"We don't accept students from Trenton"
Dear Readers,
This week, our intern Jayda Hinds writes about growing up in Trenton, Black lives, and the gaps in America’s education:
I grew up with a single mother in Trenton, New Jersey. My parents divorced when I was two years old, and my father has been absent from my life ever since. For much of my childhood, my mom did not allow me to leave the house. She didn’t want me to have snowball fights with kids on the block, or walk to my friend’s houses after school. Most of my fun was had in my backyard. When I did go out, it was to help her with Sunday morning errands -- grocery shopping, Home Depot, or a quick trip to the mall. What I knew best was my little house in Trenton.
When I was around seven years old, my mom took me to her co-worker's holiday party, about two hours away. As we exited the highway and got closer to the party, I noticed that this residential area wasn’t remotely like my town. The houses were five times as big, for one. Strangely, there were no sidewalks, and many of the homes had basketball courts or swimming pools in their backyards.
When I walked into the party, it didn’t take long for me to notice that my mom and I were the only people of color. Like the neighborhood outside, everyone inside the house was white. My afro and tan skin were blatantly obvious to me for the first time. I wanted to go back home.
That trip changed me.
As I got older, I realized why my mom sheltered me so much. Trenton has plenty of parks and delicious Caribbean food at almost every block, but it is also dangerous because of the violence. By the time I was nine, I no longer had to wonder what those loud piercing noises were at night. I knew they were gunshots. My mom didn’t want me to know the realities of living in an urban community like ours. And for years, I did not know at all.
As I began to venture farther from home, I began to register that poorer neighborhoods were most likely to have predominantly Black and Brown communities. Whiter neighborhoods were more likely to have bigger schools with after school programs, supplies, and extracurriculars. They had lacrosse, gymnastics, an arts club, or a Latin club. Black areas like Trenton had struggling public education systems, with no budget allocated for these things. Eventually, the Department of Education approved a rapid expansion of charter schools in Trenton, but all this did was serve to drain Trenton’s already low budget. The magnet of poverty seemed only to attract more scarcity.
Most of the libraries in Trenton were also defunded and shut down. One day my mother took my brother and I to our county library, but were denied access to books because they “did not accept children from Trenton.” When I graduated middle school, my mom wanted to see if I was eligible to attend Nottingham High School, which was less than two miles away from me, on the border of Trenton. They, too, “did not accept students from Trenton.”
Grocery stores with healthier options, like Wegmans or Trader Joe’s, were also always closer to whiter neighborhoods. Gyms and therapists were more common there too. Neighborhoods known as Black neighborhoods, and the people within them, simply did not have the same resources for physical health, mental health, and education -- three vital building blocks for the success of any human being.
Now in my early 20s, I have come to sympathize with my mom’s bizarre parenting style. America is one country with two very different systems. She just didn’t want me to know I belonged to the system that was treated worse. She didn’t want us to live in a town with a lower education system and higher crime rate. No one wants that, of course, but she was a single mother with two children, and no outside financial support. Her choices were extremely limited.
So often, the lack of resources in our Black communities relay a message to us from childhood onward that we don’t matter “as much” in comparison to our neighboring towns. This is why the Black Lives Matter movement resonates so strongly. The protests being seen throughout the country were set off by the murder of George Floyd, but peel back one senseless murder and you will see underneath systematic racism on a scale so vast it holds within it in a million lives like mine, growing up in Trenton.
Simply put, racial inequality continues to be the norm in America. The consequences are far-reaching. Though I managed to leave my hometown, there are Black kids like me growing up in the same circumstance now, as generations did before me. They live with poor housing, a lack of public health infrastructure, an inferior education system, low family incomes, and a criminal justice system biased against them.
Despite our limited means, my mom tried to do everything she could to help me further my education. I’m now in college at American University in D.C. In one of my literature classes, 10 out of the 13 students were from New Jersey, like me. When I tell my classmates where I am from, they usually have a general idea of my town already. One day during an icebreaker, I stood up to tell the class about myself and where I was from. One student exclaimed, “Ew! Why would you want to be from dirty Trenton?”
