Born Bright: A Young Girl's Journey from Nothing to Something in America by C. Nicole Mason

Author:C. Nicole Mason [Mason, C. Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

seeing with only these eyes

The poor are made to believe that they are getting what everyone else is getting—that our schools are the same, our hospitals the same, and our neighborhoods are equipped to produce doctors and lawyers. But they are not.

Poor people and their neighborhoods receive only a fraction of the resources, and institutional and structural support, that middle- and upper-middle-class people and communities receive. In fact, growing up poor and in impoverished neighborhoods lowers children’s chances of going to college, limits their future income, and influences the kinds of jobs they will hold as adults. Rather than becoming lawyers and doctors, they are more likely to work in the service industry or hold lower-skilled, manual labor jobs.

All of the schools that I attended from elementary through high school were average at best and failing at worst.

However, growing up, I naïvely believed I was receiving the same quality education as other students across the country and that I had an equal shot at success. I did not know, however, that elsewhere, students attended prep and private schools meant to funnel them to the most elite colleges and institutions. I also did not know until my first year of college that Head Start and food stamps were for poor people.

When I realized the truth, I was angry and felt like I had been cheated. The idea that I was excelling was suddenly placed within the context of the conditions in which I, and those surrounding me, had grown up. In the real world, I was behind, and the gap between me and my middle-class and upper-middle-class peers—between what I knew and what they knew—seemed insurmountable.

There was nothing around me, or that I could see, that signaled directly that the road ahead would be hard and filled with land mines meant to derail my friends or me. I did not know that there were real kids, not just those on TV, who had more and were being prepped for success. In all fairness, they did not know about me either.

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