62 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
group of tables we collectively called the
Middle Table was informally reserved
for the darker skinned; we often pushed
the tables together and used them to
anchor marathon games of spades and
rounds of the dozens. We were theatre
kids and singers, athletes and library
shut-ins, student politicians and social
outcasts and “loungies” (vaguely politi-
cal punks who hung out in the student
lounge). I straddled worlds, trying and
failing at sports, eventually settling for
being the manager of the football team;
I sang in the glee club and in the boys’
ensemble, flitting around the city in a
blazer and khakis, harmonizing under
Christmas trees in office lobbies. I per-
formed in musicals, too. One year, I
played the villain in “Carousel,” a sea-
faring baritone named Jigger. A very
kind white English teacher pulled me
aside to make sure that I wasn’t worried
about the unfortunate rhyme.
At meetings of the Union, Horace
Mann’s multicultural club, we watched
standup specials and satirical movies like
Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” and puzzled
over how our favorite artists had turned
the country’s lousy realities into some-
thing joyful. Alongside my friends, from
a jarring double vantage of privilege and
its lack, I came to know America better,
and began honing my responses to it. I
also left America for the first time: during
my junior year, my Japanese teacher led
a trip to Tokyo, where I spent a few days
with a host family, at whose table I ate
profusely, terrified to offend, and spoke
stilted Japanese in nervous bursts. The
next summer, I went with the glee club
on a tour of the Baltics, where we sang
Verdi’s Requiem in huge churches in Tal-
linn, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg. I knew,
without ever being explicitly told, that
this kind of rare experience was just as
much the point of prep school as what
I learned in any of my classes.
One night, during an after-school
concert in the Horace Mann cafeteria,
a rumor crept through the crowd. It was
the winter of 2000, and we’d all been
following the story of Amadou Diallo,
a young Guinean immigrant who had
been shot and killed—forty-one shots,
nineteen bullet wounds—by four New
York City police officers; they had sup-
posedly mistaken him for a rapist on
the loose. An older boy named Damien,
also a Prep kid, a football player with a
high, flutelike voice—who, later that
year, would be elected student-body
president—pulled me outside, into the
cold, and broke the news: the cops had
been acquitted. We cursed and shouted
for a while, then just stood there, backs
against the wooden fence that ringed
the athletic field, shaking our heads.
My friends were my world, and I re-
alize now that I never thought to hope
for more than that. Recently, I had din-
ner with one of them, a classmate at
Prep and at Horace Mann named Chris,
who is now a private-school teacher and
administrator. The Times had just pub-
lished the first installment of the 1619
Project, and, on a WhatsApp group chat
that my high-school friends and I have
maintained for years, Chris said that a
project like that would have changed
our lives if it had come out when we
were younger. At dinner, over Chinese
food, I asked him what he’d meant. Had
we needed our lives to be changed? Was
high school tougher for us than it was
for others? If I was angry then, or had
a chip on my shoulder—a thing I was
told more than once; I must have learned
the phrase around that time—who could
really say why? But, even as I asked these
questions, one after another in a quick,
strained bunch, I wondered why I sud-
denly wasn’t sure I wanted to hear his
answers. Chris raised his brow, looking
compassionate but also ready to laugh,
and asked me about Halloween during
our senior year. I had dressed up by wear-ing my usual dark-gray hoodie but with
a sign strung from my neck that said
“The Black Kid Who Stole Your Bike.”
“You were obviously working through
something,” he said.W
hen I talked with Simons about
the arguments against Prep when
it began, he said people had told him
that Prep kids were “going to have lots
of problems socially. They’re not going
to know who they are. You’re going tomess with their minds and their sense
of identity and blah, blah, blah, blah. I
was getting that from a whole lot of lib-
erals. They were a bigger problem, ini-
tially, than conservatives.”
In January, 2019, a video showing two
students wearing blackface and acting
like monkeys surfaced at the Poly Prep
Country Day School, in Brooklyn. A
demonstration ensued; one of the pro-
testers was the daughter of Diahann Bill-
ings-Burford, a Prep alum who started at
Poly Prep in the mid-eighties, and later
served as New York’s first chief service
officer, overseeing volunteer programs,
during Michael Bloomberg’s adminis-
tration. (Bloomberg has been a major
donor to Prep and is a onetime trustee.)
Billings-Burford is now the C.E.O. of
the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality.
“The kids reached a point where they said,
‘This is not O.K.,’ ” she told me. “They
were, like, ‘This is our school, and if you
valued us you wouldn’t ask us to feel like
this.’” On Martin Luther King, Jr., Day
that year, a multiracial group of students
wore all black and boycotted classes.
The incident reminded Billings-
Burford of her time at Poly Prep. Late
in 1986, a young black man named
Michael Griffith died after he was beaten
by a mob of white men in Howard Beach,
Queens. “Some of our white friends
were, like, ‘You don’t understand, it was
just where he was, it wasn’t a race thing,’”
she recalled. “There wasn’t a space to
discuss these issues.” She later became
the head of the student government,
and, against the wishes of the school’s
administration, she led a group of stu-
dents in creating Umoja, Poly Prep’s first
black-student group.
Jackson Collins, another Prep alum,
now serves as the program’s associate
executive director. He’s also the author
of a doctoral dissertation about the ex-
periences of students of color in private
schools. He surveyed more than five
hundred Prep students and measured
their happiness according to three vari-
ables: “sense of belonging,” “emotional
wellbeing,” and “racial coping self-effi-
cacy and competence”—i.e., how some-
one reacts in a moment of racial ten-
sion. Among older generations, Collins
has found, avoidance is a common tac-
tic, but, he told me, “students and their
families are much more candid now,
much more outspoken.”