After fifth grade I was expected to attend the attached middle school M.S. As a young dance student at the Bronx Dance Theatre, Ballet Tech and later the Dance Theatre of Harlem, I was primarily in classrooms with other black and brown kids. I never thought of myself as disenfranchised, only very lucky. Minority students were picked up on a bus from their schools in various boroughs and we were driven to Manhattan to take dance lessons. I began an after school dance program at Ballet Tech in fourth and fifth grade. I was young and unaware and I loved school and thrived in the academic environment. I didn’t question why the ESL (English as a 2 nd language) students were in the same class as students with learning disabilities. Excluding the gym teacher and my fifth grade teacher, every other instructor I had was white.

24 were incredibly diverse and I was friends with kids from all walks of the earth. It never occurred to me why my Italian- American mother didn’t want my older sister and me to attend a public school in my own neighborhood of the Bronx. Dance was no exception.įrom first through fifth grade I attended P.S.24, a public school in Riverdale, New York. I didn’t understand the complex structures of institutionalized racism until I was a young adult, and I was deeply saddened to realize that racism had dictated so many aspects of my life without even knowing it. Yes, its topography can be exquisite and there is beauty and opportunity at arms’ length, but at heart it is a nation divided by the oppressed and their oppressors. It’s tyranny masked in democracy and greed overpowering ethics.

It is gentrification and segregated neighborhoods. America is strip malls and confederate flags.

Living in a salad bowl of culture, race, language and (relatively) efficient public transportation, was the boulder that shadowed me from understanding the deep seated racism that oozes out of every pore of our nation. I’d laugh thinking that suburban people were the ones “living under a rock”, but it wasn’t until I toured the country as a professional dancer that I realized, America was not New York. I felt privileged to live in a big house with a yard, pets, two parents (in my early years) and I always had dance. Growing up a biracial child in the Bronx, New York and primarily receiving my dance and academic education in Manhattan, I sincerely believed I was living in a post-racial world.

Black faces in white spaces