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

[Idaeo]

“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 starts since 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.

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

 

[Devil Plisken…CMS]

When they put one in Harlem let me know I’ll check em out

 

[Cadillac]

read years ago many black people are doing homeschooling

 

[Afro]

I like this idea.

You can't call it "racist" because they accept all applicants

 

[Hejdå]

awesome

 

[you're NOT "n!ggas"]

Definitely noticed the uptick down here


I'm genuinely asking here, cuz I'd imagine this is the type of rhetoric DOS is against... Would a DOS school be considered 'slave-centric'?

 

[96Blue]

DOPE.

 

[nate*]

yessir

 

[Scuti]

i remember the day my younger sis came home from school crying
momma asked her what was wrong
she told her im the only girl out of my friends with skin like this
when i heard that it just fukked with me
that was when she was in like 1st grade
we went to a nearly all white school
if you can, surround your kids with other black kids
AND teachers. I remember half of those old cac teachers would treat me and my bros like leftovers

 

[EndDomination]

Just read the article about an hour ago.
I'm in full support of this

 

[Fillerguy]

I went to one in the 90s

 

[reasonable_doubter]

it wont help the boys..... black boys are better off in all male schools, mixed or all black....... just look at the photos of the kids, see any boys??? sigh........

 

[InGodWeTrust]

Full support of this.

Needs to be one in every major city to start.

 

[Crude Abolitionist]

Our rise is inevitable.

 

[⠝⠕⠏⠑]

Hope for the future. Who is cutting onions in here?!