Aingkhu Ashemu, Graduated from Denver School of the Arts, 2017. Age 20.

Ashemu attended three different high schools in three different states—Renaissance High School of the Arts in Long Beach, CA, as a freshman; Peachtree High School in Atlanta as a sophomore; and Denver School of the Arts for his junior and senior year. After graduating, he went to Howard University for two years before taking this past year off. Because of COVID-19, he is considering his options and whether he will return to the Howard campus in the fall. Ashemu shared some of his high school experiences and SLJ asked what changes he would make the education system.

Denver School of the Arts is a predominantly white school—which has to do with a lot of different factors [tuition, auditions]—but there aren’t very many black kids at all. There were only two black kids in the senior year creative writing class. We had these two white friends, and we all took a picture together. In the yearbook, we were in the picture and they got the white kids' names right and switched me and my ex, who was the other black student, with two random black kids from a completely different grade. It was a little thing, but you can really feel how your presence isn’t acknowledged the same.

And it can be difficult and hard to discern when praise for your intelligence is because you’re actually intelligent or they’re surprised by the level of your intelligence.

I grew up in Ghana. My parents decided to move there when I was one and we stayed for ten years. My mother homeschooled my older sister and I and we didn’t watch TV. We didn’t use the internet until I was like nine, because my parents didn’t want those influencing our personalities. We were raised to have pride in ourselves. So I didn’t even really consider that people could be using something like saying I was intelligent negatively until much later when I was here and figured out that people used it that way. A lot of the stereotype stuff I didn’t learn until I came to America so I didn’t have a way to gauge that for a while.

You can’t have a school that’s not systemically racist in a society that is systemically racist. Schools are a part of the system. If society changes, it would happen in the school, but I don’t know that schools could change first and impact society. My mind can’t process it happening that way. Schools are a microcosm of the world. But there’s no way you can change the society without including changing in the schools where children are being educated.

So where you would start in a school? For one, the presence of police—not just security guards but police—in schools is not good at all for a lot of different reasons. If you look through the history of what the police are, which I actually recently went and read a long piece on it. I was blown away by the history and how they were created in America. In the south it was as slave control and, in the north, as a tool for rich people to control the labor force that were rioting all the time because they were being screwed over with wages and stuff.

The police have always been a system for control. We obviously see that in the larger society, but it’s starting in school, and it’s starting the violence against—not specifically black—but at-risk youth in general.

Secondly, the curriculum needs to change. Fundamentally. Even in college, I’m reading history books that say slave women and masters had sexual liaisons. If that kind of revisionist history is being regarded as higher education, it should tell you something. Even when they talk about important issues, they often take a position that either doesn’t delve into them or doesn’t speak on them accurately enough for it to matter. And a typical curriculum doesn’t start or end with any of black culture. It’s typically talking about black culture from how white people were looking at it at the time or in hindsight.

And the presence of black teachers. I went to three different high schools and, across my high school career, I didn’t have a single black teacher. When I went to Howard, I had all the black teachers obviously, and it was incredible. It was incredible. Being black doesn’t necessarily mean that you are conscious about black issues but, because I went to an HBCU, a lot of who you are is tied into almost every aspect of what you’re learning, so you kind of learn your place in the world. So it was a very incredible experience to have that.

Even when I was in Atlanta and was at a predominantly black school, I barely had any classes with black classmates or people of color, because I was typically in AP classes. It’s crazy the way you see the AP classes and the normal classes are split up racially. I had maybe three black classmates in all my classes except general geometry and that class had like two white people. It was a straight up flip.

I don’t know if I was treated differently in class, but whenever you’re the only black kid in a class that is predominantly not and any topic of race comes up, you can feel the entire room tense up and start kind of checking with you. At the time I was kind of a master of blocking everything out. Being uncomfortable just made me sink more into myself, so I wouldn’t experience that more. There were those instances, but they weren’t instances I dwelled on because I didn’t want to sit and dwell on them. I didn’t want to feel like that. You can really feel disconnected.

Leah Hunter, Hume Fogg Academic Magnet High School, Nashville, TN, graduated 2020. Age 17

As a lover of foreign customs and traditions, I looked forward to events like my high school’s annual International Day program, in which students celebrated cultures that were suffocated under the knees of colonialism and the whitewashing of history. Sitting year after year in my school’s auditorium, I began to wonder why it was that I knew so much about European history as opposed to my own. I wondered why our annual Black history program solely discussed the American sector of the innumerable cultures that encapsulate the African diaspora. Why didn’t we ever discuss subjects like the Kingdom of Kush, the Kingdom of Aksum, or the Kingdom of Ghana?

I was once asked by a friend why I’d opted not to take the semester elective, a seniors-only African American Literature class. His was a question with a long and complicated answer, one that I deflected and assumed he wouldn’t understand because of his European ancestry. Though it eluded me at the time, the truth as to why I didn’t take the African American Literature class was that I was tired of my African heritage and history being portrayed as if the substance of its past was the multi-continental enslavement of African people and the American Civil Rights movement alone. American school textbooks and literature offers students of all backgrounds the erroneous understanding that African empires were nonexistent, and that African people did not have a history before European colonizers made slaves of people living in the Western section of the continent.

My problem with the African American Literature and Studies classes, as well as school Black history programs is that they simply do not explore the depths of African history. While I believe that it is the job of parents to further educate their children on topics schools fail to address, it is paramount that classes pertaining to African history be offered and required nationally in every school the way classes pertaining to European history are. It’s easy to surmise that most students don’t investigate African achievements the way they do European ones. The evidence of this problem is present in our current protest filled society. The lack of African classes offered in schools subconsciously instills in students and teachers alike the belief that Africans and their descendants never impacted this world. It begs the question, “Who are you, and why should I care about your existence?”

I’d like those in opposition to this solution to consider this question: why is it that classes like AP US History are required, AP European History is always available, and African history is sometimes offered as an elective? In our “melting pot” society, it is critical that we inform citizens of the true history behind the contributing groups.

I saw my high school as the mirror image of our nation, but I wondered how “inclusive” it truly was if classes pertaining to African history were occasionally offered as semester electives, as if Black students were an accessory to the administration’s vision. I want more for my country and the students who attend school after me.