by Stacey Dash
I went to schools in wealthy areas and schools in poor areas. So I speak from experience when I say the American school experience is horrible.
One of the main problems I experienced during my academic years was the strong culture of violence. I can’t remember the name of my third school in the Bronx, but I do remember the girl who ruled the playground like some sort of queen.
“TaLonna wants to fight you today after school,” my friend told me. It was a sentence that stopped me in my tracks. TaLonna was an enormous black girl—probably twice my size and fat. “What’d I do to her?”
“She said you think you’re cute,” my friend told me, her eyes wide. According to my classmate, TaLonna had called me the ultimate insult: “high sidity.” That simply meant she believed I thought I was better than everyone. That I was special.
“Oh, God,” I said, dread filling my stomach.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “She wants to meet you at the corner after school.”
I knew I couldn’t turn the challenge down. If I didn’t show up, my family would have been disgraced.
“What can I do?” I asked.
My heart raced as I planned my attack and walked to the corner after school. TaLonna could take me out with no problem. Since she had me on size, I had to have her on strategy. When I saw her standing there on the street, I immediately looked around to see what I could use as a tool, a weapon. I wasn’t a fighter. Already a crowd had gathered. A nervous energy emanated from the kids, and I could tell they were electrified by the anticipation of seeing a fight. I wasn’t going to give them what they wanted—a long-drawn-out scuffle with TaLonna scratching my face like a cat. No, I was going to finish it before she realized it had started. I was going to take her out fast.
My eyes scanned the environment. A plastic bag. Half of a wet cardboard box. Leaves the wind had blown into a crevice so long ago that they’d stopped being individual leaves and were now just a damp, brown mush of old leaves and cigarette butts. Nothing useful.
When my eyes met hers, I took her in. She had a tee shirt on that was about three sizes too small. The fabric pulled tightly over her bulging stomach, showcasing her width, her girth. Her ability to simply sit on me in front of all of these classmates to show who was boss. But she wouldn’t simply sit on me. No. She wanted to humiliate me, to bring me down a notch or two. And even though I was six years old, I knew the honor of my family rested squarely on my narrow shoulders. Too bad for her, she’d made a critical mistake.
She was standing, nonchalantly, by a brick wall. Suddenly, my plan was clear. Before she even got to the corner—the predetermined meeting place—I ran up to her, grabbed her, and beat her head against that brick wall.
And that was it. I didn’t knock her out, but she was probably dizzy enough that she didn’t come at me. She struggled to get up, and I pushed her down.
“Get up again and I’m gonna knock your ass again,” I said. The people standing around on the corner realized they had missed the big fight, so they ran over to us to see what had happened. My mother’s words of advice floated through my head. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Turns out, she was right. It was a lesson I’d learn again and again. Word got around.
“Stacey beat TaLonna’s ass and you don’t really want to fuck with her. She’s crazy!” That’s how I earned my nickname; suddenly I was known around school as Crazy Stacey. I wasn’t thrilled about the nickname, but it helped establish my reputation in the neighborhood as someone to avoid. What TaLonna didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that she was unevenly matched when she decided to pick on me. Sure, she was big, fat, and strong, but I had a secret advantage.
My life had already been filled with grief that my parents never were around and sadness since no one seemed to care whether I lived or died. But somewhere over the past year—maybe during the first few weeks of kindergarten when many American schoolchildren were learning that a was for a-a-apple—that deep well of melancholy and anguish had turned into fury. Whoever is angrier usually wins.
In third grade, I smoked a joint my cousin gave me and loved the way it felt. I didn’t even know it was illegal. I didn’t become a “pothead,” but I smoked marijuana whenever it was around. My dad tried to protect me from “hard drugs,” or at least he tried to hide his use from me. When I was twelve, I caught a glimpse of the truth. One day I came home from school, opened the bathroom door, and was surprised to see Uncle Freddy and my dad both in the small room. They looked up, horrified, and I saw that my dad had a belt around his arms and my uncle was holding a syringe. I still didn’t understand, but I knew, judging from the shock on their faces, that I was seeing something not meant for my eyes.
