Well, my name is Rebecca Braithwaite. I'm 71 and will be 72 in a week. I have a daughter, Elaine Braithwaite who lives in Brooklyn. She went to school here in Chicago, to the University of Chicago Laboratory School from nursery school through eighth grade, and then decided she wanted to go away to boarding school.
So, having a child back in the '80s in Chicago was kind of a fun experience for me. Because I had a job that paid enough for me to take care of her. I was a single mother. I had a job that paid enough for me to take care of her. And I had an aunt who retired from her job at the Internal Revenue Service. So she could be her only babysitter. She decided she did not want her niece to be with strangers. So she actually, she was old enough to retire, but she just been putting it off. And she said, "Now I've got a reason to." I moved a block from her, so we'd be close to each other. And she retired from her job so that every day... I mean, my daughter had one babysitter through her entire childhood and that was her aunt, which is kind of amazing when you think about it.
But my biggest concern was school. Chicago has this bad public schools that I knew I couldn't send her to public school. And I had to figure out, "Can I really afford private school?" Because private schools are pretty expensive in Chicago. I didn't want her to go on to a Catholic school. I mean, I was raised in Catholic schools, but I wanted her to get a better education than I got. So, I applied at the University of Chicago Laboratory School when it was time for her to start school and she was accepted. And initially I didn't send her there when she was initially accepted because she was in this great childcare. And always in her childcare, her aunt would take her every day so she could kind of get socialized and be around other kids.
I didn't really need childcare. But it was a great center in Hyde Park. So I thought, "Well, I'll send her there for half a day." So she was going there for a half a day and then her aunt would pick her up and I would be at work. And so when I decided to send her to the University of Chicago for nursery school, I really had second thoughts because, I thought she's happy where she is. But then, and plus it was going to cost more, But then the childcare center raised their prices and they matched the University of Chicago prices almost. So I said, "Well, I might as well go ahead and put her in there because that way when she's ready to start kindergarten, they'll accept her. And I don't have to worry about going through the acceptance process again." Even though I had turned down initially, the first week of school when I saw that they raised prices, I said, "I'm sending her there." So I called them and I said, "Well, I think I changed my mind." They said, "This is a very selective school, you can't just go around changing your mind." I said, "Well, I've decided I want to send her there. Do you still want her?" And they said, "Yes." So, and I knew they would because they like little smart Black girls.
She would get the highest math scores in the entire school. And when you go in for the conferences, they would say things like, "Well, math isn't as important at this school." And that's the kind of thing they would do for little Black girls. So you had to be on guard constantly about them denigrating her abilities all the time. She was selected for a special project they had, where the math department at the university itself wanted to do some, testing with some of the kids. And so, they choose one of the children they selected and she went over. And they were doing some spatial testing and they had a supposedly random set of dots. And they said, "Now, at this section..." They had a section off it, this section just in kindergarten, "This section has, 20 dots. How many dots do you think are on the whole picture?" And so my daughter at the time, she already knew how to figure things out. So, and she could count and she could multiply in kindergarten. So she told them, "Well, there are..." And she actually said to them, "Well, I think there are, maybe a hundred dots." And so, the guy from the university told her teacher that... That was interesting, told her teacher, "She's pretty gifted for a kindergartener." And the teacher came back and told me, "She was just guessing, it was just luck."
And I remember thinking, it wasn't really luck, that she knew that there were five sections and there were 20 in that one. So if there were five sections, it was probably about a 100. And I remember commenting on that. Valerie Jarrett's daughter, Laura Jarrett was in her class. And I remember commenting to Valerie, I said, "I thought that was really odd that the teacher would think that was luck." And Valerie said, "Let me tell you, when I was here as a student, until I graduated from here, I thought I was lucky because every time I would get something right, and every time I would score higher than anyone else, they would say, oh, she's lucky." And she said, "It took me until high school when I left this place too, to realize I wasn't just lucky, I was smart." And they don't want to admit the Black girls were smart. But that was a long time ago. Because Valarie's probably close to 60 by now, but she went there. And Valerie's mother founded the Erikson Institute for early childhood education. So I mean, for her mother not to have told her, "No, you're not lucky." but maybe she never went to her mother and said, "Yeah, they just tell me I'm lucky." It made realize the early on, that I've got to be my daughter's advocate for this entire process. I cannot leave it up to the school to decide if she's smart. I can't leave it up to them to encourage her. I've got to be the one to do it.
If had I not gone through Parenthood, I don't think I'd be very concerned about what parents are going through. But I can really, really sympathize with the plight of parents in Chicago now, or parents all over but really parents in Chicago. I mean, a lot of your kids are going to substandard schools anyway, and now you got substandard schools trying to teach online. That's the thing that bothers me about the racism. If you explain it to kids, that they don't like you because you're Black, then the kid’s really upset because they're Black. So you have to figure out a way to frame it around them. You cannot frame it around anything that is wrong with your child. I imagine there are a whole lot of Black kids out there feeling bad about their Blackness. Because their parents were saying, "They're treating you bad because you're... They're doing this because the person's Black.” They're not doing it because a person's Black, they're doing it because of, they are racist, plain and simple.
