‘I Love My Skin!’ Why Black Parents Are Turning to Afrocentric Schools

‘I Love My Skin!’ Why Black Parents Are Turning to Afrocentric Schools

While New York City schools are deeply segregated, some black families are choosing an alternative to integration. Thomas Lewis, a martial arts instructor, teaches a lesson at Little Sun People. The school has a new theme each month; in November, students studied human bodies with the help of a black pediatrician. The New York Times “I love myself!” the group of mostly black children shouted in unison. “I love my hair, I love my skin!” When it was time to settle down, their teacher raised her fist in a black power salute. The students did the same, and the room hushed. As children filed out of the cramped school auditorium on their way to class, they walked by posters of Colin Kaepernick and Harriet Tubman. It was a typical morning at Ember Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, an Afrocentric school that sits in a squat building on a quiet block in a neighborhood long known as a center of black political power. Though New York City has tried to desegregate its schools in fits and startssince the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the school system is now one of the most segregated in the nation. But rather than pushing for integration, some black parents in Bedford-Stuyvesant are choosing an alternative: schools explicitly designed for black children. Afrocentric schools have been championed by black educators who had traumatic experiences with integration as far back as the 1960s and by young black families who say they recently experienced coded racism and marginalization in integrated schools. Both groups have been disappointed by decades of efforts to address inequities in America’s largest school system. “Some of us are pro-integration, some of us are anti- and others are ambivalent,” said Lurie Daniel Favors, a member of Parenting While Black, a newly formed group of Brooklyn parents. “Even if integrated education worked perfectly — and our society spent the past 60-plus years trying — it’s still not giving black children the kind of education necessary to create the solutions our communities need.” Children of any race may apply to an Afrocentric school, though they are overwhelmingly black. Some have sizable numbers of Hispanic students — Ember, which goes from kindergarten to eighth grade and is about a third Hispanic, incorporates Spanish into the students’ morning affirmation — but the schools typically have few or no white applicants. The half-dozen or so Afrocentric schools in central Brooklyn, in which about 2,300 children are enrolled, include private and charter schools, which require applications and do not admit students through geographical zones, and public high schools, which are also unzoned. The schools are run and staffed mostly by people of color, and tend to have high graduation rates and standardized test scores at or above the city average. With the city’s approval, any principal can adopt a black-centric curriculum — with black teachers, and a focus on black culture in literature, history and art classes — as long as the school complies with state educational standards. Though Afrocentric schools have a uniquely comprehensive approach, many of New York’s 1,800 public schools have specialized themes. There are engineering, math and culinary schools. Others have Albanian, Urdu or Bengali bilingual programs. Afrocentric schools aim to empower black children in ways that traditional schools in America historically have not. Though integration advocates want the same, some parents and educators across the country believe high-quality Afrocentric schools can achieve that goal in a different way — by asserting black power, pride and excellence close to home. And though a recent study found that some Afrocentric charter schools are low-performing, they remain popular among parents and many educators. Milwaukee and Chicago both have prominent black-centric charter schools. In Georgia, some black parents have decided to home-school their children to help ensure they learn about black history. New Afrocentric public schools and programs have recently sprouted in Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif But even as the concept is spreading, decades of research have shown that integration can redistribute resources across schools and thus boost academic performance, and experts warned that abandoning integration could backfire. “Segregation leads to inequality,” said Andre Perry, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “You can’t just do that away. If you’re going to ignore this issue, it will come back to haunt you.” https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/nyregion/afrocentric-schools-segregation-brooklyn.amp.html