Mercedes: A Success Story

Today I saw this Facebook post by one of my former students from John F. Kennedy High School,  Mercedes. I will share it here in its entirety along with one of the photos that accompanied it:

I have hesitated to post this because it is sharing my personal story. To my Republican friends who don’t believe in big government and programs to help the poor, I want you to honestly tell me that you accomplished everything in life without anyone’s help. “We should all lift ourselves by our own bootstraps,” they say but most people who are “successful, “ have had had help in some way or another. 

We are not all privileged to come from “rich families” or successful families or 2 parent households. A lot of people assume that by receiving help, you are not working hard enough. In order to be successful, it is impossible to do it without hard work. I am a Democrat because I would not be who I am today without programs to help people like me. I still worked very hard. I was an honor student, I got straight A’s, I did science research, I volunteered in hospitals, and still a lot of people questioned how I got into Cornell University, a prestigious Ivy League University. I was told by one of my white high school teachers that I would never get into Cornell. If I was white, no one would have questioned my admission to such a prestigious school. Why is that ? 

I came to this country at the age of 9. I didn’t know one single word of English. I lived in Washington Heights, a “poor” area in Manhattan that is made up mostly of Dominicans where most people spoke Spanish. I was in Bilingual education for the first 3 years in NYC (from 6th-8th grade). I lived in a building where I had drug dealers as neighbors and it was during the “crack era” when NYC was dangerous. We had many drug dealers outside the building at all times. They also rented apartments inside the building. I think we had at least 3 apartments rented by drug dealers. I became friends with them because it was impossible not to, and they would look out for me and keep me safe. Sometimes you have to become friends with your enemy to survive. 

We had many shootings inside our apartment building. We even had a few fires that were started by drug users. We were held at gun point inside our own apartment one time. Our apartment was robbed and they stole my mom’s rent money. My mom was a single mom that made only $13,000 a year. I have no idea how we survived in a city as expensive as NYC on only $13,000 per year. My mom did everything “right” per Dominican standards but she was poor and uneducated and as a result she always emphasized education to us. 

My mom married my dad in the Dominican Republic when she was very young. My father was older than her and was educated and was a policeman in my country. The police there, at the time, were highly regarded, were educated, made good money and are like a “military police.” My father never let my mom finish high school. I think she left school during 7th or 8th grade. It was a very chauvinistic society at the time and she was expected to stay at home and raise her children. We had a nice house, nice cars, vacation homes and would take nice vacations in our country and even in your USA. 

My mom divorced my dad after multiple infidelities and came to the USA for a better life for me and my 2 older brothers. My father hardly ever paid child support and after they got divorced we struggled financially. Our electricity was cut off many times because she could not afford to pay it. Due to this, she made the decision to come the USA. My father was able to get her a VISA since he was a high ranking police officer and had a lot of power. She came to NYC first and we followed a few years later. We all came here legally. I emphasize this point because I have been asked this question many times. 

I always wanted to become a doctor since the age of 5 but I was not in the “right path” for a while until 10th grade. I came here on July of 1985 and turned 10 years old on August 16, 1985. I was supposed to go back home to the Dominican Republic because my mom did not want me to grow up in the USA. I was only supposed to visit her for the summer but I refused to go back home. 

I was about to start 6 th grade when I first came to the USA. The school system wanted me to repeat 5th grade, because I would be the youngest student in 6th grade, but due to my strong grades and letters of recommendations from my teachers, I was allowed to move on to 6th grade. I always made good grades but in bilingual education, at the time, I was not challenged enough. When I started high school, I was on the lower level classes and not on the college bound classes. I was making 100’s on most of my tests. I didn’t know that I was not being challenged. 

I was pulled out of 10th grade science class by Mr. Perl, the head of the Science Honors Program at my high school. He looked at my grades and saw that most of my grades were 100 or high 90’s. He asked me “don’t you think this class is too easy for you?”
He asked me if I wanted to do Honors level work. I didn’t know the difference and what it entailed but I agreed and he truly changed the course of my life. I finally had a chance to thank Mr. Perl, a few years ago. He put me on the right path to get into a school like Cornell University and to be challenged for the first time ever. It led to summer internships at Mount Sinai Hospital, to science research and to countless other things. I will forever be grateful for teachers like him. 

