A while ago I noticed this feeling I would get whenever an adult at school would bring up race. I have always liked politics, so I was used to talking about race. I even did Scholars at my elementary school. But in classrooms at the high school, every conversation felt prewritten, prerecorded. No one wanted to be there, but everyone told me it was important to talk about these things. Throughout freshman year, I recited the same speeches in History and English and advisory. I was bored to death, but I said what my teachers wanted to hear. I can’t anymore.

I feel that the administration’s position on race stifles debate, creates racial division and, ultimately, leaves Black kids more vulnerable to racist attacks. This is a liberal town and so naturally, the school reflects that in its Black Lives Matter posters and “days of.” I think the people propagating these initiatives have good intentions. But, in truth, these intentions are at best a nice gesture and, at worst, actively disabling Black kids from protecting themselves. Each time I leave the high school, I’m just another Black kid again.

Last year in March, my photography teacher was out one day. She told us to continue shooting photos, so I walked down Washington Street and turned behind what I didn’t know was the police department. A cop stepped out of his pickup and stopped me to ask some questions. How old was I? Why was I taking photos? Where did I go to school? Where did I go to elementary school? I don’t know why he would need to know that. What could have happened if I had talked back to him? What if I had been so stupid to think I would be safe three blocks from the school?

Black kids should be prepared for the actuality of life here. Whatever culture we create – whatever culture we want – won’t permeate the walls of the school to the cold reality of Brookline. In my opinion, the high school should be real. It should stop posturing, stop pretending, and expose Black kids to the truth of living in white dominant America.

I don’t care when a white kid says the n-word. I can decide who I stay away from and I think most of my white peers can too. I don’t need the school to engage with some ignorant kid; when I’m an adult, I’d rather be ready to deal with stupid people. I believe that it is crucial to the development of fully-functioning human beings to be able to identify jerks independently. People need to be able to handle situations in their lives without calling someone to save the day for them.

I am worried that it will damage kids who grow up believing that a white institution has their back, when, as we saw last year, it has no idea what it’s doing. Last year, the administration was embarrassed by their mishandling of a situation with a white kid and the n-word. The school, driven by the liberal culture, felt that immediate action, however thoughtless, would be better than being called out for taking no action at all.

And when the school went the wrong way by practically segregating students, there was deserved backlash. There was a similar incident when a teacher found the n-word written on a whiteboard. Once the teacher reported it to the administration, Headmaster Anthony Meyer emailed all students to inform us that the Brookline Police had been contacted and that “this sickening display of hate will not be tolerated.” But just a day later, we learned that the word was on the whiteboard as part of a conversation on racism held by Black students. Cops were called off, but bizarrely, the administration reiterated that the incident “caused a great deal of harm and alarm.”

It is clear that the Black kids having a conversation wasn’t the issue there. It was the white overreaction. The driving cause of the alarm was the administration’s angst to address the situation in some way. Whiteboards are erasable. In this instance, the reaction of the administration was entirely useless. The administration and school community would have been better served if the administration kept its hand out of matters between students.

I don’t think it’s the school’s job to tell anyone what speech is moral or immoral. We regard the opinions of institutions as more valid than the opinions of you or me, but that’s ridiculous. People should be able to choose what they think about the n-word and how their choice will affect them socially without the administration shaming them or telling them anything about morality.

You could ask, when do you think intervention is justified? My answer is when people are being bullied or assaulted. When a person’s education or safety is being threatened, then the school should intervene. But no protection or false sense of security should be given to Black students just for it to be violently shattered when they walk a couple blocks from school.

Not only is the school’s liberalism harmful to Black students, it is also harmful to white students. In school, when sitting through DoRRS or talking about the news, it’s natural for some white people to feel guilty for their privilege. The result of this is a population ready to spend money on signs, pins, and donating to charities. In my opinion, this is all idiotic. What I see is people spending on themselves. They are spending money on freeing themselves from some white original sin they were born with; spending on an anti-racism cult to show their white friends how enlightened they are.

We opened our 22 Tappan building the day after MLK day— a day on which we were supposed to be reflecting on his legacy. Our school’s wealth and resources are attached to our town’s property taxes and, according to the Census Bureau, Brookline’s median home cost for those who own their own homes is over $1,000,000.[1] In Boston, the same statistic is $610,000.[2] Rich white people get to live an arm’s length from Boston, where the streets are quaint and the schools are good. But on the same day when we remembered a man opposed to economic and racial inequality, we celebrated our beautiful new building, which along with other construction projects, according to the BHS Newspaper, totaled $238 million dollars.[3] The high school makes surface level tributes to Black people (calling out minor racist incidents, dedicating time in school to discussing race), but it continues to benefit from the town’s astonishing wealth; the high school is not allocating its funds towards the causes it claims to care so deeply about.

Focusing more on issues like the wealth gap between school districts would be a much better use of our time than having the same guided and monotonous conversations year after year.
Another good use of time would be informing students about actual hate groups present in Massachusetts. For a town full of self-proclaimed anti-racists, profoundly few could tell me anything about who the actual racists are in our area. We could acknowledge the hypocrisy of denouncing police and racial profiling, but then relying on law enforcement as soon as someone threatens our liberal ecosystem. We could integrate our public school districts racially and economically. I understand the weight of that statement, so I will make an actionable request: Stop wasting my time.