On Racism in Cobb County and My Experience in the CC School District
This was an open letter I wrote to my home school district in Cobb County, Georgia on June 10, 2020, during the height of Black Lives Matter protests and racial reckoning that took place across my community, the nation, and the world.
Link to original open letter on Facebook
June 10, 2020
Seeing protests right down the street from my neighborhood in Kennesaw, Georgia as well as the raw conversations being had by those I grew up with has given me a sense of validation and reconciliation with my childhood that I previously accepted I would never get, but aimed to through my experience at Howard University, my historically Black University in Washington, D.C. I honestly did not think I would hear on a community-wide level, most agreeing with and boldly declaring that Black Lives Matter. However, when it comes to conversations about how to actually acknowledge, let alone dismantle the systems of racism within Acworth/Kennesaw and Cobb County at large, there are still some white people who employ what Jennifer Susko, counselor and member of the Cobb-based educational equity organization Stronger Together, called a "reflexive denial" of racism's existence in our county and avoidance of placing any type of urgency to address it on a systemic level.
***For context, I attended Baker Elementary, Barber Middle, and North Cobb High, and graduated in 2016.
Almost two weeks ago at a small protest in front of Wildman's Civil War Surplus, a friend of the owner made a comment that racism "isn't as bad as it used to be." As though that is a reason to pacify the very valid concerns of community members of the lingering presence of white supremacist ideals and Confederate nostalgia throughout the town. As though white people's perceived reality is the indisputable objective reality for everyone else. I’ve heard similar sentiments as the Black Lives Matter movement and their demands have permeated Cobb County.
According to Georgia Department of Education's Diversity and Enrollment data, Cobb County (the second-largest school district in the state of Georgia, 23rd largest in the nation) had 980 Black girls enrolled by the end of my first year of Kindergarten at Baker Elementary School ('04) and 1,234 Black girls enrolled by the time I graduated from North Cobb High School in 2016, with Black students overall making up the second largest demographic in the county (currently around 30 percent) behind white students (around 37 percent). From what I've researched via Cobb County School District's official website and social media pages, they have said absolutely nothing about the recent uprisings or current social climate (compared to neighboring Cherokee County, Marietta City Schools, and Gwinnett County Superintendents who each released official statements).
The most public acknowledgment I've been able to find about racism at all was a statement CCSD issued in response to concerns from Stronger Together last year: “In the Cobb County School District, we strive to provide every student the opportunity to succeed" and that it "wants to know when anyone has a bad experience in one of our schools and we want to hear and listen to how our schools can better serve our community." Bad experience?
Echoing the sentiments of Cobb BOE Member Jaha Howard in this forum on race in CCSD (also a fellow Howard Bison), the goal should not stop at being not racist, but explicitly “anti-racist.” As stated by The Guardian, anti-racism tackles “the many day-to-day issues underscored by racism.”
As I've worked to better understand my childhood to better plan for my future, especially motivated by the current social unrest, I kept coming back to my grade school experience. I am writing this only to name and release those experiences, and hopefully lend my voice to brainstorming and working towards actionable solutions to ensure a better future for Black students in Cobb.
Navigating predominantly white spaces as a child in the Cobb County school system has directly affected how I've navigated white spaces and a white world as a young adult, specifically in internships and other professional opportunities. This has been somewhat offset by my experience at my HBCU- being in spaces with Black people whom I can relate to through belonging to the African diaspora, but who have more importantly expanded my awareness of the multifaceted Black experience. I've been affirmed in who I currently am and exposed to myriad possibilities for who I can one day become as a Black American woman. I've had the opportunity to meet and build relationships with people who have been where I am. People with whom I share a collective struggle. People who see me and encourage me to show up fully in my Black identity. But I understand that does not similarly reflect the world I live in, nor does it reflect where I came from.
I want to namely call out the isolation I felt as a young Black girl with few role models that looked like me or shared similar experiences, and with a public school experience that only exacerbated those feelings of isolation and invisibility.
When I come home from Howard/D.C., I am surrounded by mostly white faces, some of whom either do not see me at all or who see me and people who look like me through a lens wrought with implicit bias or outright anti-Blackness. I've had to interact with and be under the leadership of some of these people because they were my teachers. And most of these people may not have been racist themselves but were complicit by not being explicitly anti-racist or by not unapologetically advocating for children who are subject to a world they may not yet understand. A world that consistently tells Black children the limits on who they are and who they can become. Stronger Together has accurately used the phrase "spirit murder" to describe this experience. And while the language of anti-racism is fairly new in national dialogue compared to when I was in school, the values and call-to-action it encapsulates are not.
I can specifically recall one instance when I was in eighth grade when an English teacher tried to prevent me from applying to the high school magnet program I later graduated from with honors, telling me directly at the time that he planned on speaking to the Magnet Director to keep me out of the program.
In another instance in high school, I remember a tennis coach from another school repeatedly accused my coach of cheating by placing me- one of the only Black girls on the team- in what she thought was too high of a lineup position for my skill-level.
While I won't definitively claim these situations were motivated by race, what I did internalize from both of these experiences (and was generally conditioned by) was an overvaluation of how I am perceived by white people and people in positions of authority (who in most situations were both), and a blow to my self-esteem and belief in my capabilities that I feel I've overcompensated for throughout my college experience.
Additionally, as I recall my relationships with my teachers throughout the years (only one of whom was a Black woman), I do not remember feeling confident that, generally, they truly ever saw or were invested in me and my individual success, which I also understand can be a byproduct of a lack of support of teachers from the school system (ie. large class sizes). In addition, the label of being "gifted" (which is a whole 'nother conversation for another day) placed an immense pressure on me to succeed, but coupled with not feeling like I had access to the same close relationships and support I saw my white peers benefiting from, has 100% impacted how I've navigated college and professional spaces.