“Shut the fucking door!” Uncle Freddy yelled.
A shudder went through me. He had never spoken to me that way. He was like a father to me, always speaking words of encouragement. Immediately, I shut the door and stood in the hallway with my hand still on the knob. What did I just see? What were they doing with a belt and a needle? I didn’t know. But I knew it was not good, and that I was afraid.
The next year, my mom packed our bags and sent us to live with my grandparents on Long Island for a year. That’s the way things went with us—for large portions of our lives, we were shuttled off to other places. . . . Of course, this change wasn’t bad. I loved being with my grandparents, being in what felt like a stable family, and going to a new school.
In fact, I had a great teacher named Mr. Ackerman, a very dapper gentleman about 6'4". Like a character out of a storybook, he wore a tweed suit every day, wore a bow tie, smoked a pipe, and had an affected English accent. He told us stories about history and science and how they applied to our real lives. Once he gave a talk on why maps are important, how science relates to nature, and how nature relates to our relationships. He allowed knowledge to encompass our entire lives and being. His passion for teaching gave me passion for learning. That year, I was an honor student and even won the Presidential Award in PE.
When we left Long Island, we were told that we wouldn’t be going back to New York. Apparently Mom and Dad had gotten a divorce. In Dad’s place was a quiet man we’d never seen before, and Mom told us—without much fanfare—that they were getting married. My new stepfather’s name was Cecil Holmes, a tall, handsome black man from Guyana (formerly British Guiana). He was a good Catholic, went to mass every Sunday, and never did a drug in his life. In other words, he was a square compared to my father, and very successful as a record executive. In fact, his record label had KISS and Donna Summer. In 1986, he gave The New Kids on the Block their first contract. He seemed to love my mother, and I could tell he enjoyed having her on his arm.
Suddenly, our family had more wealth and opportunities than we’d ever had. Cecil’s job was amazing, but it meant we had to move to California when I was in seventh grade. California was no New York. In my old neighborhood, my friends and I ran into each other naturally in the course of the day. Kids were everywhere—playing stickball in the street, jumping rope, and playing hopscotch. That was not happening in California, where everyone had yards and cars and whole acres to themselves.
Mom immediately enrolled us in the local public school in a residential neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. It had a pretty playground surrounded by eucalyptus trees and big fields circling the school. Though I was going to miss my friends, maybe it was better than going back to New York, where the schools were so violent. Maybe I’d get along a lot better in this sunny, seemingly optimistic place.
One day I came home and found my mom crying.
“What’s wrong,” I asked, though I scarcely thought that anything truly was wrong. As an addict, her emotions were always up and down. “Are you okay?”
“They got Uncle Freddy,” she said.
“Who did?” I asked. I’d never seen anyone even so much as glance sideways at the man. No one would dare cross him.
“Didn’t you hear me,” she cried. “The c
ops. They arrested him.”
That word hung in the air between us.
“Arrested?”
Apparently Uncle Freddy—my mentor, my one true fan and advocate—went to jail because he was a pimp. The beautiful women he always had on his arms were not just legions of adoring women. They were prostitutes. His prostitutes.
I felt like a ship in a storm when the line holding the anchor snaps. He was the one adult on whom I could lean when times got tough. The one person who represented honor and virtue. Without him, I felt untethered, like I could float away to who-knows-where and no one—not one soul—would care. Later, Uncle Freddy also confessed to killing a sixteen-year-old girl and burying her in the woods behind my grandparents’ house. He was put in jail for life, and I never saw him again. I never had a chance to tell him how much I loved him, how much he meant to me, or how much he affected my life. Later, my grandmother told me he had a prison conversion. In fact, his newfound faith was the reason he confessed to the unsolved murder.
