Vania Blaiklock–Portsmouth Christian School–2000-2010–Portsmouth, Virginia
I attended a predominantly white private religious school from first grade until my undergraduate graduation. For a period of 15 years, this type of school setting– a place where most of my peers and teachers were white – was all I knew, including my undergraduate time. The racial disparity, though glaring, never seemed to be intentional.
It was not until I left college that I realized this deeply rooted racial history could be continuing to influence the racial makeup of the schools I attended. In 2015, the school that I spent most of my formative years (first grade through tenth grade) held an anniversary celebration. At that point, Portsmouth Christian School (“PCS”) had been open for 65 years, after Biltmore Baptist Church founded it in 1965. The date of its creation is important because even though it was over ten years after the decision of Brown v. Board of Education, Virginia was still in the early stages of integrating public schools. During the anniversary celebration, the founder of the school and pastor of the church noted that “When he first decided to open a Christian school in Portsmouth, he was not sure it would be successful but then that court decision happened, and his phone was ringing off the hook.”
This short anecdote sparked an interest in my mind that followed me into my academic career and has been the intellectual inspiration for my master’s scholarship and later published scholarship. From that moment on, I began to investigate what “decision” could have possibly made private Christian schools popular and whether that decision had any impact on my school experience. What is interesting about the 1960s is that the Court was both pushing desegregation but also “secularizing” public schools. Or at least, that was the perspective for most evangelical groups as the Court restricted bible reading and prayers in public schools. For this reason, the connection between the formation of private Christian schools and maintaining white segregation is not as precise as those academies who were open about their desire to avoid desegregation
Yet, through my research, I was able to demonstrate an implicit connection between these private Christian schools and segregation academies – the fact that they remained almost exclusively white. This connection is particularly relevant considering that the Supreme Court orders private school desegregationin 1976 but does not extend that explicitly to private religious schools until 1983. Learning this, I started to contextualize my experience at PCS and realized that even though I attended the school seventeen years after official private religious school desegregation, the legacy of whites-only exclusive admission still affected subsequent Black students to varying degrees.
It should not surprise most people that Black students in a predominantly white school experienced the effects of tokensim. By tokenism, I mean the difficulties that minorities face when trying to fit into a previously segregated majority group. These difficulties show up in explicit racial hostilities, internal and external performance pressure, stereotyping, and categories of exceptionalism. Importantly, depending on what “kind” of category of Black that a student fell into shaped how they experienced tokenism at the school.
For example, if I am honest, my own experience was not explicitly negative. Later, I would realize that this was because I fell into the smart and exceptional category of Black or as my white friends often would phrase it – I could pass for “not really Black.” This passing had little to do with my phenotype. Visually, I have a brown complexion and textured hair; instead, this referred to my distance from Black stereotypes – my speech, my academic rigor, and my assimilation and acceptance of white cultural ideas.
While I am not proud of the way that I assimilated during this period, I also understand that it was a means of survival that made it so that I had a great experience at my majority white school. For example, I often ignored instances of racism from my friends and stayed silent when they did/said things that were offensive or when they stereotyped other people. Mostly, I tried my best to fit in and in return no one called me the N word, students did not exclude me from events and functions, and no one assumed (at least to my face) that I was less than because of my skin color. But even though people considered me “exceptional” in many ways, that did not ease the pressure that I felt to continue being exceptional. By the time I was in middle and high school, school was more than just a place for learning and social connections – it was also a place of performance, a performance evaluated on my ability to proximate whiteness. This performance would continue past my attendance at PCS and become a part of how I perceived myself. It is not until early adulthood that I was even able to realize that my identity was a performance and not natural.
My experience of tokenism was not the only experience for Black students that attended PCS. As a part of my master’s work, I interviewed other former Black students who attended PCS, both before, during, and after the time that I went to the school. It was eye opening to hear their stories. Overall, it was clear that Black students, especially student athletes and those who did not fit the “exceptional” Black category faced explicit racial conflicts as well as hypervisibility of their existence as a racial minority. They were
called the N word. They were assumed to not be as smart as other students, and they did face categorizations of being “ghetto” or “hood.” For example, one of the people that I interviewed recalled a white student, who was her friend, be vocally surprised that she lived in a house with both of her parents and told her that she assumed that her mom was a single mom.
One event stood out for all students interviewed as a part of my study and that was the election of Barak Obama in 2008. I remember that time well. I was in eighth grade, and it may have been one of the only times that I explicitly had to confront my race and identity as a minority without the protection of my “exceptional” status. Though for many, Obama’s election signaled a historic step in the right direction for racial progress, for Black students at PCS, it still rings as a reminder that race matters in our school and our communities.
Students remembered the tension at the school during the election and recalled how once Obama won, the administration did not allow any student (but this primarily affected the Black students) to celebrate or even talk about him being the first Black president. The administration intensely restricted any conversation of Obama, and the situation became so volatile that some Black students left after the 2008 school year. I always look at this memory as a way of contextualizing the prevailing legacy of white supremacy and segregation that continues even in token integrated spaces. On a day where most of the country celebrated the great depths of societal change that transpired from the 20th century civil rights movement to the election of a Black president in the 21st century, Black students at a predominantly white Christian school came face to face with the pervasiveness of whiteness as majority.
In closing, I want to reiterate that this story is a complex one. In shedding light on the legacy that white dominance played and continued to play in my school, I am not suggesting that the education was bad nor that all students of color faced explicit racism every day. I am being authentic when I say that I have fond memories of my time at PCS, and I received an education that catapulted me to graduate with high honors from college and successfully complete law school. Instead, my hope is merely to show that the white supremacist idea of educational segregation for the purpose of promoting white dominance did not simply end with forced integration. It transformed in various ways and continues to impact both Black and White students who exist in these originally exclusive white spaces.
Vania Blaiklock is a lawyer and an American Studies PhD Candidate at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her research examines the intersections of race, education, and the law. She has published an article on the history of racial discrimination and religious Christian Schools titled “The Unintended Consequences of the Court’s Religious Freedom Revolution: A History of White Supremacy and Christian Church Schools.” She is currently working on writing her dissertation which looks at the actions and experiences of Black Americans’ quest for literacy as a right of citizenship in the 19th and 20th century and how that evidence might demonstrate a 14th Amendment constitutional right to literacy.