A memoir of race, public schooling, and identity as an "integration guinea pig" in the 1980s Midwest.
“In revisiting her educational journey, Simone Drake shines a poignant light upon the endurance of Black girlhood in this wise and bighearted memoir.” —Wil Haygood, author of Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America
“Set against the often-discounted ‘flyover’ terrain of the Midwest, Becoming Educated braids memoir and educational becoming, music and murals, and the quiet violence of policy, distilling how race, class, geography, and law choreograph our lives long after the gavel falls.” —T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor in Humanities, Vanderbilt University
“This memoir is imbued with authenticity and intellectual rigor. Simone Drake interrogates the complexities of race, colorism, and class with a musical rhythm and visual vibrancy that brings to life a multisensory narrative of Black womanhood, illuminating how personal and collective histories are shaped by law and geography. Constructing a coming-of-age narrative that is as real to the Black American experience as it is emotionally resonant to us Black mothers, professionals, and daughters, she challenges the persistent erasure of Black women’s genius and is refreshingly unapologetic about her own intellectual achievements. A vital contribution to the contemporary discourse on identity and resistance.” —Stacia Jones, Esq., Employment Lawyer and Global Human Resources Leader
Becoming Educated is Simone C. Drake’s engaging and bold memoir about race, class, gender, and the meaning of education in the urban Midwest. Drake, a scholar of literature, culture, and law, uses her own story as a Black girl attending recently desegregated Columbus public schools in the 1980s and 1990s to explore the United States’ most entrenched social problems and how local systems have tried to combat them. From starting kindergarten the year after an Ohio court decision called for busing to end school segregation, to climbing the ranks of academia, to her decision to send her sons to highly rated but largely white suburban schools, Drake weaves a lively and erudite accounting of her identity formation as an “integration guinea pig.” She punctuates her story with rich evocations of the music, TV, and film that shaped her generation, powerful reflections on relevant works by Black writers and artists from Dawoud Bey to Jay-Z, and images of her own artwork. This prismatic book is a must-read for Gen Xers, Midwesterners, and Americans of any race wanting to think more deeply about how our nation’s educational systems—and by extension, all of us—must reckon with inequalities past and present.
Simone C. Drake is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University and holds a courtesy appointment in the Moritz College of Law. A proud graduate of Columbus City Schools, she lives in central Ohio with her family. She recently returned to making art and cannot believe she had tucked it away for so many decades.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Part One: Becoming
To the Midwest, with Love
Tell Me What You Hear
On Becoming
Stories to the Tune of Midwest Life
Tension, 1971
Learning Unlimited
Riding the Bus with My White Boy
Mrs. DeLoache
Separatist Aesthetics
Soul Town Kindergarten
High Noon on Sunday and Other Times Too
Stay Off the Grass
Glass Doorknobs
Teacher’s Pet
Childhood Can Be a Drag
They Weren’t There to Be Our Friends
I Wanted to Be Whitley Gilbert, but I Didn’t Want to Attend an HBCU
Someone Walked Off with All My Portraits
Girl Meets Boy, Boy Meets Girl
Big Brother Blackman
A Friend Lost and Found
Part Two: Knowing
Republican Suburbia
Birthing Black Babies
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom House
Dyslexia and Us
Black Boys Don’t
Mansion Magic
Going South: Verse 1
Going South: Verse 2
She Had The Autobiography of Malcolm X on Her Bookshelf
The Push, May 2019
Quarantine Buddies
Thank God for Our Bodies, Ourselves
Red Stilettos
Grandfather to Grandson
Sho’ Nuff Brother
Blue Space
Overeducated. Black. Woman.
Never Seeing Myself
My Best Things
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1 Linden McKinley Black History Week Assembly Pamphlet
Appendix 2 Important Dates
Notes
