E9: School Daze

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

In January of 2020, Bloomberg CityLab published an article about a new study from Pittsburgh researchers naming the best and worst cities for black women. Among cities with at least 100,000 black women, Cleveland came in dead last in terms of livability. In this city with a nearly 50% black population, this news drops like a bomb, and reactions were mixed.

[Music Playing]

Do you think Cleveland is really the worst for black women? And what do you say?

Female:

“I say …

Female:

“It depends on the person they ask.”

Female:

“When I dropped it in one of my black girl group chats, the emojis were just eye rolls.”

Female:

“I'm not surprised. Not even a little.”

Female:

“It’s heartbreaking and also embarrassing.”

Female:

“Is it like this everywhere? Is it me? Like …

Female:

“This city will make or break you.”

Female:

“City of black women that are looking around at their outcomes, their future, their past, and saying, this city makes me anxious.”

Female:

“If anybody's out there listening in Cleveland, please get out.”

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

On Living For We, we talk to Cleveland's black women from all walks of life, from the CEO of one of our major healthcare systems to self-starting entrepreneurs, judges, lawyers, doctors, artists, students, and mothers who've experienced loss. We share stories from these women as change makers and architects of their own futures celebrating their victories, challenges, and personal growth along the way.

So, is it really true what they say? Is Cleveland deserving of the least livable title? And what can we do to make lasting improvements for black women in our city?

I'm Marlene Harris-Taylor. And this is Living For We, a project of Connecting the Dots between Race and Health, from Ideastream Public Media.

Leah Hudnall:

This grass lot used to be a elementary school. This is where my mother and my aunts went to elementary school and so did I.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Also, the school was right across the street from your house.

Leah Hudnall:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

I'm with Leah Hudnall, outside her grandfather's home in Cleveland's Lee Harvard neighborhood. You may remember Leah from episode five, one of our workplace episodes. She's very proud that her granddad purchased this home when it was newly built in 1969.

Leah Hudnall:

I walked out the door and went to school. I would come home for lunch, bring my dog out for recess. That's why I tell people like, I grew up in the city of Cleveland, but what that means to certain people is not always what our experiences were. I feel like I had a childhood that rivaled any suburban childhood.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

By the 1970s, Lee Harvard was the destination of choice for black middle-class families. With its own thriving business district and robust community culture, Lee Harvard was teaming with young professionals and their families.

Now there's a big empty field across from Leah's family home, but that lot used to be Leah's elementary school, though it may be gone now. That doesn't change the wonderful memories from her time attending Emile B Desauze Elementary School.

Leah Hudnall:

And I was just talking to some of my childhood friends about our elementary school. We built a playground. We had a garden. We would come and pick vegetables from the garden on the weekend. And we just had things that now has all these terms for it, like environmental justice and all these things.

But then we were just at school. But we had a black woman principal. We had these banging black history month, like theatrical productions, like the parking lot. And you see how big the lot is. The lot would be full of cars.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Where was the parking lot?

Leah Hudnall:

So, this half was the parking lot, and that half was where the school was. And we would be jam packed for things like Black History Month productions and we would have costuming and design and we would be the Supremes and all these different Motown acts. But we were-

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

So, why did they tear the school down?

Leah Hudnall:

As a school board member, I have to be careful about my answer.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Don't give me the PC answer. Give me the real answer.

Leah Hudnall:

Well, Cleveland is declining in terms of enrollment in public schools. And so, there's about 67,000 school-aged children in the city of Cleveland right now.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

They couldn't have repurposed the building for something?

Leah Hudnall:

They could have.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

I’ll tell you the reason, it just kind of really strikes me is that in my hometown, Toledo, same thing, dwindling population. The school that I went to, the elementary school is a lot just like this now. So, it's just sad that …

Leah Hudnall:

It is.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

It's a familiar story. Dwindling population numbers and chronic underfunding leading to shutdown of schools. And in the process the complete destruction of black cultural hubs like Leah's school in Lee Harvard, which closed in 2012.

Black schools are taking a hit in Cleveland and have been for a while. Cleveland metropolitan schools have been consistently underperforming and unsupported, leading to a major exodus of black families of means to private schools and surrounding suburbs.

Despite Leah's ideal upbringing in the Lee Harvard neighborhood, she later found that the education she received in Cleveland public schools paled in comparison to the education kids in Cleveland suburbs were receiving. It all hit home after she went to college.

Leah Hudnall:

I went to Whitney M. Young, which at the time was a blue ribbon gifted and talented junior high school that-

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

You were gifted and talented.

Leah Hudnall:

So says Cleveland Public schools in the 90s. Yes.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

That’s awesome.

Leah Hudnall:

Yes. And I graduated from Cleveland School of the Arts, and I had decided early on that I wanted to go to a HBCU because I spent a lot of my free time watching A Different World reruns.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

I think A Different World was responsible for so many people going to HBCUs.

Leah Hudnall:

Yeah. For a lot of us. Yes. I remember sending in my $25 application fee. I worked at Zagara's after school, and I was waiting on the bus to take me from School of Arts to my job. And my mother called me and read the acceptance letter over the singular cell phone.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Yay.

