called into the office for throwing down a Ping-Pong paddle in a fit of anger over losing a match. The paddle popped up and accidentally hit a fellow classmate. Granted, Marcell did start to have a little temper around that time, but it was the product of adolescence and hormones, added to which was an undercurrent of hostility he was facing from his teachers and especially his peers, not some kind of academic or emotional deficiency. He had kids calling him the N-word, walking up to him and addressing him in Ebonics—“Yo, yo, yo, Marcell, what up!”—as if my son didn’t have a command over the English language, and even asking him, conspiratorially, if he ate fried chicken and drank grape Kool-Aid.
“What are you even talking about?” Marcell would snap. “My mother doesn’t cook fried chicken; it’s high in cholesterol and it’ll kill you. And I’ve never had Kool-Aid in my life.”
Unbeknownst to me, he was dealing with this day in and day out at that school, though I wouldn’t find out until years later. Only then did I understand that this kind of attitude was why he wanted to leave one particular school. When he was in the thick of it, however, he would simply tell me he didn’t like the school, which, to my ears, translated into “I don’t like school.”
“Boy, just focus and get your head in them books,” I would say, dismissing his complaints. “You can do this.” Frankly, I wanted the school to work; as an institution, it was academically sound, plus he had solid connections there, including a pair of Armenian brothers he really liked to hang out with, and Ian, the son of my fellow actress Regina King, whom he counted as a good friend. I thought he was doing just fine.
Then I got that phone call from the teacher that would make me understand just what kind of danger my son was in.
“He was a preemie, so that might have something to do with his abilities,” the teacher said nonchalantly one afternoon when I was called up to the school to talk about Marcell’s yearly assessment. She actually suggested that my son wouldn’t be able to test into a high-performing private high school and proposed that rather than let him graduate, I should approve leaving him back a year at her school. “If we keep him back a year, he can catch up.”
“Well, is he failing?” I asked, my forehead pulsing with anger. I knew the answer, and whatever she was going to say didn’t matter; I was too disgusted to bother hearing and digesting the words. I just wanted to see her fix her mouth to give me her reasoning for holding back a child who was passing all his classes. The very second sound came out of her mouth, I cut her off. “You know what? It doesn’t even matter what you say to me right now. I’ll be taking my son out of this school,” I said.
“Oh? What school do you have in mind for him, if you don’t mind my asking?”
I ticked off a list of considerations and mentioned a private school that was looking to up its diversity and had a new coach who was recruiting players for the school’s basketball team. One of my closest friends in the business, Lisa Vidal, who plays Kara on the hit BET show Being Mary Jane, had nothing but good things to say about the school. That’s where Marcell would go next—somewhere where he was wanted.
“Really,” she said smugly, more like a statement than a question. “Well, I don’t know if that would be a good fit. He might not be up to the rigorous academic standards they have there.” That’s when I gathered up my purse and my jacket and pushed back my chair. I needed to get out of there before I caught a case.
That incident and the school’s handling of it would be the dawn of my son’s racial awakening—when he would realize that skin color and the way society views it, particularly when it comes to black boys, is nuanced, layered, messy, and at times traumatic. I know figuring this out for myself was a devastating shock, particularly after growing up in a primarily black neighborhood and never having to experience this kind of in-your-face racism. Southeast DC had its issues, of course, but not the kind of racial intolerance that would have been immediately apparent to a sheltered African American girl surrounded by black people