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Over the course of her freshman year, Yarde felt her mental health deteriorate. Panic attacks became regular occurrences. She often felt overwhelmed and ran to the bathroom to cry. Racist remarks from other students – such as one student’s comment that his mother would rather he be gay than date a Black girl – wore her down.
Yarde begged her mother to let her transfer to a different school, but her mother encouraged her to stay. As the youngest of 10 children, and the first to attend a specialized high school, she felt significant pressure not only to stick it out but also to perform well academically.
And she has. She is graduating with a 3.8 GPA, and she will start college in the fall at Northeastern University in Boston
Last edited by jonbenson; 06-22-2021 at 03:02 PM..
Sorry, I don't feel that sorry for her. She's welcome to leave and switch to some mediocre majority-black school if her mental health is so shaky that her main need is to blend in.
Maybe someone should have shown her footage of the courageous black students trying to integrate schools in the 1950s.
Cool, cool. We're friends with a Polish and Trini couple, a good friend and best maid at our wedding is of Jamaican descent, and I went to college and am friends with several Jamaicans. Clearly they all missed your memo, so I'll try passing that on to them and their parents given your extensive knowledge of the Caribbean Black community.
I'm generalizing but that doesn't mean it's incorrect. It also doesn't mean it's true in 100% of cases.
High school days are filled with anxiety and fear. Some more so than others. Kids are trying to fit in while at the same time navigating in the young adult world. I bet you could do this with 50% of the current graduating high school students. Each will have their own laundry list of things that caused them angst. Teachers, homework, sports, fashion, parties, classmates and a myriad of other panic inducing situations.
Cool, cool. We're friends with a Polish and Trini couple, a good friend and best maid at our wedding is of Jamaican descent, and I went to college and am friends with several Jamaicans. Clearly they all missed your memo, so I'll try passing that on to them and their parents given your extensive knowledge of the Caribbean Black community.
Most white folks have very little to no understanding of how disorienting, discouraging, and sometimes plain ugly it can be for a black person to go to an elite, predominantly white/Asian school, where many of the kids and a lot of the teachers will doubt your intellectual capacity, no matter what hoops you jumped through or tests you took to get there. They'll assume you're poor when you're decidedly working- or middle-class, assume you're an athlete and start asking which team you're on, assume that you've never been on a vacation anywhere outside of the city, think that you don't have a father, only a mother, wondering do you really need sunburn protection because you're black, assume you live in a horrible rat-infested slum, when your apartment is actually quite nice..... and on and on and on.
In short, her story strikes me as absolutely true and believable because I know so many folks who this has happened to--including me and most recently my son. He had to go through the same s**t not too many years ago when he was admitted to an elite public middle school here in Manhattan that had only a handful of black students. The first day he had to curse out a white girl who looked at him and snidely asked "How did YOU get in here?" It was not pretty. But that sort of thing that happened to my son and to this girl. It happens all the time in similar situations, and I can guarantee anybody here, it's not all in her head.
This attitude is why a good number of smart black and Hispanic kids don't even want the specialized high schools. Sometimes they'll get scooped up by a private school offering tuition help, and where instead of a student body that's 2% black, there may be one that is double or triple that share. Not a lot, but the higher number does make life easier, and when that happens academic success is easier. Some academically talented kids skip the SHSAT altogether and prefer selective high school programs that are more diverse, like Columbia Secondary or Beacon High School-- or predominantly black/ Hispanic and high-performing schools like Manhattan Center For Science and Mathematics in East Harlem. In short, there are a lot of smart black kids who just don't want to put up with that crap. And parents who don't want them to have to.
Kudos to Ms. Yarde. I hope she's happy at Northeastern. And that the black kids following her at the specialized high schools will have an easier time of it than she did.
Last edited by citylove101; 06-22-2021 at 07:05 PM..
Why should a kid have to fight through that kind of bull**** just to get a decent education?
They shouldn't I just think she's mostly full of it
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