Dante de Blasio: How my HS was racist

Ayear after I graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 2015, the hashtag #BlackinBrooklynTech started appearing on my social media. Black students and recent alumni were sharing stories of overt acts of racism at the school.

The stories included a teacher laughing at a student when she shared her dream of becoming a doctor, white and Asian students using racial slurs to bully black students, and faculty members ignoring a student’s complaints after he was called the N-word and “monkey” by his peers.

The current and former students who drove the campaign were sick of having to defend their right to earn an elite education in the face of adversity from the students and faculty meant to support their success.

I understood exactly where my fellow black alumni were coming from. I’d had many of my own experiences. Some of them might seem innocuous. For example, I remember being the only black kid in many of my classes. However, other experiences displayed a racism that was all too common in the school.

Once, I was sitting near a loud group of white students during lunch when a black cafeteria worker walked over and asked the group to be quieter. As the cafeteria worker started to walk away, one of the white students asked her friends why the cafeteria worker didn’t “back off and go back to Africa.”

When I told some of my white and Asian classmates that I’d gotten into Yale, they were dismissive. More than one told me I’d probably only gotten in because of affirmative action or my last name. These same classmates often complained that black and Latino students were able to get into elite colleges without “working hard.”

When you hear things like “we worked harder to earn our place,” the subtext is that there is a “they” in the school who aren’t deserving of admission. Indeed, academically successful black students were treated as outliers by their fellow students. It was commonly assumed within the school that black students must have gotten lower test scores to attend Tech in the first place.

It seems obvious that a major contributor to the toxic nature of race relations at the school is the simple fact that so few people of color are offered admission.

During my final year at Tech, just 16% of seniors identified as either black or Hispanic. These numbers have decreased; now it’s 15% for the class of 2018. The numbers are worse at other specialized high schools like Stuyvesant. This is in a city where black and Hispanic students make up about 70% of the public school population.

Fort Greene, the neighborhood that houses Tech, is majority black and Hispanic. I remember the discontinuity of walking through this neighborhood of black faces in order to enter a school where hardly anyone looked like me.

Proponents of the SHSAT, the test that is the only criterion for admission to specialized high schools, are quick to point out its apparent objectivity. But the exam’s results tell another story. It is screening out black and Latino students. It’s no wonder kids are quick to take away a false narrative that certain students don’t belong at top high schools.

What I appreciated most about Brooklyn Tech is that the school takes people from all across the city — many who will be the first in their families to go to college — and offers them a quality of education that many public schools can’t.

But the way these schools choose students is offering them a distorted lesson in who belongs in the upper reaches of education in this nation, and who does not.

The mayor’s son says a stubborn lack of diversity feeds racism at Brooklyn Tech