An Open Letter to the Greeley Administration and the Chappaqua Board of Education
Dear Dr. Ackerman, Mr. Corsilia, Greeley Administrators, and Members of the Board of Education,
I am a graduating senior writing to you in response to the last forty-eight hours in our district, particularly with regards to the administration’s response and the email that was released yesterday.
My parents are Indian and Pakistani immigrants, and I proudly identify as an Indian Pakistani American. I spent the first ten years of my educational journey in the Newburgh Enlarged City School District, a predominantly black and Hispanic, inner-city school district forty-five minutes north of Chappaqua. I feel that these life experiences have given me a unique perspective on this matter, and because of this, yesterday’s incident was very personal to me, even though I am not a member of the black community and my struggles pale in comparison to those faced by these individuals.
Let me be clear, Greeley — like the rest of the country — has a race issue. It manifests respectively in the school’s culture, curriculum, and administrative passiveness, as was seen in yesterday’s email.
Amongst the student body, ignorance and apathy towards race tarnish the student experience. Most students are loath to take off their blinders towards race because it’s uncharted territory; it’s uncomfortable to go beyond their bubble. And when they do, as one black student explained, it’s littered with microaggressions, largely because “there are a lot of experiences that many people cannot understand, especially when there is no one to explain them.” In his experience, other students weren’t “ready to treat me just as another person because they never learned how to.”
This, along with a clear lack of representation in the faculty and administration at Greeley — only one of my teachers in my three years at Greeley has been a POC — leaves POC students feeling isolated. This can cause students to reject their own cultural identities, simply because the social climate tells them that it is detrimental to be non-white in Chappaqua.
Moreover, there is an obliviousness of privilege amongst much of the student body. Coming from Newburgh to Chappaqua, I was baffled by the resource disparities between students in Newburgh and students in Chappaqua. Many Greeley students have astonishingly easy access to multiple attempts at standardized tests, technology, tutors, test prep services, college counselors, and college visits. They are also backed by a culture that values education and a fleet of teachers whose pedagogy is incentivized. This was simply not the case for students in Newburgh; for many classmates, these resources were financial impossibilities, primarily because the wealth inequality they faced was a product of racial marginalization. Greeley students must be more aware of their privilege, as this is a key first step in empathy toward the oppressed. For more insight into this specific inequality, I’m providing these links:
Additionally, cultural appropriation abounds throughout Greeley. One of the first things that struck me about the school was that many students — donned in Timberlands, blasting black rappers through their AirPods, idolizing the likes of LeBron, Beyonce, and the Obamas — were wholly unaware of the black experience. This was uncomfortable to confront, yet it was often branded as a mere byproduct of the endemic “affluenza.”
Culturally, there must be more mindfulness across our community. Students and faculty alike must be aware of the prejudices that have become ingrained within us all. That includes a consciousness of Greeley’s aforementioned lack of diversity, cultural appropriation, and privilege. Failing to be aware of these things allows for implicit racism to continue to plague our community in inconspicuous ways.
Beyond the culture, Greeley’s educational system fails to expose its predominantly white student body to the black and minority struggle. In tenth grade, I had an hour-long conversation with my English teacher after a lesson that was designed to teach through lyricism in hip-hop. My teacher chose a song from a white rapper regarding materialism. In our conversation, I explained to my teacher that I was disheartened by the fact that while this lesson presented an opportunity to unmask the black experience engagingly, she chose a song whose message was safe and perhaps culturally-appropriating. I suggested that future lessons utilizing hip-hop should be used to unveil the troubling realities that existed beyond the confines of the notorious Chappaqua bubble.
This conversation was an inflection point for my insight into the lack of minority experience featured in Greeley’s curriculum. Throughout English classes and social studies classes, there has been a distressing negligence of the history and perspectives of blacks and other minorities. Their books are rarely read, and their history is quickly glanced over. Most notably, Greeley seniors’ primary social studies option is AP European History, while during the rest of our four years in high school, merely a few weeks have been spent discussing African and Asian history — and even those stories are spoiled by the colonizer’s perspective.
The purpose of education in this country is to breed well-rounded and well-informed citizens. Greeley — a school lauded for its prowess and prestige, based in an ostensibly progressive haven — denies students this experience. It presents students with a glorified, disillusioned image of American society. Greeley doesn’t show the disabling status quo that exists for so many — for the single black mother working three jobs, the undocumented Mexican immigrant who boils under the sun as he toils in the fields, or the Arab refugee struggling to assimilate. By denying students an honest and enlightening education, Greeley leaves its students in a state of vulnerability and hopeless unawareness, making them ill-informed members of our society. For more on this, I sincerely ask that you reference this article:
Finally, Greeley’s administration is also guilty of indifference towards race, as evidenced by yesterday’s email. It was performative. It feigned compassion. It provided a false assurance that the district is active on this issue. Unfortunately, as I hope my perspective reveals, racism is entrenched in our society and operates in covert ways, as shown in the following two pieces:
https://www.theatelier.work/blog/2018/3/9/the-humor-of-minority-youth
https://www.theatelier.work/blog/2019/8/31/ejq5idnjpsp5ayr6h81zfqqm06jx3m
This means that tackling racism requires committed, long-term solutions and tangible actions — not just vague, ambiguous proclamations like yesterday’s email. I illustrate this in the piece below, which has resonated strongly within our community:
The administration has to do better and has to establish a more concrete action plan. Going forward, our administration must disclose transgressions, punish overt acts of racism hastily and unabashedly, and dispel racial undertones and detachment. It must not cower from shedding light on the ubiquity of racial issues and ignorance in our community, as it did during this incident.
Furthermore, our administration must hire POC teachers who can offer authentic perspectives and serve as archetypes for POC students. The administration must also revamp Greeley’s curriculum so that it does not shy away from minority struggle. Beyond the implementation of more minority authors as required readings and a more diverse study of history, there must be an introduction of courses dedicated to minority literature and history — of which there is a conspicuous absence in the extensive gamut of English and social studies courses offered to Greeley’s juniors and seniors.
To illustrate the importance of administrative proactiveness and how change must come from the top down, I want to draw a perhaps eccentric comparison. I just finished watching The Morning Show, a stunning drama that depicts how corporate negligence and silence equates to complicity, thus enabling a culture of sexual misconduct and misogyny in the workplace. Such a culture marginalized many competent women on the show, leaving them feeling powerless and deprived. At Greeley, administrative passiveness — which is precisely what transpired in this instance — has enabled a willful ignorance that is eerily analogous to what was permitted on The Morning Show, except that in this instance, qualified POC students end up feeling disempowered.
I graduate from Greeley in two weeks, yet I’m not overcome by exaltation and anticipation as I expected to be. Our district’s mission statement concludes by saying that it hopes to foster “responsible, contributing (members) of society.” Unfortunately, the prevalence of passive attitudes and ignorance towards racism throughout Greeley, along with the discomfort towards discourse surrounding racial issues, leaves me questioning whether many of my peers have been adequately prepared to be such individuals.
Sincerely,
Zain Jafar
