We Weren’t Represented As Our White Peers Were

Brittany Wilson-Jackson Preparatory School-Class of 2020-Jackson, MS

Jackson Prep’s history as a 1970 breakaway all-white private school at the time of public school integration wasn’t any secret to me. In fact, my mother remembers driving past the school on her way home. As a local 1980s teenager in an integrated public school, she’d ride by Prep’s Lakeland Drive campus. She remembers it as an isolated place, some place foreign to her. “I never thought I’d have a daughter going there,” she says.

   A generation later as a middle-schooler in Jackson public schools in 2015, I was thinking ahead to college, wondering if I could earn undergraduate credit in classes at a private school. I didn’t automatically associate Prep with its past.

    In truth, I wanted a school change as well. My father had attended a predominantly white school when he was in elementary school in Michigan and was one of five Black students at the private school. Except for about six white students, my public middle school in Jackson was all Black. My parents and I thought a private school might be an opportunity for me to work with people from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds and different upbringings. 

    I explored different private schools and zeroed in on Jackson Prep because it was closer to our south Jackson home than the other private schools north of town. I was intrigued by the course offerings and even liked the uniforms more than my public school ones.  

    Nothing about race was spoken when I visited Prep, and neither did I ask. My parents and I knew some social challenges would likely happen, but we just didn’t know what or when. Prep was as white as my old school was Black. Yet my parents saw it was a solid school academically and that I wanted to go there. My parents considered going to a private school anchored in pro-segregationists’ money a significant decision. Despite its origin story, I enrolled for ninth grade.

   The night before I started Prep, I rehearsed various scenarios regarding racially charged comments that might happen, just in case. Most students came from First Presbyterian Day School, an administrator had explained to me when I first visited. Most of my classmates had only known private schooling, while I was coming as someone of a different race and different school background. I figured that even though the administrator had said that Prep was a family, I wouldn’t be entirely a part of that family.

  On my first day of school, I tucked my uniform shirt into my skirt and walked proudly into the school, ready to find my locker and my classes. I saw students laugh and say she must be new. That’s when I saw that the girls had their shirts untucked. My first day came and went. 

     My Prep graduating class had twelve students of color, four Black students. A new vocabulary came with the Prep territory for me. I kept hearing classmates mentioning “First Pres,” that elementary school most attended before coming to Prep for middle school and high school. It took a while before it occurred to me that this “First Pres” was just shorthand for the school at Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church on North State Street. That school was created at the time of local school integration as Prep had been. In turn, my new Prep classmates had never heard of my old school, Bailey APAC. Ironically, those two schools are within three blocks of each other, both on North State Street in the Belhaven neighborhood. That’s how parallel our worlds ran.   

   I began to see how other things operated at Prep, including how students of color were branded with various unspoken stamps—chill, smart, and star athlete were the main identities. The stamp you received signaled your significance to your fellow peers. Most of the time, you were one or the other. If students of color came in pick-one categories, I was in the smart category.

   As a student of color in Honors and Advanced Placement classes, I often saw myself as a black dot on a white canvas. I was the only Black student in my grade to be in Honors and AP classes. Once, a classmate declared she was surprised to see me in the advanced English class. I felt the need to represent my race, prove my intellect, and make sure that my peers, teachers, and administrators knew and understood that the Black students that come to Prep are not just star athletes on the football, basketball, and track teams. Given the stereotype that Black people were more athletic, I emphasized my academic and artistic skills rather than try a sport. High school is tense enough on a good day, but it’s extra emotional labor to task yourself to represent your entire race.

    I hand it to Prep for trying and allowing this one: a civil rights history class. The teacher sincerely wanted students to know the history of Mississippi and of Prep’s origins (the school website omits the school integration part about its beginning). On the class’s first day, she showed a video about how we as humans define race versus what DNA shows about race. After the video, the teacher asked if the class thought Blacks were more athletic than white. The vote was yes. “That’s not true,” I told the class. “I’m an example of that,” I laughed. I felt my back stiffen and a small knot in my stomach. I’d rather read my textbooks and create art. I wasn’t on any sports team. I wondered what exactly we’d learned so far about our shared humanity and each person’s identity. Even though I’d proclaimed I wasn’t athletic, I could tell the others kept their opinion. 

   Later in the term, the teacher had a trustee of the school come to speak. He asked for suggestions on attracting more students of color. I spoke up on broadening the curriculum and on scholarships. Simply the atmosphere was something to contend with as well, however. A wordless kind of gaslighting went on. Even if nothing was said about race, there’s a silent message when the staff cleaning the school looked more like you than your teachers and administrators. And most times, the maintenance staff were the kinder of the two. One maintenance man in particular would always find time in his day to say hello and ask how I was doing and give words of encouragement about life. There were few instances where we had at most ten POC employees that were not a part of the maintenance and cafeteria staffs, but many of them left within two years of working at Prep. 

   There wasn’t any racial camaraderie among the small group of students of color other than the United Student Union, which was a key space where we had the chance for candid conversation about the good and the bad at Prep in terms of whiteness and the Prep bubble. I was talking with one of my Asian peers, and we two thought harder about the curriculum. We counted how many books we had read during our high school years and realized how very few were by POC authors. Of the four years in high school, not including shorter works, we had read four books by writers of color, including Interpreter of Maladies and Things Fall Apart. When I think back, I can’t remember any book written by an African American in any of my required reading. There were some as options for outside reading, but we weren’t being represented in the curriculum as our white peers were. We were side characters in the novels, if even a character. We were constantly bombarded with the same information about the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Silk Road. We were in a battle of identity at Jackson Prep because who we were was not represented—which means misrepresented—in English and history classes. In every history class I had, in fact, states’ rights was presented as a possible reason for the Civil War instead of specifically to preserve slavery.  

    My senior year, I worked on several projects that were meaningful for me: Black in America and Being Black at Prep. Each project gave me a chance to think harder about my identity.

   An event occurred my twelfth-grade year, though, that still stays with me. Three white students wrote a note to a Black student calling him the N word. They passed the note through a girl who was clueless to the note’s contents. The Black student opened it, and it was a gut punch, of course. I’m grateful it wasn’t me, but I couldn’t let this incident slide. I told a teacher I trusted, and she told an administrator. I was questioned about what I knew. The white students were suspended and also assigned to do extra community service. I was glad I’d helped another student and that the students who wrote the hateful note were dealt with.

   Even though Prep has come a long way, Prep has a lot of room to grow in the realm of race relations and its social atmosphere. It’s evolved from a white academy rooted in the separation of the races to a place that is attempting to welcome various racial groups. When I went to Prep and had so many opportunities offered to me, I had never known so many options were open in Mississippi. I think that schools could learn from Prep in this aspect, offering plenty of opportunities and a number of resources for its students.

    I’m glad I went to Prep despite the negatives I’ve mentioned. I believe because I was in a white-majority environment, I grew more passionate about racial healing, racial injustice, and education. I was able to find my voice as an individual there, and I don’t believe I would have grown the way I did if I had gone to another high school—one where a Black identity could be taken for granted. 

   Prep far from reflected who I wanted to be, true. Honestly, however, the same applies now that I’m a student at white-majority Millsaps College. The point is to reckon with what’s wrong and to reckon with ignorance, and work with the institutions and individuals who are willing to try to do so and create a better social environment.  

Brittany Wilson is a sophomore at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. She is a double major in Mathematics and Creative Writing.