Anyways, the point of the story is many times, students from low income families like myself, are not challenged enough or told by someone like Mr. Perl, “I know you can do this.” At the time, the Honors program had special funding to help students like me to help them get into the medical field. A lot of these programs that put me in that path no longer exist. When you go to a school in an inner city, a lot of times, the classrooms are crowded and it is impossible for teachers to do their job well and really teach us and inspire us. My life could have gone many other bad ways. I could have married one or those drug dealers in my building and gotten pregnant and my life and my path to

become a doctor would have been derailed. 

I am glad I had the mom that I had who emphasized the importance of education. I am glad I had someone like Mr. Murray Perl, Mr. Pat Clark and Mr. Rick Levine in my life in high school. They always believed in me and told me I mattered despite being poor and not having all the resources. I was told by another white teacher in that same school that I will never get into Cornell. I don’t recall his name but I also wish I did because he motivated me to work even harder to prove him wrong. 

It should not be this hard for students of color or for black students to have the same educational opportunities as anyone else, but it is because I lived it. I have looked around the room many times since becoming a doctor and not many people look like me. Why is that ? 

If you think we all have the same opportunities in life to get an education, to get a good job, think again because that’s not true. 

(I’m attaching the letter I wrote to Mr. Murray Perl and what Mr. Rick Levine wrote in my high school yearbook. I will forever be graceful to Mrs. Grace Newman for helping me find Mr. Perl. )

#Latinx
#Blacklivesmatter
#BLM

 This post struck a responsive chord with a lot of people, over a hundred likes and fifty comments in the first six hours. I should find it personally rewarding because I am one of the teachers she cites as have been influential in her success and because she I know she has gone back again and again in moments of doubt to that note I put in her yearbook.

Except.

Except Mercedes is a successful ob-gyn in Texas. Except Mercedes graduated medical school. Except Mercedes graduated Cornell.

Except Mercedes is an exception.

People love to point to successful people as evidence that the system actually works.

People love to suggest that the thousands of brilliant and talented students I taught who didn't achieve this level of success must - therefore - have been lacking some essential personal quality and held themselves back.

People love to suggest that the millions of brilliant and talented students I didn't teach and who didn't achieve this level of success might have done more if they had just one encouraging teacher.

Mercedes doesn't mention one teacher; she mentions three! I know for a fact that she credits a few more, by name. Look at the comments from her high school classmates who mention even more.

I lived in Washington Heights in those same years and I know exactly what immense social pressures existed against achieving academic success. I used to tell colleagues who drove down every morning from the suburbs that each child in our classroom had made a conscious decision to be there that day instead of riding around in a Jeep Wrangler with an Uzi under the seat, because that was an ever-present option for Heights teens. And that was only one pressure against success. There were the teachers who told them they weren't shit, one of whom Mercedes mentions. There were the cops rolling up the blocks treating every kid socializing with friends as if they were soldiers in the drug posses. There were (and still are) the standardized exams that create a pretense of objectivity in highly class-based college admissions. There is the sheer weight of social capital that Mercedes alludes to when she talks about the difference between her and her more privileged Cornell classmates.

I wish I believed that people would read Mercedes's story and accept her point that simply applying the same criteria to everybody is fundamentally inequitable. I wish I believed that people would understand why she thinks that race and class inequality in America won't go away just because we pretend to be "colorblind" and give everybody the same treatment.

But I don't.

I think they will see Mercedes as gifted, driven, and resilient. I think they will devote resources to "resiliency education" whatever the fuck that is. I think they will applaud themselves for applauding her, as if their appreciation of an exceptional story makes them exceptional, too.

I'm stuck elsewhere. 

I'm stuck on my former student, valedictorian at Kennedy High School and a much earlier graduate of the same Science Honors Program as Mercedes, who spent all four years at Harvard believing she didn't belong there because that's what so many of her classmates and professors told her. 