Those beliefs about my capabilities and the possibility for my success as a Black woman in a white world have only been reinforced by statistics like the following from PayScale which reveal "women of color benefit the least from [job referral] programs, accounting for just 13% of successful referrals—making them 35% less likely to receive a referral than a white man." Additionally, a Women in the Workplace 2017 report from LeanIn.org stated "only a third of Black women report they receive advice or advocacy from managers (31% and 36%, respectively)."
There is a pressure to form relationships with people who are directly instrumental to your success, as anyone can attest to the fact that you cannot succeed in a vacuum by yourself. But, again, when you feel like those same people do not fully see you or understand your lived experiences, it seems (or it has certainly felt to me over the years) that you have to blindly perform for gatekeepers who ultimately determine whether you succeed or fail. This contributes to a culture of Black people feeling like we have to "work twice as hard" or even beg white people to see us in order to succeed, or in the most extreme cases, to live and be seen as full human beings.
So, when valid concerns are raised about race in Cobb, and those concerns are met with that "reflexive denial" of the reality of many Black people and people of color who live, learn, and work here- instead of active listening, empathy, and accountability- it becomes super awkward when data confirms the contrary. In a ProPublica interactive database titled Miseducation, which examined "racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline" over the 2015-16 academic year, Cobb County School District is reported to discipline Black students 3.8 times more frequently than white students. Comparatively, Black students were said to represent only 21 percent of students in AP courses and 14 percent of students in Gifted Programs, where white students make up 53 percent and 63 percent, respectively (remember that in the overall population, Black students make up 30 percent, white students 37 percent).
This silence and "reflexive denial" is unacceptable in a county where a police officer felt comfortable enough to say they “only kill Black people" to a white woman during a traffic stop, where a student at my old high school was exposed for making racist remarks on social media (including saying they wanted to "exterminate" Black people) and where most recently Lisa Cupid, the only Black woman on the Cobb County Board of Commissioners, went through unnecessary hurdles to get the Board to unanimously pass a resolution condemning racism (coming in fourth to do so after Smyrna, Acworth, and Kennesaw). From what I've read and heard, Cobb County is more interested in keeping up appearances and hoping we settle for reactive responses to incidents of racism after they've happened than taking the initiative to fight for a culture where those incidents don't happen in the first place.
I think that over the years I often gaslighted myself about these experiences because I, unfortunately, understood that me not feeling seen and heard in my middle-class, suburban hometown was not as bad as the grand scheme of what reality is for many Black Americans, particularly the violence that we have seen take the lives of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery here in Georgia, as well as countless others.
However, the internalized stress of knowing that fate could very well be a reality for you or someone you know regardless of where you live, while simultaneously being made to feel like that "wouldn't happen here," that we "don't really have anything to be upset about," or some who even go as far as to say that if we don't like it then we should just leave is the gaslighting and deliberate avoidance that is woven into daily life in Cobb County and affirms the privilege of a white majority to deny objective reality. It renders it nearly impossible for anyone to make any real progress for our community's most marginalized.
Thinking back to high school, I was transitioning into my freshman year when Trayvon Martin was killed, transitioning to sophomore year when his murderer was found not guilty, transitioning to junior year when Eric Garner was choked to death on camera, a junior when Michael Brown, Jr. was left dead for hours in the streets of Ferguson and when Tamir Rice was killed for having a toy gun, transitioning to senior year when Freddie Gray's murder caused uprisings in Baltimore and a recent graduate when Philando Castile was shot in front of his fiancée Diamond Reynolds and their daughter. I remember discussing a few of those events on social media with my peers. I do not remember us being provided with any resources, language, or support to collectively process or make sense of any of that from our school.
While CCSD has ways to go in terms of racial equity, I want to acknowledge the work of community leaders who have been fighting for change in this space even before this moment, including Stronger Together and Cobb Board of Education members Jaha Howard and Cherisse Davis, for their presence and voices. As I continue to learn and listen to the conversation already being had, I'll try my best to amplify and support solutions. Based on what I've learned so far, and in the spirit of radical imagination, here is a list of things that I would personally like to see in a perfect world from NCHS/ CCSD in a commitment to anti-racism (or things I've been thinking about/recommendations I agree with from other counties, because I don't want to make assumptions about what work is or isn't already being done):
Short Term
CCSD: Release an immediate statement regarding the current social climate in support of Black students and community members, with a commitment to anti-racism within Cobb's school system
Long Term
NORTH COBB MAGNET SCHOOL FOR INT'L STUDIES: Incorporate anti-racism/DEI into programming
How does anti-racism (and dare I add the idea of decolonization) reframe one's understanding of what it means to truly have a "global perspective"?
CCSD: Hire more Black educators and administrators (According to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution [in 2019], "About 74% of [Cobb County] teachers are white, as are 68% of its principals and 70% of administrators.")
READ: Students Benefit From Teachers Who Look Like Them. Here's How. (Teach For America)
CCSD: Hire a Chief Equity Officer or an equivalent role (similar to Gwinnett County- Cobb BOE previously rejected the idea; this would need to be supported by Superintendent)
CCSD: Develop a Plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (similar to Forsyth County's five-year plan)
DEI Training for employees
Culturally relevant educational content for students
Commitment to a culture shift that does not subject Black students and students of color to deficit thinking (Ex. Language like 'achievement gap' vs. 'opportunity gap'
