Racism & Mental Health
This is a story about my path to high school graduation and my experiences of education, racism, and therapy. – by L. C.
In the eighth grade, I had been found with a weapon in my locker and had been placed on a Child In Need of Services (CHINS) order by the court.
This meant that I had a probation officer who was supposed to make sure that I obeyed a curfew, went to school, and followed other rules. I managed to stay out of trouble with the CHINS.
In the ninth grade, I got into trouble in school for verbal confrontations with other students (I thought that I was just sticking up for myself) and I was getting suspended repeatedly for disrupting my classes.
By the third quarter (Q3) of that year, I was getting kicked out of class or I would walk out every day.
I didn’t understand the class work so I would think, ‘fuck it, what’s the point’. If I raised my hand to ask a question, I got ignored, which would make me mad.
On my bad days, I would talk in class, and if a teacher said ‘be quiet’, I would talk back.
I usually wasn’t the only one talking but it always seemed to me like I was the first one blamed.
I knew that, with my grades from the first and second quarters, there was no way I could pass, so what was the point of trying?
I know now that I was pretty immature, but I also had not learned enough to be in the 9th grade.
I felt like some of my teachers were discriminating against me, and thought that it must be a discriminatory system because so many Latino students were so far behind.
Therapy in School
In February of 2009, I was assigned to see a school therapist, Frank. Recently, he asked me what it was like to be assigned to see him.
In my whole life, I never had an adult in school to talk to. I kind of liked it. I liked getting out of class to go to counseling because the classes weren’t doing me any good anyway.
I didn’t like some of the questions he asked me because I was used to keeping things inside. If you don’t think about it, it’s like it’s not there. But he said that I didn’t have to answer anything I didn’t want to, so it was good.
When I told him that I thought that some administrators and teachers were racist, he listened respectfully and asked for my reasons for thinking that.
I appreciated that he took me seriously and he wanted to know about my real experiences in the school. His idea that some teachers and administrators who are racist don’t know that they are racist, and that the system itself is set up as racist, did seem to fit the picture.
I feel as though most teachers and I come from two different worlds, like many of them can’t relate to me and to the adversities I face daily. A few teachers do see the maltreatment which happens on a daily basis but they do not speak out in fear of losing their jobs.
My History
When I was four months old, my parents brought me to the U.S. from Puerto Rico. My mom still has family in the Dominican Republic and my father still has family in Puerto Rico.
When I was about nine, I was home when my brother, diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia”, stabbed himself with a kitchen knife while I hid with my mother in the bedroom.
My parents were separated for several years because dad cheated. I remember being sad because I wanted to see them together.
My parents have always been hard workers. They don’t speak English and don’t understand much about U.S. culture.
School books are the only books in the house. I live on a street that one teacher said was “the worst street in the worst neighborhood in the city.”
Really, it’s not so bad. It’s a working class neighborhood, mainly full of friendly, industrious people.
My older brother had no job and slept on the couch in the living room, which upset my mother. She wants a better life for me.
I first got lost in school in the 7th grade. Instead of keeping me back, they put me in a self-contained classroom for 8th grade.
That class was too easy, I didn’t learn enough or get good study habits, so I was slammed when I got to the 9th grade, not prepared for it.
By the time I met Frank, I was in big trouble academically. I was used to not paying attention. I didn’t do class work, homework, or reading.
If I allowed myself to care, I would have been embarrassed by my bad grades and failure.
Over my school years, whenever I tried to tell my mom that I wanted to drop out, she wouldn’t let me. I respected my mom for leaving the Dominican Republic with nothing and coming to the US to give us a better life. She didn’t say it, but I knew it. There is a lot of poverty in the DR.
Personal Skills Come Before School Skills
I was happy to see Frank my freshman and sophomore years, and he helped me with personal skills, like, when teachers seemed rude or unfair, how to not get upset and say things that made things even worse.
I could count on him to listen to me, and I learned by listening to him. During my sophomore year, I began to take important steps in my own life, in my own way.
I wrote expressive rap lyrics and I recorded music with friends. I could say things in rap lyrics that I couldn’t say directly to Frank, mainly related to my sadness and anger.
My sadness was about some of my friends who had died, and about my brother. My anger was aimed at authority, especially in school.
Some of the staff seemed mean and rude to me and to other Latinos. I saw them as racist, which I took personally. Plus the system seemed set up for me to fail.
Once my feelings were written in verse, I was happy, and even proud to share them with Frank.
How racism looks to a student
For my sophomore year, I had a housemaster, Ms “Smith”, who was the worst. She got me and a lot of my friends into trouble.