I looked at him and said, “You see me right now. Do you think I’m a dirty person?” His tone changed immediately and he apologized to me afterwards. You see, he wasn’t thinking about individual people who might be from Trenton, but rather a generalized idea from negative stereotypes about Black and brown people.
Throughout my life, I’ve heard different variations of what that classmate said to me. Most kids I grew up with dreamed of immaculate suburbia, with white picket fences and a high school that could cultivate their interests. But that was not our reality, nor a choice. Systematic racism plays a large role in where any one person ends up.
There are different kinds of education. Those who grow up in hometowns like mine learn about systematic racism early -- like I did, at nine years old. Some students I go to college with, on the other hand, still haven’t learned about it, because they have never had to. Even people much older than me often don’t acknowledge the realities of systemic racism. Disparity is a lot easier to ignore when you are on the right side of it.
The guy in my college class who called my hometown dirty ended up sitting next to me for the entire semester. He eventually put aside the stereotypes he had learned from the media or his parents or other people, and through conversations with me learned about who I was as an individual and the reality of life as a Black person in this country. He realized that what he thought he knew about Black people was wrong. Never would I have imagined a friendship would stem from an ignorant statement, but it did.
I know that the education a kid growing up in Trenton has available isn’t great. But I also know that the education of the rest of the country has grave deficits as well, especially when it comes to race.
More people need to be willing to listen to the stories of Black people, instead of creating false narratives about an entire race. Seek out Black authors, Black films, and Black stories. The mainstream media does not portray Black lives in a considerate or favorable light. We are most often portrayed as “poor,” “loud,” or “thugs.” Black people as a group are not “okay” with the lack of resources our communities have. The fact that Black communities experience inequality at a higher rate than other races is the product of an entire system that profits off marginalized communities. Set aside what you think you know about Black Lives, listen, and learn.
-Contributed by Jayda Hinds, Lioness Media Intern
What We’re Reading This Week…
Speaking truth to power always comes with risk, but for one couple that runs an e-commerce newsletter, things turned dark soon after they reported on a lawsuit against eBay. Unhappy with the coverage, employees at the company began a campaign of terror, mailing the newsletter editor items you might expect to score on a dark web version of an online e-commerce auction site - from live cockroaches to a bloody pig face mask. Ultimately, this stalking culminated in a spy campaign, and eventual firings and arrests. But it does leave one to wonder, where does one acquire a box of live cockroaches?
Car-lite streets, wider bike lanes, pedestrian pavilions, and permanent sidewalk cafés were all part of a vision for how we could radically reconfigure life in our cities for a healthy, happier future, post-Covid. Now, those same city streets are filled with protestors and shattered glass. We are confronting an uncomfortable reality we knew all along, but had for decades been conveniently ignoring. Lioness client Gabe Klein of CityFi writes this week about the ways racism was built into the very streets we live on today, and calls for cities across America to mitigate the harm done by changing the very way we think about urban life.
Announcing Amplifying Black Voices Call for Submissions!
Are you a Black-owned business or non-profit doing something good for the world? Are you a Black individual with an untold story to tell, or a unique take on current events, who wants to be published in the media? Do you want to get the word out about your product, service or social issue but need a strategy?
Lioness is offering our services free of charge to up to five Black-owned businesses or Black individuals this month. If you or anyone you know is interested in applying to be considered, find out more and fill out the application here.
Lioness In The News
Take a peek at Lioness Founder Ariella’s op-ed, published in FastCo yesterday: Employment laws have long been outdated. Here’s how they have worked against antidiscrimination policies. She argues that, even when anti-discrimination laws are in place, at-will employment and other policies like non-disclosure agreements and non-competes can strip employees of their power, allowing subtler forms of workplace discrimination to persist. (If you have a story about a workplace issue you want elevated or told somehow, you know where to find us!)
That’s our newsletter for this week! We look forward to hearing from all of you, with any reader responses, tips, or unsung stories of your own to share - reply to this email to share them with us.
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-The team at Lioness