On the Failure of Integrated Neighborhoods and Schools

In 2007, Baldwin, New York was ranked 25th on CNN Money Magazine’s list of the top 100 places to live. A mark of honor no doubt. 2007 is also the year that my classmates and I said goodbye to our hometown and embarked on adventures that would take us to different parts of the country and the world. I took my talents to The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest universities in the country. Even back then, the smallness of Baldwin felt stifling to me. I had grown tired of being surrounded by the same faces since 6th grade. I told my mom that I wanted to go somewhere where I could meet someone new every day and Ohio State offered that and so much more.

Academically, I felt more than prepared for my classes at Ohio State. I entered college with 8 classes worth of credits thanks to the AP classes that I took at Baldwin High School. This leg-up allowed me to graduate college in four years with two separate bachelors degrees and no matter what happens, that is something I will always be grateful for. Socially, there were many societal realities that Baldwin shielded some of us from. We grew up in a kind of fabricated utopia. A nice, integrated, suburban public school where everyone worked together and got along. But just like all lies, the story of Baldwin unraveled eventually. In different ways and in different places and spaces in time, my classmates and I realized that much of Baldwin had been an illusion. We felt and saw through expanding minds and hearts that as children we had been subjected to inappropriate and racialized treatment at school and in our community.

We realized that some of our soccer, football, and little league coaches were hardened racists who masked their views by always being able to proclaim “my kid has black friends.” They were people who resented us for integrating their perfect white town to begin with. We realized that the comments that made our skin crawl and the hair on the back of our necks stand up were real slights and microaggressions, not imagined. We realized that our teachers and administrators were trained in the old-fashioned cultural deficit models of education and were thus woefully underprepared to offer us a just and equitable education or to see us in our full humanity. Maybe we didn’t face the kind of overt racism that would have garnered immediate objection, but we were emotionally and psychologically unsafe at school. This aside from the Blackface costumes that teachers repeatedly approved for publishing in senior year books in the 2000s. Blackface in yearbooks in Baldwin, New York, not in the deep south. My best friend and I have been friends since our Baldwin Eagles soccer days and we still lament over an incident in middle school where our social studies teacher kept the only three black girls in our honors class after class one day to notify us that the team of teachers met about us and considered us to be “the mean girls of the team.” We were children, 11 or 12 years old. Where was our guidance counselor or our parents during this verbal lashing? Why wasn’t the the other white girl involved spoken to? The answer is simple. The adultification of black girls meant that she saw us as aggressive women who needed to be put in our place. Over 20 years later we still recall and feel that incident clearly. We knew what it was about then even if we didn’t have the language for it. Our saving grace was that the three of us had each other. When my volleyball teammates said that I was only winning MVP awards because I was Black and tried to call me “Blackie” as a nickname, I had only myself to lean on. Some memories take up residence in our cells and thus never leave us.

Years after leaving I came back home to Baldwin. Donald Trump’s election and the racist rhetoric that became normalized as a result left me shaken. I vowed to do more than just complain online. I vowed to get involved in my community. But being involved as an adult has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Baldwin is full of racism and classism and that has disgusted me. I have participated in meetings where people have openly complained about the browning of Baldwin. I have listened to community “leaders” use racist and coded language to describe their neighbors. I looked on with shock and dismay as a festival celebrating the food, culture, and music of the African Diaspora was treated with the same suspicion as an armed gathering of the Black Panther party (although neither is actually suspicious). Too ethnic, too scary to white Baldwinites, because you know, gatherings of Black people always devolve into violence. “You know how your people are.”

Ultimately, these same individuals will “lead” Baldwin to nowhere in particular. Some of the same poorly trained teachers and administrators that my classmates and I contended with still proudly walk the halls of Baldwin’s schools, traumatizing another generation of Black and brown children, and the adults who could do something about it instead choose to position themselves as indifferent bystanders. Anyone who is not actively pushing back against racism is supporting it though, and that’s a reality whether people want to accept it or not. I used to have hope for community building and change but there is this uniquely American ideal that holding a mortgage on a house means you own the house and also the community. As long as people continue to perpetuate the idea that Baldwin belongs to some people and not to others nothing will change.

My biggest mistake with Baldwin is that I seem to have overstayed my welcome. Had I not come back I might have been able to hold on to the illusion for a little while longer. I may have been able to continue believing that this place was special in some way, better than other communities. Ultimately, I am planning my exit because once you see a place for what it is, it’s easy to trade it in for another place that’s just as flawed. The only hope Baldwin has given me is that some of my beautiful classmates, by virtue of having grown up with us, are committed to the humanity of black people. As adults they have positioned themselves as allies, people willing to listen, willing to learn, and willing to work. At their best, this is what integrated schools and communities can do, but integration on its own does nothing to liberate black and brown children and integrated schools and communities on their own offer nothing but illusions, fabrications and gaslighting. Baldwin is a shell of its 2007 self and, the past and present are inextricably linked in anti-racism work. Baldwin has a past that still demands reckoning. Sins that must be confessed. Stories that deserve to be told.