Growing Up Segregated

Until coming to Amherst College, I had lived my entire life in the same suburban town on Long Island, which consists of two counties — Nassau and Suffolk — jutting east from New York City. Growing up on Long Island brought me many blessings: wonderful access to nature and the ocean, and peace and quiet, just to name a few. Long Island, however, is also heavily segregated. How segregated? The towns of Garden City and Hempstead, which border each other, exemplify Long Island’s segregation. Close to 90% of Garden City residents are white, while 90% of Hempstead residents are Black or Hispanic. About 4% of students in Garden City qualify for free lunch. Literally across the street in Hempstead, around 72% qualify for free lunch. Because property taxes fund school districts on Long Island, and Garden City has much higher property values than Hempstead, Garden City has $7,000 more to allocate per student in funding  compared to Hempstead. This structure exemplifies what Princeton Sociologist Douglas S. Massey calls “hyper-segregated patterns,” and it runs deep across nearly every town on Long Island.

Historians and urban planners have written extensively about how Long Island ended up so segregated, but I do not intend to focus on that in this article. Nor do I intend to delve into the political culture that actively maintains Long Island’s segregation. Rather, I want to recount what it is like to come of age in such a segregated environment and the devastating effects it has had on my psyche, despite my growing up on the “winning side of the tracks.” This column begins on Long Island, but will continue into Amherst College, because, as I have learned, segregation in this country is inescapable. Despite that, we Amherst students also have the very unique opportunity, by attending a small and diverse school, to become better, more introspective, and more empathetic people towards those unlike us.

I was lucky enough to attend the Syosset Central School District for my K-12 education. Syosset prides itself on being one of the best school districts on Long Island — and for good reason. The district boasts many impressive accomplishments, including an average graduation rate of 99% and an average student SAT score between 1400/1600. Syosset spends more money per pupil per year, $32,125, than any other school district in America. As such, I was able to learn under high-quality, caring teachers, and with plenty of resources, such as a stocked guidance office. Behind these privileges lies a much darker reality: growing up in a de facto segregated place tainted every aspect of my intellectual and personal imagination.

For instance, Syosset and its school district are overwhelmingly white and Asian, 41.3% and 50.9% respectively, as compared to being only 0.6% Black. The school is also overwhelmingly upper-middle class, with only about 7% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. I had no African American teachers or friends in Syosset — the first time I ever interacted with African American people outside of passing conversations was when I came to Amherst. At Syosset, African Americans were objects to be studied through the lens of curricula in my history and literature classes instead of full and complex human beings. For example, we discussed and analyzed how African Americans have been mistreated by the criminal justice system after watching Ava DuVernay’s documentary, “13th,” which highlights the links between slavery and mass incarceration. However, without African American students present in that classroom, we didn’t develop empathy and understanding for African Americans beyond just being static victims of police brutality.

Through our studies, students in Syosset gained a false sense of confidence that we could understand and analyze the world effectively. In reality, we learned to view the world through the comfortable, upper-middle-class lens. More specifically, our implicit definition of “normalcy” that we developed was that “normal people” were white or Asian, on track to college and a professional career, and had the disposable familial income to afford luxuries such as vacations or casual trips to New York City. My peers and I would continue to understand the world through this lens of “normalcy.” By defining how we view the world, de facto segregation — especially in today’s era where equality under law is written into the Constitution — can hide its influence. Because these biases were enforced subtly every day by well-meaning teachers, administrators, friends, and family members, unless one were to intentionally reflect on their biases, they would likely not notice how growing up in a segregated environment has affected them. I have seen the impact of these ingrained biases firsthand, noticing that people from Syosset and similar upper-middle-class towns tend to congregate with each other when they go to university and into the real world.

