My earliest memories of my neighborhood involve double-dutch. My parents owned a brownstone in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem and jumping rope was a popular activity among the girls who lived in the apartment buildings at the end of the block. I couldn’t master jumping in between the ropes, and I was told that I was “double-handed” when I tried to turn. No one wanted me to turn for them because I favored one arm over the other and couldn’t get the rhythm right. I felt like an outsider among people who looked like me, and this is the first time that I was aware of differences in economics, class, and culture.
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| Ms. Gumbs's 5th Grade Class |
The public school that I attended was diverse in terms of race and economic background. However, when I was in 6th grade my parents decided to send me to private school. I went from feeling relatively privileged to feeling disadvantaged. Even though my father was a psychologist who owned his own consulting company and my mother was the Director of Information Technology at Riverside Church, it was clear that we did not have the same amount of money as my peers. When travelling to school, I remember feeling as if I entered the train station in one world and exited in another. Although, Harlem has changed tremendously in recent years, when I was growing up there were very few banks, restaurants, grocery or clothing stores. This was the 1980’s and 90’s in the midst of the crack epidemic. Mothers holding infants while they begged for money competed with students heading to City College for room on the sidewalk. Men walking like zombies looking for change in the gutter passed families heading home for dinner.
The neighborhood surrounding my new school, Columbia Prep, seemed to have none of those issues. Each weekday morning I exited the subway station at 96th and Central Park West, and walked quickly to the school on 93rd Street (just a few blocks from Dwight). Central Park was a beautifully maintained oasis from the city, and the towering apartment buildings were all guarded by serious looking doormen. Everyone seemed similar in respect to wealth as they rushed to school and work in austere uniforms of navy and grey.
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| 6th Grade |
At Columbia Prep, I was amazed by the difference between my old school and my new one. All of the classrooms were carpeted and full of light. Books were everywhere and I was thrilled to discover that they were all new. The food in the cafeteria included a salad bar, a sandwich station, options for hot food, and a frozen yogurt machine. While many of my peers took all of this for granted, I was well aware that it was not available to everyone.
This knowledge made me alternately guilty and angry. Why did I deserve to have restaurant quality food for lunch when my old friends were probably still eating half-frozen chicken nuggets and syrupy canned peaches from a styrofoam tray? Why were we being taught about the ideals of the American Revolution in an environment in which only a small segment of Americans were represented? Wasn’t the very concept of private school education undemocratic?
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| 6th Grade! Look at Mikita! |
I was not poor, but I was very aware of the sacrifice that went into sending me to private school. No one ever intentionally made me feel inferior because I was not rich, but I remember feeling resentful when students assumed that I came from Prep for Prep, an organization that recruits talented people of color from public schools, puts them through rigorous academic training, and places them in private schools. Why was it impossible to accept that I had applied and gotten in like everyone else? I also was irritated by the assumption that I was on full scholarship, and was therefore being done a favor. While I was on partial scholarship, my parents refinanced their home more than once to pay their portion of the tuition. And as far as I was concerned, Columbia Prep and I were doing each other a favor. They paid part of my tuition and I allowed them to tout how diverse their student body was.
I remember coveting the non-descript, yet obviously expensive clothes and accessories that my peers had. As I got older, I remember going out to fancy restaurants and envying the casual way that my friends spent money while I kept a running inventory of everything that I ordered in my head. Not having as much as other people lead to feelings of inadequacy. I think that part of the reason that I worked so hard in school was that getting good grades negated those feelings. Looking back, I recognize that all of the students at Columbia Prep were struggling with something. Some of the rich kids spent money on drugs that they used in the bathroom stalls, or spent hours agonizing over their weight. Money definitely did not equate with happiness, just as lack of money did not equate with depravity and depression. I wish that I had spent less time being envious.
In high school I had the opportunity to travel to several countries in Africa and the Middle East through a program called The International Youth Leadership Institute. My travels enabled me to fully understand the uniqueness of poverty in America. For example, in Senegal I lived in a community where there was no running water, and electricity was not guaranteed for more than a few hours a day. But for the most part, everyone within the vicinity lived the same way so they did not feel deprived. In America, the poor live within walking distance of the rich, and television seems to advertise what you can’t have unless you are wealthy. Have you ever driven down Madison Avenue? Within a block or two the entire neighborhood changes from the Upper East Side to East Harlem and the difference is shocking. In America, the distinctions of wealth and class are made sharper because they exist in such close proximity to each other.
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| Senegal |
Once I graduated from college, I decided that I wanted to be a teacher. In 2003, I began working at an Independent school in Harlem. Working in that school, I was exposed to a level of poverty that I had not been exposed to before. Even though I had been raised in Harlem, I had been sheltered. I knew that the girls on the block who played double-dutch didn’t have as much as I did, but I had no idea what their lives were like. At that school, I began to get an idea. Although, there were many middle-class students in my classes, I also had students who were living in shelters, and students who wore the same uniform every day because it was the only one they had. It seemed as if every year I went to the funeral of a student’s parent who had died, not because of violence, but because of lack of access to quality health care.
One thing that I learned teaching in Harlem is that the belief that people are poor because they don’t work is wrong. The parents of the poorest students in my school were often the ones working the longest, most difficult shifts, often over-night. They were also the ones working and going to school full time. This made it difficult for them to support their children’s education.
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| Classic Storefront |
Being at this new school has been wonderful because it has reassured me that 6th graders are similar in many respects, regardless of economic background. They love to eat snacks for breakfast, and they sneak to play video games and text their friends in between classes. They forget to put their heading on papers, and need to feel loved and appreciated by their teachers. However, children do not stay in Middle-School forever, and the kind of adults that they turn out to be is dependent on having a quality education that gives them insight into themselves, exposes them to the lives of others, and teaches them to see the connections between the two. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging differences between people, the problems come when we begin attaching value judgements to those differences.
Education is the key to bridging the economic gap in New York City, but first all of us, regardless of economic status, must appreciate what we have and acknowledge that the gap still exists.
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