Revival of Middle Class Black Posters

[madville]

Wonderful news. It is great to find a school that your child will be happy to attend and is also a financially feasible option for your family. It seems as if Vandy is fitting the bill.

No doubt about that, regardless of what finally transpires, I will always be grateful for the opportunity that Vanderbilt has presented to my S. As many of you had predicted, he will have several more options. When he got home today, he saw that he has been accepted to Denison with a very substantial merit scholarship. We are planning to visit Swarthmore this week and he is still waiting to hear from several other well regarded colleges and universities like many here in the CC community. Like several of you and his GC have stated, the hardest part will not getting in to some of the selective schools on his list, but choosing the ONE to attend. I like my DS being in the position of the latter as opposed to the former. With his safeties and one match letting us know where he stands, it's all gravy now. It has really been enjoyable researching and assisting my DS & DD in their college planning. I'm hoping to find some way of sharing my experiences with others in a constructive way in and outside of CC. There are so many people who aren't as savvy or persistant when it comes to college planning, yet you can discern they want better for their children too.
Once again thanks for all the support and encouragement.

[Texasmama]

Madville,
Congrats on Denison. That's wonderful!

[Harmony2]

Madville,

Congratulations. It is wonderful hearing about your DS's many options. My DS is still waiting to hear from a few other colleges, but hearing your DS' s news has been really encouraging.

[Silvermoonlock]

Greetings from a seasoned lurker.

Middle-class black. yep. Nice to find some people to commiserate with.

My daughter will be attending Howard as a Laureate scholar. We live a large city with a black population greater than 70%. The public school system is abysmal. The average ACT score for those students is just under 17. Of course there are some flagship schools, but we opted out.

She has attended private schools since since pre-K. She attends an all-girls catholic high school in one of the most affluent suburbs ( read conservative)...with no bus transporation. In 9th grade there were 8 black girls in her class. By 10th grade, she was the only one and has remained the only 1.

There have been good times and some things she has struggled with that brought me to tears. However, she made it...She made it!!!!

She is National Achievement Finalist, NHS, 3.6 gpa, taken AP classes blah blah blah. Time to look for college. She demanded diversity. So how did we end up at Howard? She decided she had been around white peope long enough. She wants to learn Black history and culture. Howard is her Harvard.

She is the black table in her school lol. She has ended up being a mentor to the black freshmen and sophmores, letting them know the lack of racial diversity in the school should not deter them from the quality education. She is the one who stands up minorities in this 1-dimensional conservative environment...and I mean all minorities (racial, class, gender, religious..take your pick)---and no, I don't wonder why she is leaning toward being an ACLU layer lol.

It's been an interesting ride for all of us. Somedays when her father or I would go pick her up, we'd have 50-Cent or Public Enemy blasting from the radio for the heck of it. We'd go the school events and watch some parents who were..afraid of us, drawn to us, ignored us, or looked down on us. We didn't care.

Anyway, as I ramble on, the point I want to make is we made a conscious choice to make sure she got the best education and experiences that we could afford. She was not interested in being affirmative action for anyone anymore. And Finally i don't understand why we are knocking the abilities and capabilities of the HBCUs? See I am from Michigan and the voters decided AA was illegal. Thats fine...they don't want us, they don't need our best and brightest. The way i see it, my child is going where she know's she'll be accepted and doesn't have to prove a thing to anyone, or be resented because she is as just as good or even better than other 90%.

-cheers

[lmpw]

Hi Silvermoonlock, congratulations to your daughter's acceptance to and award from Howard. She will love it. I definitely understand her decision to not constantly be the race representative. I am an academic and just sat on a national fellowship selection committee and one of the Black young women we interviewed was a national merit scholar semi-finalist from Howard who turned down full scholarships to Duke, Stanford, UVA among many other places. People asked her why would she choose Howard over these other more prestigious institutions and she said the same as you. She said once she visited Howard and got such a warm and wonderful reception, she didn't want to go anywhere else. So, bravo to your daughter. My daughter, who is a first year student at Amherst, almost went to Spelman College. But, after being flown to Amherst for Diversity Weekend and seeing so much diversity there, she changed her mind and decided to attend Amherst. It ended up being a good choice for her and it is extremely diverse in so many ways. College choice is extremely personal and it has to be the right fit. I applaud your daughter's choice.

[Shrinkrap]

Go Bisons!!!!

[Triguena]

Welcome Silvermoonlock! Congrats about Howard. Shrinkrap, how did KNOW you were going to weigh in with "Go Bisons"!!

