THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 63
A few months before the Poly Prep
incident, Prep for Prep, which was cel-
ebrating its fortieth anniversary, held a
symposium at the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture, in Har-
lem. Alumni and staff walked through
the building’s atrium in neat suits, vi-
brant dresses, and polished shoes; bronze
light fell from high windows. People
hugged and shouted at one another and
flagged down favorite teachers they hadn’t
seen in a while. The symposium featured
panels on education and on electoral pol-
itics, and during the Q.&A. portions
people got into good-natured arguments
and tossed out earnest ideas. Should we
form a Prep PAC to support political can-
didates who share our values? Should we
start a school of our own?
Prep’s current chief executive is Ai-
leen Hefferren, who was the program’s
operations director and, later, its fund-
raising chief before succeeding Simons,
in 2002. She has the efficient mien of a
newly elected congressperson—speak-
ing quickly and affably, calling dates and
figures frictionlessly to mind, swerving
purposefully between budgetary and
programming specifics and the pro-
gram’s guiding ideals. For the final ses-
sion at Schomburg, she spoke with Les-
lie-Bernard Joseph, then the chair of
Prep’s alumni council. (He is now the
C.E.O. of the Coney Island Prep char-
ter-school network.) During the Q.&A.
that followed, a tall young alum wear-
ing a floral shirt and a skeptical look
stood up. “I want to know,” he began,
“whether you feel that there needs to
be an ideological shift from a white-
supremacist, élitist mentality that Prep
is at minimum participating in, if not
encouraging or propagating.” The crowd
quieted, and he went on. Many of thePrep kids he knew and had mentored
had a “fraught relationship” with “this
Prep identity,” he said, “given Prep’s re-
lationship with white-supremacy norms.”
Joseph, who is black—and who looked,
to me, as if he sensed the peril inherent
in the question—spoke before Heffer-
ren, who is white, could. “There is an an-
swer you want, an answer Aileen believes,
and an answer Aileen can give,” he said,
suggesting that, rather than making her
offer any of those, he would field the
question. Then he steered his answer to-
ward a pitch to his fellow-alumni: those
who are active in fund-raising and char-
itable giving can bring about the changes
they want to see, he said.
I later tracked down the young ques-
tioner. His name is Anthony White. He
went through Prep 9, attended Choate
Rosemary Hall and Georgetown, and
got jobs in finance—first at Barclays,
then at Credit Suisse, which has a long-
standing relationship with Prep. (A num-
ber of Credit Suisse employees have
served on Prep’s board and have been
major donors to the program; the bank
frequently hires alums as interns, and
many go on to work there.) White told
me that he had no love for banking but
that the money was more than anybody
in his family had ever earned, and that
he used it partly to provide financial se-
curity for his mother and younger sister.
He’d worked as a Prep adviser in the
summers and, since finishing college, had
continued to mentor Prep students. Many
of them, he said, felt torn between their
genuine interests and what they felt Prep
expected of them.
“A lot of people I know are unhappy
with what they think Prep wants their
lives to be,” he said. “The mission itself
is élitist. And when you have a mission
that’s élitist, and then you use these in-
stitutions that are élitist, it’s difficult for
children or teen-agers to even have a
healthy self-esteem. A lot of them want
to figure out how they can decide their
identities outside of these rarefied spaces.”
White had always wanted to be a
musician. As he talked to these students,
he realized that he couldn’t advise them
in good conscience if he wasn’t living
his values. He quit his job at Credit
Suisse and used some of his savings to
start recording music as well as a one-
man podcast about pop culture and cur-
rent events called “The Black SublimeHOUSE
Door frames off the square, the inside
sweating tile-brick walls uncovered,
the checkerboard linoleum floors tilted
toward infinity or at least in the direction
of my northern bedroom window, which
in winter is half-frozen with ice thick
enough some mornings to draw on
with a fingernail, while in the dust of
summer the heat though everywhere
fills up the sunburned space with what
my sister calls the angels, who live also
in the attic, no less famous for its stars
and star-like rain that sometimes slips
on through the ceiling into the shy air.A man standing before his children with
nothing in his hands, the angst coming
down like air the weight of gravity through
the whole length of his body, a lifetime
of falling and slow settling like night fog
or soft rain, as if there were a lake inside
him and above that the cloud-float of
a mind, until a day, like now, the water
rises to the limits of its form: and
it does no good to say that fathers are
the fathers of their own misery, it does
no good to take it all to heart, when
all he is doing is standing there, alone,
in silence, disappearing into himself.—Stanley Plumly (1939-2019)