Leah Hudnall:

And I was really excited about that. Again, not a lot of guidance. The programs that they have now weren't really in place, in terms of FAFSA guidance and things like that.

My grandfather and my mother dropped me off and my grandfather gave me $20, and he told me, “Be a lady.” And they drove off.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

And that was it.

Leah Hudnall:

And now I was in Washington DC though and-

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

On your own.

Leah Hudnall:

And I was determined to stay. Howard is a magical place. It's called the Mecca for a reason. And it reminded me of elementary school. Tom's 10,000 black folks just walking around on a mission, well-dressed. They smell good, their hair is popping and it's chicken on Wednesdays. And I'm sitting next to a senator and I'm sitting next to a biochemist, and it inspired me to want to step my own game up.

Unfortunately, though, when I got to Howard, I was quickly told that I had to take remedial courses at Howard. And so, in June you graduate, you're applauded. You have all these honors ribbons and AP ribbons and …

And then by August they're like, “Yeah, we know you broke, and you already don't have the money to pay for the regular course load.” And I remember going to the yard and calling my mother and I remember telling her, “I got to come home. I don't get tutored. I do the tutoring.” And she was like, “You get tutored today. You can't just leave because it's not going the way that you would like it to go.”

And so, that was the first moment that I had actually had an educational challenge.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

And so, you had that, but you were like, “Oh my God, I got to take remedial classes.”

Leah Hudnall:

I had that with the added pressure of cost, and you leave home like Leah's going to Howard, she's always been smart. And then you get there like, girl, you need to take an extra course because you don't know this, this or that.

I got connected with some students who were from Cleveland Heights who went to Howard. What I realized, I traded in my lived experience for their academic experience. They didn't know how to wash their clothes. They didn't know how to catch a transit system.

Let me say it like this, when Barbara Byrd-Bennett got on the news and said that because of the financial constraints Cleveland children would be on the RTA, I was 11 years out and I got on the bus, and it was a big deal in my household. And I remember my uncle saying, “She's going to have to ride it because they're not having school buses, so we might as well let her start now.”

And I remember at that time my uncle told me all of these street rules of what you do when you get on the bus, “You sit here, don't put that Walkman on your ear. Always be able to see all four corners. If you walk, turn around so many feet,” all these rules.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Be alert.

Leah Hudnall:

Be alert, be smart. And in his words, “Don't be a dummy.”

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

So, you got an early education in street smarts.

Leah Hudnall:

Yes. Which my now Howard classmates did not. And I was trying to figure out how I have a public education 10 minutes away from them and they can tutor me in calculus, but I don't know it. But I'm gifted and talented.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Leah may have envied the high school education some of her college classmates received in Cleveland Heights, but black families living in supposedly diverse Cleveland suburbs deal with their own struggles against unequal treatment for their kids.

Another school system on the east side, Cleveland Heights, grapples with equity issues and honors classes according to our next guest, Tait Manning. Tait is in college now, but just a couple years ago she was one of the few black students in the advanced classes at her high school.

Tait Manning:

In Cleveland Heights, a primarily black school, I was in mostly advanced courses, AP courses. And I was also involved in band. I happened to interact with a lot of white people because in Cleveland Heights, white people are the majority of the advanced classes, even though it is a primarily black school.

And so, I think in those settings I experienced a lot of microaggressions. And just in conversations about race, I saw that even the white people in Cleveland Heights who consider themselves liberal and interact with black people, they still don't totally get it. And they're still ignorant to a lot of things that I can see, and other black women can see that they don't understand.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Well, that's a really interesting dynamic. You have a majority black school, and majority white honors and AP. What's that about?

Tait Manning:

Part of it is they discourage a lot of black students from joining those classes. And also, white students are in their home life and at school provided with a lot more resources to advance their education. And they're already like two steps ahead.

At Cleveland Heights, a lot of people place more value on the white students' education, and they're given a lot more attention by teachers.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

You saw that personally?

Tait Manning:

I felt that personally. I saw that with my friends who were denied opportunities to be in those classes. Even if they wanted to, and even if they were capable of taking on that workload and that course content, they were dismissed by teachers and counselors who didn't believe that they could perform well in those classes or perform as well as white students.

In those classes, white students will also dominate conversations about racism and just different social issues and nobody really sees anything wrong with it a lot of the time because the teachers themselves are white as well. And so, they don't see what's wrong with that either.

Which is also what I appreciate about going to Howard is that it's very different there. Heights, I saw a lot of that, and it was incredibly frustrating for me to see them, I don't know, give opinions on things that they didn't really know anything about. And they felt very confident in their answers and their opinions, and I just didn't see it the same way as them.

I think a lot of black students, especially black students, that they didn't deem palatable enough for those classes were discouraged from enrolling in them. So, they didn't necessarily tell them, you can't take this class, but they told them, I don't think you can take this class. I don't think you're ready to take this class. I don't think you're smart enough to take this class.

It's things like that where it's like, even if they want to take the course, they lose all their confidence as soon as they hear that from a counselor.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Steering and discouragement from teachers and counselors can make a giant impact on black students’ confidence both academically and personally.