I missed him so much after he was taken away, and his words of advice always came to me during times of need. One recommendation would come back to me more than the others: when the Jesus train comes, make sure you’re on it.
I think, in a weird way, that this was his way of making sure he was going to be on it too. He died in prison, and I can only hope that he felt the love I had for him during his last days.
On the first day of school in my new home in California, several buses pulled up to the school. I watched as black kids poured out of them. Oh, shit, I thought. I did the math that quick. They’re coming from somewhere, and it’s not here. Because my neighborhood was predominantly white, the government bused black kids in from South Central Los Angeles. It also bused white kids from my neighborhood to South Central L.A. Of course it was a recipe for disaster. The kids that got bused had to get up at 5:00 in the morning. By the time they arrived at school all they wanted to do was fight and sleep. It was obvious they didn’t want to be there. The teachers didn’t want them there either. And so my new California school was not a respite from violence, but instead a place embroiled in racial conflict. The bused kids stuck together, and the Valley kids stuck together. Since I was black, the Valley kids assumed I was a bus kid. Since I lived in the Valley, the bus kids wanted nothing to do with me.
“You’re from here?” the bus kids laughed, pointing at my lighter skin. My hair didn’t conform to their standards, either . . . as they told me repeatedly. “You’re not even black,” they’d say. Though I had established myself in New York as “Crazy Stacey,” my reputation didn’t reach to California. They saw me as “high sidity” too, which meant—of course—that I would scrap every single day.
I didn’t like to fight. In New York, violence permeated the school . . . and perhaps the entire culture of the South Bronx. Turns out, California, absolutely dominated by gangs, was no different. The Crips and the Bloods were the most notorious gangs, and membership in one or the other was mandatory . . . like a class needed for graduation. The reason was simple. One guy alone at school will certainly get jumped. If this guy has a friend, he’ll be less of a target. His friend will have his back. This is an age-old principle. Even the Bible talks about it in Ecclesiastes 4: “Two are better than one. . . . Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves.”
Of course the guys in Los Angeles weren’t thinking of the Bible when they created their groups. But they figured if two is better than one, four is better than two; ten is better than four; fifty is better than twenty. That’s how gangs proliferated, on and on until every single student had to decide.
“Crips or Bloods?” I was asked by a friend named Catherine as she and her twin sister Emily walked with me through the hallways on the way to class. Catherine was in one gang but her sister Emily was in the other, a house divided because Emily’s boyfriend was already established in a gang. I didn’t know which to choose—there was no “how to select the gang that’s right for you” quiz in Cosmo that month—so I joined the same gang as Emily based on nothing but the fact that her boyfriend was really a nice guy.
That’s what breaks my heart. Gangbangers, drug dealers, and hustlers are all made out to seem like horrible people, when they’re just trying to survive. They’re just doing what they think is the only thing to do, but they’re being lied to: white people don’t actually hate them, all white people aren’t rich, and you don’t have to behave like criminals on television to be cool. I know what it’s like to believe you have one option—a gang—and to go along with it. Once I joined, my social life was set. Crips or Bloods. Red or blue.
Of course people don’t join gangs by filling out a form and sending in an enrollment fee. To join, people have to prove their loyalty through horrible initiations involving revenge shootings, jail time, and more. Thankfully, they didn’t make me go through with any of that. Gang members assimilate into various roles. Some are quick-tempered, while others are chill; some fight, others are on the lookout; some make plans, some execute the strategies. The gangs—thankfully—had already noticed my reputation as a brawler, so they let me in without having to prove myself. They called me “the smart girl.”
After I chose my colors, I had to dress differently. I had to start wearing khakis and big white tee shirts and a certain color rag. The gangs took the fact that they didn’t have a lot of money—and therefore couldn’t afford nicer clothing—and turned it into a badge of honor. A pair of khakis, a tee, and a rag were all that were required to fit in. In fact, anything else was shameful. You were in or out, and your clothes were a kind of uniform. The first morning that I was a gang member, I took one look in the mirror and laughed. I looked like an inmate at Rikers Island.
