town.

One day I was talking to one of my dearest friends. (We’re still the best of friends today.) Her name was Debbie. I met Debbie when we were in the 1st grade. Debbie was this corky looking white girl with red hair and freckles that invited me to her Pizza party at Pasqual’s Pizza, when it was not heard of for a black child to be at a white child’s birthday party. Anyway, we were looking at our senior class schedule to see if we were in some of the same classes, and I notice that Debbie had Calculus and Economics, while I had Algebra 2 and Chemistry. I said, “Debbie, how did you get those classes?” She said, “They were on the curriculum.” I was like, “Well, we have the same curriculum, but I didn’t see those on mine.” I really did think too much about it until I was talking to two other African American Students. I asked if they had Calculus and Econ on their curriculum. They each say no. We discuss the classes that Debbie was taking and decided to bring it to Debbie’s attention. Once we compared “our” curriculum to a few of the other white student’s curriculum, we discovered that we had different curriculums. Talk about a wake up call.

Lesson learned: Integration was an illusion of inclusion.

Submitted by: Torria