We, mainly Latino boys, were often suspended by her. She would confront us, often about something minor, and then provoke us to yell or swear at her which would give her an excuse to kick us out of the building.
Here are some examples of what seemed to be discriminatory attitudes against me and other students by school staff.
When I was a freshman, an administrator thought that it would be good for me to go work with my mom at her menial job, so that I would see what my life might be like without an education.
I had gone to work with my mom before and did not mind at all. What the administrator might have thought to be degrading work, I found natural.
I believe that the administrator actually meant well, but I would never look down on my mom’s work.
Some staff categorized us by the way we look. I felt like that all along in school. The white boys, especially the jocks; some teachers and administrators just let them slide.
Once, I was seated for an MCAS test. I went to bed early and woke up early because I wanted to be awake, on time, and to pass the test. I was ready for it.
(The MCAS is the high-stakes Massachusetts standardized test by which students, teachers, and schools are judged. Student cannot graduate if they cannot pass the MCAS.)
A teacher who was monitoring the test called an administrator to say that I smelled like marijuana.
They pulled me out of the test room and took me to the nurse who was supposed to assess me and report if I was under the influence of drugs.
One of the administrators, as if doing me a favor, counseled, “Don’t take the test if you are under the influence, you’ll never pass it.”
The nurse reported that there was no reason to believe that I was high on marijuana.
I was allowed to return to the test and I passed it which was a significant accomplishment and a vindication, especially because my test-taking focus had been disrupted.
For me, the actions of the teacher and administrator were just one more in a series of discriminatory acts against me, a young Latino man.
Frank asked me if I thought there was racism from the white students directed towards the Latino students.
No, I told him, we get along good, I’m friends with a lot of them. There is no hostility between students because of race or anything.
The problem is how the faculty looks at us; some of them treat us different. I don’t think the white students notice when we get picked on and they get to slide. It’s just how it is.
In many years of receiving public education, I’ve witnessed school teachers and other adults treat different groups of students differently.
The school athletes seem to be perceived as the school heroes due to the fact they represent the school in sports.
However, as a Latino from what many consider to be “the wrong side of the tracks”, I feel more or less “frowned upon” and treated in a different manner by some adults.
Some teachers and administrators categorized us by how poor we are and the work our parents do. Once, in a Campus meeting, Ms Smith made a derogatory remark about a menial job. She said, “You don’t want to end up doing this”. She was challenged about her disrespect by a student whose mother did that very job.
I had a friend who went to Ms Smith to get some paperwork about his housing signed. He said that she started giving him a speech that had nothing to do with the paperwork.
She wouldn’t listen to what he was saying. Instead, she got mad that he was trying to say anything and she suspended him for two days.
Stuff like that was always happening with her and Latino students. I would only see her when I was in trouble. She was never helpful, not even once. She had a habit of kicking kids out of the Campus program if she thought that they had too few credits for their age.
Time for a Focus on School
I didn’t really start to take Frank’s advice about doing school work until my junior year. By my junior year, I started to have school goals including that I wanted to graduate. I worried, what if I can’t achieve my goals? My mom didn’t want me to end up like my brother, and I did want more for myself. I was glad I had Frank to encourage and push me.
Frank helped me to stop thinking about myself as stupid because he treated me with respect and he told me directly that I was not stupid. He liked my rap lyrics.
We reviewed my personal and school history to understand how I ended up so far behind. He made it clear to me that he did not think that there was anything wrong with me.
That summer, I took up boxing and changed myself physically from an overweight teenager into a person who is fit. My self-confidence improved too.
After two years of gaining some personal skills, I needed to get into a program for student support and credit recovery, designed for students like me. Frank suggested that I try “Campus”, a school program that was supposed to help with credit recovery.
I had friends in Campus who said that the staff, particularly the head teacher, would help you out and cared about the students.
Unfortunately, that teacher, Mr. MacGyver, worked for Ms Smith. And I knew how dangerous she could be.
In the beginning of the Campus program, I was more careful about what I said, even though I was still getting into some trouble.
I still had an attitude towards people in authority but, while I might talk back, I knew not to swear. I was careful not to say anything that might get me into big trouble.
I was seeing that some of my friends didn’t graduate. They were still doing the same old things in the street, smoking weed every day, and selling drugs to get by.
I didn’t want the same for me. I also saw some of my friends graduate and that was a turning point for me. I knew that I wanted to finish and leave school like they left, with a diploma, not by dropping out.
So it was a combination of seeing some of my friends graduate, some drop out, and my mom really insisting that I continue my education to get my diploma.