Where has this left me? Growing up in Syosset has tainted my internal monologue and gut instinct with bias against those outside the definition of “normalcy” that Syosset has ingrained in me. My environment implicitly taught me that those I did not grow up alongside do not belong in the spaces that I inhabit. I cannot count the number of times I have had to cut off my internal monologue when meeting and interacting with other people. I have imagined people who fall outside my realm of “normalcy,” such as those from low-income backgrounds, as objects of sympathy to be analyzed and helped, not as full human beings. This notion has been devastating to think about. It’s terrifying to think that I could have lived my whole life without ever questioning the reflexes that growing up in such a segregated place have instilled in me. 

I knew abstractly when I grew up that I was in a segregated space, but this idea was only ever a vague talking point. I never thought to question how growing up in an environment segregated on racial and class lines harmed myself as a person; I only knew that I was an abstract beneficiary of privilege. I never felt anything. It took me attending Amherst and taking classes like “Justice,” where I worked with incarcerated people and opened up new emotions and ways of relating to other people, to reflect on the tangible harms that growing up in a segregated place has had on my development. My upbringing is still affecting me today, as I prepare to write my thesis around topics such as slavery, race, and mass incarceration, and I have to grapple with how my own ingrained biases are affecting how I undertake my academic research. It is also especially terrifying to think how early on in my life these prejudices have formed in me; research shows that prejudice formation in children happens as young as around three to four years of age.

You might think that coming to Amherst could have provided me a cure from growing up in such a segregated place. In many respects, Amherst College has helped me tremendously in this regard. Coming to Amherst College was the first time in my life that I substantially interacted with people from different backgrounds, meeting students from low-income and ultra-wealthy backgrounds alike. Of course, however, Amherst is not perfect. It only takes one stroll through Valentine Dining Hall (Val) during the dinner rush to see how students self-segregate amongst those similar to themselves,  shown through the athlete/non-athlete divide. As I experienced firsthand when I studied abroad, it is quite natural for students to associate with students from similar backgrounds, because that is where we find comfort in unfamiliar environments. Moreover, as I discussed in my previous column, Amherst, through its very structure, selects only for a very specific type of privileged student and then systematically excludes those who do not fall into this category. I am also not unique amongst the Amherst student body in hailing from a de facto segregated or homogenous place. Unfortunately, de facto racial and class segregation is practically unavoidable in this country, whether one hails from Baltimore, where patterns of racial and class segregation look like a “butterfly” on a map; the civil rights epicenter of Selma, Alabama; or Grosse Pointe, Michigan, an affluent Detroit suburb built upon de jure segregation. 

However, surprisingly enough, we Amherst students have reason for optimism. Despite everything I just said, we still attend a very racially and socioeconomically diverse school. Furthermore, as I learned when I studied abroad and attended a large school of over 40,000 students, our tiny size gives us students substantially more opportunities to form strong connections with people from different backgrounds than is afforded to our peers in larger schools. At Amherst, we have the unique opportunity to learn how to be intentional about reaching out to those from backgrounds different from our own and to reflect on how the environments we have grown up in have shaped our internal biases and prejudices. This opportunity is especially fleeting because we will likely never live one door down again from someone from a different socioeconomic class or region than us, or, frankly, from somebody who lacks the professional jobs that Amherst aims to set its students up for. 

To make use of this opportunity, we must pursue two particular goals. First, being self-aware of the biases and prejudices that your background has imparted on you; from my experience, having this knowledge helps me cut off my own judgmental train of thought when I meet new people. Secondly, we ought to place more intentional effort into meeting students from different backgrounds than ourselves. From my experience, this is surprisingly easy to do, and I have been able to do this through the friends I have made from serving on the Association of Amherst Students to simply sitting with new people at Val. 

I am not advocating for anything close to a cruel form of cancel culture on campus that castigates people for saying the “wrong thing” or humiliating, Maoist self-criticism sessions. However, a little bit of intentionality about meeting people from new backgrounds, such as, say, by attending new club events, can go a long way in making us more tolerant people. My goal with this column is not to say that America’s centuries-long history of racial and class segregation, or the longstanding prejudices it has created, will magically be solved tomorrow by us. But we Amherst students are in a very unique and privileged position to begin making a difference, starting with how we conduct our lives on campus.