JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Choosing the right school for your child can be a difficult decision, but it can be even more complicated if your child's Black. Jenisha Watts is a staff writer at the Atlantic and also the mother of a son approaching school age. She shares her experience in a piece titled "Why I Am Sending My Black Son To Private School," and she joins us now. Welcome.
JENISHA WATTS: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
SUMMERS: So we're having this conversation on the heels of a lot of fierce debate about this story that landed in the New York Times magazine. It was written by your friend Nikole Hannah-Jones. But I want to start this conversation talking about your experience. You grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, and you received what you describe in your piece as an abysmal education. How did that factor in to how you're raising and thinking about educating your son?
WATTS: I guess, one thing I want to say, too, is just this is from my experience from Lexington and from...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
WATTS: ...My personal experience. But I will say that I - by the time I graduated high school and I attended community college, I was behind. I discovered that I was behind in English, math. I didn't know a lot of, like, some of the basic things that you should know, I guess. For me, it's just a situation where I've always just been extremely insecure about my education. It's just something that just haunted me. So, like, even now as a staff writer at the Atlantic, I get very insecure or stressed out by coming across like I may - don't know certain information.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
WATTS: With my son, I just never wanted him to experience what I experienced of, you know, just not knowing or just feeling like you're not smart enough or not picking up on, like, certain social cues or cultural cues.
SUMMERS: Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a cover story for the New York Times magazine. It was called "Choosing A School For My Daughter In A Segregated City," and it charts the decision that she and her husband made to send their daughter to what they describe as a high-poverty all-Black school in New York. And I just want to just be direct here. I am not a parent, but I do remember when that article came out, it was this big topic of debate among my friends, especially my Black friends. And I wonder if you had a similar experience.
WATTS: I think Nikole is probably one of the most courageous journalists of our times, and she's an incredible journalist.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
WATTS: And I think that what she was doing, was - I mean, I thought it was incredible. And I don't want to speak for Nikole, but...
SUMMERS: Of course.
WATTS: ...I just love the idea of thinking about the community as a whole.
SUMMERS: In your article, you acknowledge that being able to choose a school is a, quote, "mark of status". Many parents do not have that option, but you do. Tell me what factors you weighed when choosing to educate your son in the private school system.
WATTS: The biggest factors for me was the education, the education and also the diversity and the rigor of the program. So, I mean, he's still in preschool, but I just wanted to make sure that he was surrounded by diversity. I want it to be organic.
SUMMERS: Jenisha, our educational backgrounds are really different. I grew up in Missouri, and I attended overwhelmingly white private Catholic schools my whole life. And I would say I got what people would say is a conventionally good education, a great education from a school with great ratings. But I have to say, it was also a super lonely experience. There weren't a lot of other kids that looked like me in my classes. Do you worry about that when you think about educating your son?
WATTS: Yeah, I definitely don't want him to only be the only Black boy. Like, I want there to be other Black and brown kids. So I do want him to see other people that look like. I do remember, like, a couple weeks ago, he came home and he told me he wanted straight hair. And I was horrified. And it's not like his school doesn't - I mean, he sees a lot of people that look like him, but, you know, it was just something I had to, like, kind of sit with for a couple days.
SUMMERS: Yeah. We should talk about the gender factor here, too, because you are raising a Black son in this country. Why do you think it is that many of our young Black boys or Black men are failed by this country's public education system?
WATTS: I think I can - from my experience with my son, I can say sometimes that teachers can bring their own biases when they're working with Black children, or they can make assumptions. So I've had experiences when my son was, like, maybe 1 years old and a teacher used like aggressive language when she was describing his behavior. But I was like, wait, he's 1. So I think there's just the lens of how they just viewed in this country.
SUMMERS: If you could sit down across the table from another Black parent who is wrestling with what is undoubtedly just a really hard choice, what advice might you give them?
WATTS: I will say that whatever decision you make is going to be a hard one. I don't believe there's a right or wrong decision, but I think that it's just - like, you have to kind of, like, live with it. And even though it's selfish, you have to think about, you know, what you think will work best for your child. And then sometimes it may hurt you because, you know, other kids may be left behind, you know? Like, you know, you see other kids, like, struggle.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
WATTS: So I think it - just it's hard. It's a hard - it's very, very hard.
SUMMERS: Jenisha Watts is a staff writer at the Atlantic. Thank you so much for joining us.
WATTS: Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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