At the beginning of my senior year, I started doing class work and homework. Frank and my teacher, Mr. MacGyver were amazed.
Doing all my homework did not last long, but I kept doing my class work and some homework because sometimes they would let us do homework in class.
This was a big change for me, and if I skipped class, I only skipped my last period. I also had a study hall where I could do homework with a really helpful teacher.
I started getting credits because I was smart enough to pass tests, even if I hadn’t done all the homework.
I appreciated that MacGyver treated everyone with respect, and he was willing to help every student who was willing to try. His attitude and the fact that Campus program was more like a family, helped me change my attitude towards school.
Every morning, Mr. MacGyver would say hi to every one of us individually. He’d ask us how we are doing and he meant it. You could see that he actually cared about us.
If we needed anything, we would go to him; he would always try to help us. He would tend to our individual needs in a way that most other teachers didn’t. Other teachers in Campus also helped.
Modern Racism
In this day and age, racism is more difficult to detect. It’s not like people call you racial names. It’s more subliminal than direct. Students have little to no rights within school walls.
Even constitutional rights don’t exist once we are in the school. Some adults and authority figures in the school abuse their power. For example, a friend of mine was once suspended for complaining to the headmaster that “you never listen to us”.
It was like the school is divided into two groups and favoritism plays a major role. The school seems divided into the victims of stereotypes, and the other part of the student body that is totally unaware of what is really going on.
In another incident my class asked the teacher if we can go outside and enjoy the nice weather. “Yeah!” demanded a fellow classmate in a joking manner, “Take us outside or we’re having a coup d’état”. “Spell coup d’état and we’ll go” said my English teacher sarcastically.
I had studied the term the previous year in my history class and was familiar with it. Confident I began to spell it out. C-O-U-P D-apostrophe-E-T-A-T … He chuckled and then said “I didn’t expect that, especially from you”.
It was comments like these that would frustrate me immensely. Don’t get me wrong. I had a lot of fun in high school and met a lot of nice teachers.
However, I felt as though I was constantly judged because of my appearance and background.
Another assertion was made by my former health teacher in discussing stereotypes in class. She chose me as an example saying “L. must be a drug dealer because he’s Hispanic and is from the Point area”.
Joking or not I took great offence. I’ve learned, even with all these injustices, one cannot simply just lash out at the establishment.
You just have to have a professional form to present your argument, starting with a typed up complaint or something of that nature in order to voice your concerns.
When students have tools to analyze power
Ms Smith was a dictator; she would come by the Campus program and just threaten students. In 2012, some of my friends and I had a major incident with her. Frank had taught me to always remember conversations, and if they were important, write them down.
You will read in the compliant that Ms Smith told me that “students are judged by the company they keep and the reputation of their friends”. She said this after claiming that all students were treated equally.
To me, this was hypocritical. I wasn’t the best student but I felt as though, because of my past clashes with authority, I was an easy target. I was dealt with in a different fashion because of my past.
I was discriminated against. I wanted her gone, not just to win my case, but for the sake of everyone else, too.
I wanted to get the details down on paper about what happened, to have my side of the story told. Here is a complaint that I wrote against her that contributed to her removal.
Official Complaint to the Principal
Five of us were on our way to the bathroom when, before exiting the cafeteria, an administrative assistant asked, “where are you guys going?” We answered, “To the bathroom”. She said OK.
After being in the bathroom for 2 or 3 minutes, we heard knocking on the door and a voice we recognized saying, “you guys need to hurry up in there”. The voice was Ms Smith’s, one of the Assistant Principals.
Since it was her administrative assistant who knew where we were, we assumed that she had told Ms Smith to check us out.
A couple of us exited the bathroom. Ms Smith asked, “Who else is in the bathroom?” I ignored the question and two more of us came out of the bathroom.
We thought this was the end of it, but Ms Smith told us to wait outside her office and got on her walkie-talkie, calling for two more administrators to come.
As we waited for them outside of Ms Smith’s office, I asked what was going on. She said she found it suspicious that five boys were in the bathroom at the same time.
I said, “We were simply urinating.” She said she wasn’t buying it. I replied saying “Oh, but if it was five white boys, it would be a different story”. This angered her and she got defensive. When another boy agreed with me, it angered her even more.
She got mad and turned red in the face. She tried to flip it on to me about being racist. She was getting mad because I was making her feel stupid, and when you make her feel stupid she acts like you’re her worst enemy.
From that statement, it all went downhill. She tried flipping the script and tried making me look like the bad guy.