ChiChi Nkemere, one of our partners at Enlightened Solutions is also a former school teacher. She says there's no easy fix.

What did you hear from the women who you surveyed and spoke with about education?

ChiChi Nkemere:

Black women in Cleveland have been using education obviously as a means to an end. Our parents, our parents’ parents, everybody in any black family will tell you, especially as a woman, stay in them books and get to where you need to be.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Oh, yeah. They drill it into you.

ChiChi Nkemere:

They drill it into you. And whether it is a formal education or getting your trade, so studying to be a cosmetologist or a nail tech or whatever you end up being it's study, so that you can get the job and the career that makes you money, right?

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Yes.

ChiChi Nkemere:

Black women go in very clear-eyed and very steely focused about their education, but the folks that are providing that education don't see the seriousness with which black women take their education.

Look, steering, and discouragement were the two most prevalent themes that we saw in education, folks not believing that black women could attain or surpass their own dreams. Meaning you're asking a young black girl what she wants to do. She says she wants to be a doctor and you tell her you can be an STNA.

Or you're asking a young black girl like, oh, what do you like to do? She likes to draw. And you're like, well, you're not going to get a career doing that.

That lack of knowing that we have brilliance within this city and that brilliance is encapsulated in black women and black girls, it is to me the most unsurprising, but the most disappointing thing because it deals with our future. It deals with our economic prosperity and it deals with exactly what generations are going to look like here in this shrinking city, this shrinking region. What exactly are we going to do when all of our brilliance that is trained here leaves?

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Particularly at PWIs, predominantly white institutions where black educators are often sparse or non-existent, there's a lack of understanding or cultural competency as they say between students and teachers.

That's why people like our next guest, Dr. Shemariah Arki, are so important. Dr. Arki is an assistant professor of Pan-African studies at Kent State University and co-editor of the book Teaching Beautiful Brilliant Black Girls. Overall, how are black girls doing in the classrooms?

Shemariah Arki:

That's the question. We are not okay. We are not okay. While the goal of my research is to position classrooms as these spaces of radical transformation, we got to tell the truth about who they were really designed for and what they were designed to do.

To come into this space that was not built for me, that was intentionally actually designed to kill me, to annihilate my people, to keep us where we are on the bottom of everything, every social structure.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

You name it, we're at the bottom.

Shemariah Arki:

We're at the bottom. That's the state of education and many other social structures for us as black women. But here we are killing it in the spaces designed to kill us.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Right. And that's what's so fascinating, not just to me as a black woman. I mean, I love the fact that we're killing it. But I'm sure it’s perplexing to the world.

Shemariah Arki:

Very, very. Right, very. So, while we are doing well in particular spaces, even those of us who are doing well are struggling every single day to stay afloat.

We do what we do. When we show up as our full self, we make magic. So, that's not the hard part. The hard part is having to deal with the consistent oppressive structures, microaggressions. The consistent macroaggressions, ain't no more micros.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

One of the guests on the podcast talked about how she grew up in Cleveland. And even though she was like the honor student at her school, when she got to college, they were like, “You need to take some remedial classes.”

Shemariah Arki:

Thinking about the scenario that you just said and thinking about those black girls who have figured out how to do school. Bell Hooks taught us that there's a difference between schooling and education. You are understanding this at a superior cognitive level. Like your cognition is all the way. So, that's education. What you don't know how to do is school, you don't know how to study to take this test.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Right.

Shemariah Arki:

That's not measuring your cognition.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Right. She hadn't been taught in those classrooms in Cleveland how to take the test.

Shemariah Arki:

The system that we're in, we call it an education system, but it's a school system. People are packaged by age as if they're, this batch you come through, not according to what you like or how you learn or where you’re from.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

You're right, it’s structured by age. Everybody's not the same maturity level. Or they'll say, well this student Michaela is reading at an 11th grade level in the fifth grade, they're still going to pass her just onto the sixth grade.

Shemariah Arki:

Right. Because passing her along to the 11th grade would interrupt their whole system. It would dismantle their whole system and say, this can't be working.

So, instead of allowing Michaela to be the brilliant bright beam of light that we all know that she is including herself, she's lumped with this group and sent down the conveyor belt.

And so, maybe sometime at some point, Michaela will learn how to do school. Maybe at some point some will see Michaela as this bright beam of light as she is and say, “Hey, have you heard about this program or this scholarship?”

But what happens if nobody encounters Michaela? She continues going through the system. She becomes disenfranchised. Other things become more important to school. Other things become more entertaining, more enticing, more intellectually stimulating.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Because she's on the conveyor belt. When we have these subjective opportunities that are given to some students and not to others, when it's up to the counselors to decide who gets to go into the gifted program, do they pick Michaela?

Shemariah Arki:

Do they? Right. Because Michaela is bored in class, she was probably brushing her baby hair.

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

On her phone.

Shemariah Arki:

And she’s been sent to the office saying that she's grooming in class. Because there's this lack of cultural competence. Right?

Marlene Harris-Taylor:

Right. What do we have to do for Michaela, for all the other young black girls, for all the young black boys in these disenfranchised communities going to schools that are not resourced?

Shemariah Arki: