I am currently reading a book called “Cross-X: The Amazing True Story of How the Most Unlikely Team from the Most Unlikely of Places Overcame Staggering Obstacles at Home and at School to Challenge the Debate Community on Race, Power, and Education.” I kid you not, that is the name on the cover. Cross-X is what adorns the title page inside the book, so we will go with that for the remainder of this post.

I don’t actually remember why I requested this book from the interlibrary loan system. I was actually quite surprised and a little bewildered when it arrived and I had to make a special trip up to the main library to retrieve it. I am, however, quite glad to be reading it. It’s engaging and it discusses two very deep issues with which I have been grappling nearly my entire life: education and racism.

I am Puerto Rican; sometimes I joke with my husband, who grew up in the Bay Area of California, that it’s too bad I am not Mexican since he loves Mexican food so much. He once asked me a question about tortillas and I looked at him and asked him “You do realize that I am Puerto Rican, right? What do I know about making tortillas? I buy them at the supermarket, just like you.”

I grew up in the north central Bronx in an area that has seen a gradual shift in demographics over the last 30 years. When I was a young child, I remember being surrounded by a predominantly older, Irish Catholic, demographic. I went to a very diverse public elementary school. While the majority of students were apparently Latino (I wasn’t exactly taking a census), there were a very good number of Albanian and Yugoslavian refugees, Italian Americans, Irish Americans, African Americans, and Korean immigrants who spoke no English. It was predominantly Catholic and I remember that there was one Jewish boy, Jack. Student achievement was relatively high, though the school district still tracked students–meaning, if you tested high, you were placed in classes with other students who tested high, and if you tested low, well fuck you.

I always scored extremely well on standardized tests. I was not only simply familiar with the subject matter, but I had a knack for “gaming” the tests by understanding the underlying question so I could eliminate answers that were incorrect based on the phrasing or other factors. I typically only missed 1 or 2 questions on each annual exam. It meant that each year I was in the high score track, was put in gifted and talented programs, and almost skipped a grade (which my parents decided against because it would put me in the same grade as my brother and they worried, rightly, about social issues).

It also meant that I had guidance, engaged teachers, access to resources, and advocates, as well as a classroom that was also generally free of constant disruption. There was one girl, however, who had behavioral issues even though she was quite smart. She was black, she was in foster care, and she practically lived in the guidance counselor’s office.

The other tracks, however, fairly teemed with under achieving students and behavioral issues. We also had a thriving special ed and gates program (unlike GATES in California which appears to be the gifted and talented class, our Gates classrooms were gateways between grades, for students who hadn’t quite passed a previous grade, but wouldn’t benefit from being left back due to disability or other challenges; these were in-between classes, like a grade 4-5 classroom, serving a range of students rather than a specific grade).

I took my track for granted because I had never been in danger of moving down a track; my testing was always consistently high and if anything, I occasionally suffered from boredom in the classroom. I was a fast paced kind of kid and devoured material, feeling no need to linger on it.

In fifth grade I was tapped for a program called Prep for Prep that would help minority students in public school bridge the gap between public education and opportunity and private education and opportunity. For two summers and one school year, I took extra, intensive coursework. During the school year I attended class on Wednesday nights and Saturdays. I took Latin, Algebra, Problems in Modern American Society. I was writing 10 page term papers at age 12. All fabulous things, but things that singled me out in my community as different.

I found myself the butt of a collective cold shoulder. I suffered harassment, kindled by an overreaction to something stupid I did that upset my fragile place in the social hierarchy. Mobs of children followed me home, threateningly, menacingly. I got into a fist fight. The vice principal walked me home and my father even once went to another parent’s home and threatened to kill everyone in their family because their daughter’s harassment (and let’s face it, betrayal, as she had been like a second daughter to my father) of me had become so severe. After that, the ostracism dominated my life–the active abuse had stopped, but the social pariah status took up permanent residence.

A common thread during that time was the epithet used to describe me as a preppy bitch. Somehow, I had risen above my station by daring to not only achieve in public school, but to move outside of it to aspire to something greater by attending one of New York’s finest independent schools. It has never been something I understood, which is why this book resonates with me. It describes some of the same experiences I had. That up until about 6th grade, academic achievement was still socially acceptable, as long as you didn’t go too far with it, take it too seriously, applied other social norms (such as appropriate style of dress), and eventually gave it up for reality later in life.

I rejected that idea of reality. My reality would not include teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of high school, or working as a secretary watching other people make decisions. I knew this because my parents were adamant that it not be so. Yet somehow, there was an undercurrent in my social circle that my future would be decent, but nothing special. The worst kind of self-fulfilling prophecies are the ones people make about their own mediocrity.

Joe Miller’s book Cross-X hit a nerve with me here. Joe writes:

“Of all the things that disturbed [Jane Rinehart] about teaching in the inner city, the worst was the way the kids limited their own experiences. It was as if they’d resigned themselves to a narrow cultural cell, beyond which lie bogeyman and perilous pitfalls. Since coming to Central, she’d read a number of books about teaching minority children, many of which explained that such kids often resist education because they have internalized racial stereotypes about themselves. One of the best of these was Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed…. Freire observed that oppressed people often identify with their oppression. It had become their way of life, and they tended to shun experiences that might lift them out of it. Rinehart often complained that her students locked themselves in a ‘comfort zone.’ They would only listen to a small selection of music, watch just a handful of TV shows, read few if any books…, and travel only to familiar haunts, usually ones frequented by other blacks.”

It’s a powerful observation and one that I have often made myself, less eloquently. Other kids resented me for stepping outside of their comfort zone. I was surrounded by intelligent young people who were fully as capable as I of getting out of the ghetto, except for a singular unwillingness to leave the comfort zone. There was no peculiar alignment of forces pushing them to experience and accept new ideas or ways of life; I had several forces find me by sheer, blind luck. I had two parents at home, and while my childhood was dismally depressing for the most part, anxiety inducing almost constantly, and gravely insulated from true interaction at the best of times, I did have exposure to ideas that infected me with a desire to see things bigger than what I found in my everyday circle of life. The people at Prep for Prep positively dragged me kicking and screaming out of my comfort zone, exhorting me to greater achievements.

My peers in the Bronx public school system did not share this sense of urgency and adventure and in fact often derided me and persecuted me for it. It was behavior that always astounded and confused me. These kids were smart! What changed from elementary school to middle school? Something in the environment tightened the sentiments that glorified underachieving and scoffed at anyone who wanted to make their lives better. I remember feeling so angry to see some of my former classmates fail and then blame institutionalized racism for their condition. It looked to me as though these intelligent, charismatic children weren’t even trying.

To me, racism was not an apparent factor; it always felt like a cop out. These kids had many of the same resources and opportunities that I did, though by far not all. Their failures seemed directly attributable to their own actions and poor decision-making. They chose to cut class, do drugs, have unprotected sex, and fail out of school.

In retrospect, however, I think I may have simply not understood the trickle down effect of years of oppression on a marginalized people. Even to my own family, who are very modest stock. My parents had potential for more than they had, but they didn’t have the ingrained habits of those who are habitually accustomed to money and acclimated to success. My parents didn’t understand credit, weren’t good with finances, and were disorganized. They helped us to read and to strive, but they couldn’t teach us basic skills like washing clothing on a schedule, keeping a clean and organized house, maintaining a schedule, visiting family, or how to save money and build wealth.

These skills are all characteristic of functional, affluent, predominantly white households. People who derive from historically marginalized people in the United States often lack resources and historical experience to pass these basic skills to their children; the same ingrained senses of confusion and failure self-perpetuate until it is no longer simple mediocrity looming, but an inability to reasonably cope with everyday life. These same people sometimes become not simply poor but destitute to the extent that it persists for generations. Take a look at the Mississippi Delta region or areas of Appalachia to see how some of our brethren live. It is infuriating and heart breaking.

How much of it IS ingrained racism? The weight of hundreds of years of marginalization, deprivation, and systematic oppression and resistance to progressive ideals? Giving up before you start in order to avoid the failures associated with factors outside of one’s own control. How much is a protective mechanism created as a response to societal rejection? In reading this book, I am much more concerned that the amount is much higher than I ever dreamed.

I am about halfway through the book, but I can say that I would place this on recommended reading lists, especially if you are at all interested in the plight of education and the marginalized in this country.