Ah, yes, diversity. I sit writing this from a hotel room in Providence RI. We are halfway through our marathon college tour. Tally so far:
Ithaca College: I only saw AA female students. Where were the young brothers?? On the upside maybe DS will get a girlfriend...
Syracuse:Great! We were not the only AA family at the info session (there was another from the DC area). Also there seems to be an effort here as there was a large group from "Prep for Prep" there at the same time.
BU: What a zoo! There must have been 75 families in our information session. Did not see one other AA family.....
Tomorrow is Brown and Friday is Wheaton (AA male president!!)

BTW, congrats Madville about Denison.

[Shrinkrap]

BTW, Silvermoonlock, your D's school (and your choice of music to blare!) sounds lot like ours. It is interesting to me that she seems to have a different perspective than my D. I believe this is a question raised here before; to what do you attribute your D's racial identity?

[Silvermoonlock]

Thanks

The racial identity has come full circle for my daughter. From pre-K through 8th grade, she was in a small private school, which started out somewhat diverse. By 8th grade it was mostly black.

For whatever reason she had lost patience with her classmates, although some she had been with since pre-K. Too much familiarity at that point. She wasn't clear on why some of them behaved like they did and they seemed shallow to her (OK she watched the news and read newspapers and watches the history channel). She didn't revolve around Kanye West or Allen Iverson lol. Long story short, she cut her ties with all of them. They reached out to her, or I would stil be incontact with the parents, but she wasn't having any of it.

She hit high school and thought she'd find people who would share some of her interests. (Excuse me while I laugh) She found the exact same thing at the new school, except it was a different culture. Of course she has made some good friends there, but she realized shallowness wasn't limited to race.

Anyway, by living in a city where the minority population is the majority, she was put in a position of defending the city and the race. She was just telling me today that she chooses her discussions because somedays it feels as if she is the spokesperson for the black race at school...rofl. "If she says it, it must be true!!"

As an aside, she was talking about colleges with counselor last year and expressed some interest at Xavier. The counselor had absolutely no knowledge of Xavier University in La. Kid had no respect for the counselor after that.

[Texasmama]

OMG! I hope I don't sound like Bill Cosby when I say this, but I have to give Cos his due. Silvermoonlock, your child sounds a little like my kids. They go to a high school that is very diverse. (39 percent black, 36 percent white, 12 percent Asian, 11 percent Hispanic) The black population of the school is the one that's been growing. My son said to me that other night, "If I weren't black, my school would make be be a racist against blacks." He says some of the black kids at the school behave so badly that they are giving blacks a bad name. As far as my D, who is a senior, she's in almost all AP classes, and there are very few blacks in those classes. Therefore, her experience of the school is very different from my son's experience. It's almost like they go to different schools if you look at the makeup of their classes. Anyway, my kids feel that the other blacks at their school are giving other races the wrong impression about what blacks are really like. These kids are in the middle class, living in decent homes, but seem to have very little regard for education. It's frightening. Since my S is a freshman, I can only hope we're just seeing freshman immaturity and not something more sinister.

[SuperMom_I_Aint]

>>>> These kids are in the middle class, living in decent homes, but seem to have very little regard for education. It's frightening.<<<

Which, of course, comes FULL CIRCLE to a post I made in the old forum: What the heck IS middle class really? And how do you know when you're "upper" middle -- or just, plain, "upper?"

Got a great & much appreciated response back then from a race-neutral point of view, but I wonder if the definition of "black middle class" isn't in someway DIFFERENT from other middle classes these days? Pulling in data from all the posts in here that have come before, we see that "middle class" when applied to blacks, doesn't mean "middle wealth."

-- and now we have TriG & SilverM & Shrink all jammin' to rap (don't ask me who *I* listen to - I'd have y'all rollin' and calling me "old."). So obviously the "upper middle" posters in this forum enjoy the same "culture" as the middle class kids referred to in T-Mama's post. WHAT THE HECK HAS HAPPENED to middle kids today?!! They're acting EXACTLY like the kids I went to school with in the projects in Dorchester back in the late 60's. And I gotta say -- livin' on the gov't dime, we were no where NEAR middle class back then.

When I was younger, I used to sneak peeks at the middle class kids. They were the ones in magnet schools, wearing socks and mary janes. They shopped the Sears Catalog and went to church every Sunday in spiffy clothes, driven there in actual family cars(!). They played piano and could identify the "Minuet in G" from "Fur Elise."

You KNEW the lower class kids, 'cause we were the ones in the late 60's outside until dark, not doing homework, playing hop scotch or jump rope, or "Mother May I" til' our haggard parents yelled through the windows for us to come inside -- or in the early 70's sporting HUGE "boomboxes", huddled around the "break dancers" who were doing incredible contortions to the sounds of the Sugar Hill Gang. Sitting in the back of the bus or the train (because that's where the "cool kids" rode), laughing and talking loudly. We backed up our "gang" as today's middle class kids do their "homies."