I'm stuck on the two girls I sent to a different elite New England school who came home after freshman year because they were the only Latinas in the entire college and convinced themselves they didn't belong. Neither has a degree yet.

I'm stuck on the boy I sent to an out-of-town two-year college, (literally... I had to bring him and his clothes upstate in my car to register and move into the dorm) who came home with an associates degree but was convinced by the people in the neighborhood that his real talent lay elsewhere. (Do you know what I'm talking about?)

I'm stuck on the boy I could not convince to attend college at all.

I'm not quitting, even in retirement. I was able to help the son of one of those two girls get into an appropriate college. I brought him to three of his campus visits myself. The daughter of that boy I brought to his dorm freshman year? I moved her into her dorm when she was a freshman. This week I have to write her a grad school recommendation.

Yes, this is me patting myself on the back. But it is also me explaining to you that it hasn't been enough. There are millions of talented kids from families who don't have the capacity to provide this support themselves and who aren't getting it elsewhere. And there are potent social forces holding them back when they do. I will not surrender to despair. But I will not act as though the successes we achieve are enough.

They are not enough.

And that is what I think Mercedes was trying to convey by sharing her painful personal history.

Some thoughts on the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre:

Army surplus airplanes like those used to bomb Greenwood

-The white rioters were initially blocked from entering the prosperous Black business and residential district of Greenwood (Black Wall Street). Black veterans  of World War 1 had learned from the recent history of racist violence. White rioters invaded Black communities in East St. Louis; Chicago; the Arkansas Delta; Wilmington, NC; Charleston, SC; and countless other cities and towns to murder, loot, and burn. Then the courts prosecuted Black survivors, apparently for the crime of not having been murdered during the first round of white supremacist violence. The Black vets of eastern Oklahoma set up a highly-organized, armed defense of Greenwood, especially along the railroad tracks that divided white from Black Tulsa. They were successful enough that the white supremacist mobs instead began dropping incendiary bombs from about a dozen airplanes to gain entry to the neighborhood. They were aided by the Oklahoma National Guard which was called up to “stop the violence”, by which the governor meant the armed self-defense of the Black community.

Attorney BC Franklin in his temporary law office

-Despite the countless murders and the aerial bombing that incinerated over 35 square blocks, Greenwood was not emptied of Black people. Attorney BC Franklin reopened his law practice in a tent while smoke still hung in the air to ensure that Black property owners retained their titles. (Yes, BC Franklin was the dad of the great historian John Hope Franklin. John Hope Franklin was six years old at the time of the massacre.) The uncompensated destruction of so much Black-owned capital in the form of hotels, office blocks, businesses, and homes meant that Greenwood couldn’t be rebuilt on the grand scale it had before the white-supremacist assault. Some of the families who fled the violence never returned. Some of the most successful Black entrepreneurs, now broke and broken, left, too.

Detroit Avenue after the aerial bombing

-Eastern Oklahoma offered a special case for several reasons, but the pattern of white resentment and envy of successful Black people existed throughout America. Maybe white people filed fraudulent lawsuits to steal Black people’s property, which were upheld by white judges. Maybe white people stole that property (or destroyed it) by totally extralegal means, but were then protected by those white  judges and juries. But the common thread is that property was robbed or burned and the owners were murdered or imprisoned. Historians will tell you about property records in counties all over this country which are unavailable for research because of “mysterious” fires many decades ago. This pattern also existed in South Texas where landowning families of Mexican descent - most of whom had lived in the area before the American Revolution - had their property stolen by Anglo newcomers. The entire history of Native treaties with the US is about land set aside for Indians because Anglos thought it was worthless, only to be stolen later when some new resource was discovered there. During the same time as the Tulsa massacre, hundreds of Osage Indians were murdered in Oklahoma for their oil lands. Then white judges appointed white receivers to “manage” the properties.

Prosecuting and convicting the police who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis is a start. But it does not put us in a post-racial era. We have hundreds of years of white supremacist murder and arson to confront. There is an entire system of white supremacist law to overturn.