Khia

“And you’re on this everlasting question: Who am I?”

By Students of NYC

April 26^th, 2023

“In school, it’s always felt like we're on a time limit. Always. Last year, we were working up towards Regents. Then working up towards AP exams. Now, we're working up towards graduation. And I feel like we never get to just pause and just be in the moment. Now that I take AP African, we get to take our time. To actually learn about slavery. It’s always been so generalized in other classes. It's like, Yeah. We did the slave trade. And then they became slaves. And then in the Emancipation Proclamation, Civil War. That's it.

But it's just like, okay, we learned that chronological order... but what actually happened? We only learned the result, the aftermath. We only learned that there was a war, and then the Emancipation Proclamation came. But when I got to AP African, I learned that the Emancipation Proclamation wasn't even to emancipate the slaves. It was a proposal. It wasn't definite that this was going to happen. It just became so popular because slaves wanted to be free. A proposal. It wasn't saying, ‘Oh, yeah. They're free. That's it. Cut it off. Stop.’ U.S. History taught us none of that.

And now, with AP African Studies, they're still trying to silence those lessons. They're still changing the curriculum. Literally, at the beginning of the year, we had to change over to a whole other book, because they said, ‘No. That book is no good. Now use this.’ We went from a 600-, 700-page book to a 40-page book. How can you make so much information so compact? What does that say about its importance? What does that say?

Right now, we're trying to decide what college we're supposed to go to. And I can tell you yes, I have been accepted, but I don't feel accepted. If you get where I'm trying to go with that. I don't know if I'm right for that place; I don't know if I'm going to belong.

There's just so many questions we're trying to answer, especially in senior year, but it's been prolonged from when we were born, I guess you could say. Because your parents are always telling you…they literally are waking you up and telling you, ‘Don't be like me.’ So it's like, who am I supposed to be like? And you're on this everlasting question: Who am I?

I love my mom's determination and the way she cares. She's really like that person that people who don't have mothers wish they had. Like I would love to be only half the mother that she is. That's somebody who I can say is the definition of mother and then some — that best friend, that parent, that teacher. She teaches, she parents, she's friendly. She sits and watches TV with you or she sits and cries with you. Things like that. There's no word for that; it's just who she is.”