I swear - I can't tell the difference between the black working and middle class today. The lines have blurred. Upper middle appears to be what middle once was. And upper class? Hell I dunno -- they don't eat barbequed ribs w/their bare hands - I don't hang with 'em.

The thing I hate most -- is the toll it's taking on my girls' identities. Like your S, T-mama, "if [they] weren't black, [their] school would make [them] racist against blacks."

On the bright side, though? If each generation strives to be as different from their parents as possible. Perhaps THEIR kids will be defiantly and fiscally responsible!

[foolishpleasure]

Class has always been a complicated issued - - and too often confused with income, or even wealth.

For example, many of DD's boarding school White friends were affluent, but did not have any of the values or experiences associated with being upper-middle class. Often the parents had not attended college - - and if they had attended college it was as state school. This was quite different than the familes at DD's upper-eastside day school where many of the girls could boast day school, prep school and ivy league legacy relations going back two or three generations. And yes, each one, including DD, played "Fur Elise" or something similar at a middle-school recital and they now share a obsession with designer bags and sunglasses (the real thing - - not bootleg).

DD has had considerable difficulty finding other black students w/ background similar to hers. Generally, the black students with our class-values come from families that are wealthier my own. Or they are from working-class or poor families. As a result, many of DD's class-peer friendships are with White students. And DD would echo TX-mama's post re: bringing down the race.

It breaks my heart.

[Shrinkrap]

On a lighter note, my son wrote a "fashion" column today in which he discussed the latest in hip hop attire with which his caucasian peers could find their "inner gangster"....

[FLVADAD]

I can echo the same thing here. My girls have always stuck out like a sore thumb no matter which setting they were in. "Not black enough," "talking too proper," "oreo", etc. White kids used to come up to D3 and say, "Wow, even I'm blacker than you."

On the other end of the spectrum, D1 is often stereotyped due to her name (not quite Shaniqua, but close enough I guess ), and has been in many situations of being the "black" representative, or put on the defensive regarding the "black point of view," etc.

Fortunately, they've adapted extremely well and have a very large and broad network of friends and associates which pleases me considering the range of other potential outcomes.

As far as other black students, I agree with Texasmama and others. Even in college D1 was always expressing sadness regarding some of the unfortunate thinking and self-effacing behaviors she observed. And that was including some who might otherwise be considered among the best and brightest.

[Silvermoonlock]

Good Morning!

Kid was notified of her acceptance to Northeastern with a hefty scholarship : ) Northeastern was actually her 1st choice about a year ago. We did the college tour last summer to visit several schools. Howard, Northeastern and other assorted est coast colleges.

Howard was the 1st stop. The trip could have ended there lol. By the time we got to Boston, the lack of diversity was glaring. She thought Northeastern was too much like her high school. I saw the (white) students treating the (black) workers in Dunkin Doughnuts like trash. She applied to the other schools by November. Northeastern sent a notice to apply free, so she said what the heck!! Now she has to tell Northeastern no thanks. The deposits have been made to Howard and she will be going to the Weekend at the Mecca next week ; )

Anyway. Back to her middle class values. My grandfather (born in 1896) was one of the 1st black lawyers in the City. My uncle was a MD, my mom is a reitred teacher with 2 masters. My cousins are lawyers and doctors. She has 2 cousins who will graduate this spring; one with a masters in IT from Carnegie Mellon and the other just finished med school. A 3rd cousin graduated from Stanford, got a masters in Public health from U-Mich, MD from Duke and is now doing residency at a Harvard affilliated hospital in Boston. My mom is an AKA, as am I and we have assorted pink and green things around our houses. College was always a given.

The City has at least 3 public schools which are for the best and brightest. One the kid's teachers really didn't want the kid to attend. She referred to the students there as intellectual thugs. The students embracing a hip-hop culture that my kid can't quite relate with. They understood the need to excel, but stil feel the need to keep it real( say what?)

Yes, we listen to hip-hop, but my child's iPod has Aretha, Gladys, Tina, Carlos Santana, EWF, Hall and Oates, Jimi Hendrix(!) and others, in addition to Chris Brown, Outkast, and Kanye (lol I will ask her to replay Kiss Kiss by Chris Brown)

In the end, I kind of think Black Middle class is a state of mind. If your families are like mine, we have everything from the successful, motivated relatives I referenced earlier, to those who are quite happy to recieve a hand-out ( and we don't get it, since we were all exposed to the same things)