But my gang membership didn’t protect me from the one-off fights.
The next month, the biggest girl in the school said she didn’t like the way I talked. She was an ugly black girl named Keisha. Everybody was scared of her—white kids, black kids, everybody. When I heard that Keisha didn’t like the way I talked and wanted to fight me, I thought, Oh great. But here’s the thing. I’m not going to be bullied or intimidated. If I feel for one second that someone is going to try to hurt me, I’m going to let you know real quick that’s not how it’s gonna go down. I’m not going to stress out about it every day, I’m going to finish it before they even know it’s begun.
I went to the location where Keisha wanted to fight and scoped it out—a corridor with lockers lining the walls. I’d learned in New York that I had to act faster and use an element of surprise. I knew I had to take her out quick before she saw me coming. As soon as I saw her, I pushed her up against the locker and took the locker door and I bashed it into her head. I kept bashing it into her head until she fell to the ground with her face bleeding. Then I got on top of her and started pounding her. I was so sick of people telling me that I wasn’t good enough because I didn’t live up to their standards. I guess you could say I fought dirty, but she was big and that was the only chance I had. I think I might have killed her if somebody hadn’t pulled me off of her.
I guess you can see that I’ve never backed down from a fight. My stubborn insistence on standing up to bullies twice my size came from necessity . . . but I have to admit it has helped me in life. Without the constant practice of conjuring that strength at school, I’d never have been able to stand up to the bullies that hide behind computer screens on Twitter, blogs, and Facebook as an adult.
My classmates got the message—don’t mess with Stacey—but life didn’t get easier. I missed my dad and my friends in New York, and I felt like I was in a war zone at school. I didn’t get in trouble for fighting—it’s amazing what sort of violence was just left unchecked by the teachers. But I would frequently get in trouble for talking back to them. “Here, do pages 47 and 53,” the teacher would say, before slipping off to the teachers’ lounge for a smoke. I guess I had been spoiled by the example of Mr. Ackerman back in New York, but I could spot lazy teachers a mile away.
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br /> “What’s wrong with you?” my mother asked me when she noticed I was favoring my hand.
“I broke my finger,” I said. It was the last day of school in the eighth grade. I had leaned over the water fountain to get a drink when I felt a hand slip up my shirt. Rather, a hand trying to slip up my shirt. I turned around and hit the guy square in the face. He hit me back, and we ended up having a fight right there in the hall. My finger was throbbing and hurt like hell.
“On what?”
“A boy’s nose.”
I had told my mother that things were bad at school, but we weren’t the type of folks who fled danger or left a place scared. Finally, after an entire year of me getting in fights, she relented.
“Okay, I’ll send you to private school,” she said. When my mother eventually took me to the heart of downtown Burbank to Providence High School, I could already tell this Catholic school would be a welcome change. As a freshman, I met a girl named Cynthia. We became fast friends, and she’s still my best friend today.
But my family never stayed anywhere long.
As you can see, I had many layers of problems during my educational years, most that extended beyond the scope of school. However, since my experiences with school have been so harrowing, I’d like to think I learned a few lessons along the way. Here’s what I learned about education:
1. EDUCATION IS NOT POSSIBLE AMIDST A CLIMATE OF VIOLENCE AND INTIMIDATION
No one should ever be physically intimidated or harassed at school. If I hadn’t had to fight my way through school, I might know Latin by now! But anti-bullying initiatives have been so politicized, it’s hard to actually put your support behind them. Take for example, Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way Foundation,” whose mission statement said it tries to “foster a more accepting society, where differences are embraced and individuality is celebrated. The Foundation is dedicated to creating a safe community that helps connect young people with the skills and opportunities they need to build a kinder, braver world. We believe that everyone has the right to feel safe, to be empowered and to make a difference in the world. Together, we will move towards acceptance, bravery and love.”