by Amir Bilal Billups, New York City
I was walking up the street with my boy Anthony and this other kid. Anthony was making
jokes and the other kid turned around and asked, "Are you in special ed?" My man said, "Yes." Soon
after, being in my six-person class, like yesterday I remember South Orange Maplewood School
District classified me.
It was 2000. She said I was "eligible for special education." Possessing this label they gave me, I swallowed the stigma and felt the pain of being seen in a room with six people. Yeah, it fell upon me and the pain was like stones raining down on me. From that day on, school assemblies seemed segregated and I had to watch my girl Krystal from balconies. Away from the "normal" kids, I found myself fulfilling self-fulfilled prophecies. See, I received the label of "special education" and it sat on my back like a mountain being lifted by an ant—it just can't happen.
It was my mind's master. It told me I was dumb, I didn't know how to act in a normal class. I needed two teachers to fully grasp the concepts touched upon in class, and my classification will never allow me to exceed track two. So what is it that I do—so many occasions when the classification caused me to break into tears? It was my frustration.
My reaction to teachers speaking down to me saying I was classified and it was all my fault had me truly believing that inferiority was my classification. Cause I still didn't know, and the pain WAS DEEP. The pain—OH GOD! THE PAIN! The ridicule, the constant taunting, laughing when they passed me by. Told me that community college should be my goal. It wasn't until Ms. Cooper came and rescued me with her history class. Showed me the importance of my history and told me the secrets my ancestors held. She told me about the Malcolm Xs and the Huey Newtons. She told me to speak out because this is the story of many and none of them are speaking. And the silence is just as painful.
Reprinted with the generous permission of Teachers College Press. In 2003-2004, thirteen youth researchers from New York City high schools combined forces with a New York choreographer, a spoken word artist, and a videographer to create an interactive, 55-minute production called Echoes of Brown: 50 Years Later that situated their own lives in the greater narrative of Brown. This essay was part of the production.