She claimed I was making racist remarks by saying “white boys”. I told her I was speaking nothing but the truth and that’s how I felt.
We moved the conversation into her office where it got worse. She tried telling me there was no discrimination or stereotyping done by the faculty in the school.
After telling us that every student in the school is the same to her, she said that the faculty only judges students by reputation and by the people kids hang out and surround themselves with. Isn’t that stereotyping, I wondered.
She said that when she was in high school, she did a lot of pot and hung out with kids who also did pot. She claimed that she has observed everyone in the room high except for one of us, and she pointed at each of us, one by one.
That statement made everyone react to it. We all know when she sees someone she thinks is high she makes a big deal about it right then, so she was lying to us about us.
Like One Brain
In the beginning everyone was talking at once, but we were being reasonable. Then, she started swearing, “It’s my fucking office and nobody talks to me like that in my own fucking office” and more swears.
All hell broke loose, everyone in the room was yelling, everyone was arguing with her, but nobody swore at her. She said that she did not appreciate the fact that “all four of you are acting like one brain.”
Then another administrator, Ms “Baker”, walked in. Everyone in the room was yelling and trying to get their point across. Ms Baker yelled, “What the hell is going on”. Ms Smith explained the situation to Ms Baker by lying about it, saying that I was saying racist remarks.
I said that, first she says that everyone in the school is the same and should be treated the same, but then she says that certain people should be judged by their reputation.
I told Ms Baker that Ms Smith was lying to her face by saying that what I said was racist. Ms Baker asked me to let Ms Smith finish what she was saying and that I would get a chance to talk afterward.
I said to the others, “Wait, just let her talk so we can get this over with”. Ms Smith said, “thank you for letting me talk in my own office”. I said, “No need for the sarcasm, but all right.” She said, “Can’t we just have a civilized conversation?”
I said, “It doesn’t seem that way, it just seems like you want to do all the talking and not listen to what we have to say”.
I told her she claims all the students are the same but she is judging certain ones on their reputation which only she gets to decide. She said “the days of talking back to me are over and if anyone talks back to me, I’m going to deal with them”.
Then Mr. “Mann” walked in and said to me, “When you call someone something they are not, they get defensive.” He thought he was talking about me but to me he was talking about Ms Smith.
Ms Smith said the reason that we were arguing with her was because we’re paranoid because we have something on us that we shouldn’t have. I said that, if we did have something on us, we would be on our best behavior.
After this some of the others were searched, and three boys were suspended for the rest of Thursday and all of Friday.
Nothing was found on them. They were never told why they were suspended and they still do not know.
I was suspended for ten days because I thought that I had the right not to be searched. I found out later that I do not have the right not be searched.
I was allowed to come back after losing three and a half days of school at an important time that I needed to be in school to finish the semester and get credits.
There was no trouble until Ms Smith started it. None of us did anything wrong. She started and escalated the problems by stereotyping us Latino boys as pot smoking and having bad reputations.
Ms Smith said she would not have had us searched if we had not “made a fuss”, meaning to me, stood up to her harassment.
Because of their suspension, two of the boys were kicked out of their house and forced to sleep on other people’s couches, because their mother thinks the school is always right.
A third has not come back to school at all. This complaint says that we have been the victims of discrimination and harassment, and when we said something about it, we were searched and suspended in retaliation. (End of complaint)
(This complaint was the “final straw” against Ms Smith. The first was the parent complaint contained in “shot“. After the initial parent complaint, 18 teachers filed grievances, three more parents, and another student filed complaints against her. By September, she was gone, and the atmosphere in the school was greatly improved.)
Endgame
Mr. MacGyver lost track of me after my senior year, because he switched to another program. I worried because, if he wasn’t paying attention to me, who was?
I started Novanet (online) classes to make up some of the classes that I needed to graduate. I was doing more under my own initiative because I wanted to finish and I was close.
I finished Keyboarding in summer school, and started Earth Science in September. Every time I finished a class, I went to my Guidance Counselor and asked what course I should do next.
I finished Earth Science in October of 2013. I had made a deal with the Assistant Principal, Mr. Mann. I would make up the three gyms that I needed, by keeping a log of my actual time in gyms that I went to for my boxing and other training I was doing.
When I had enough hours, I went to him and gave him a log of my Gym attendance showing ninety hours of gym time. I actually did more than that. That was the last thing I needed to finish in order to graduate.
On Monday, I dropped off the gym log. The next Friday, I went into the school and he gave me my diploma. I felt like The Man. I was happy. I felt like I accomplished something that many people thought I wouldn’t be able to do.