Listening to Our Black Alums

This year is one like no other, and so our school community is alive with activity, even in late June. Our faculty and staff have just finished two weeks of professional development, administrators are analyzing a variety of re-opening scenarios, the first session of Summer@BrowningConnect has been launched, and we are planning to honor our Class of 2020 with an in-person commencement ceremony on July 1. These are manifestly busy days, as we all work to ensure that we are a community where boys are connected to each other, to our faculty and staff, and to the highest aspirations of our school mission.

A significant part of that mission is to “honor and celebrate the dignity of all people and support the power of a diverse, inclusive and welcoming community.” As we enter into the fourth week of protests over anti-Black racism,  institutions of all kinds are in the midst of a long-overdue reckoning, as they are forced to examine the degree to which their rhetorical commitments to equity are actually lived by members of their community. In the independent school community, this call has come particularly from the students and alums of the institutions themselves, often in the form of Instagram accounts detailing stories of being “Black@” a particular school. 

That Browning has not yet had its own dedicated Instagram should bring us no solace. If the present moment has demonstrated anything, it’s that no school or institution has been vigilant enough in dismantling the systemic and structural ways in which institutions deliver unequal experiences on the basis of race. The Browning stories surely exist, and it’s our community’s responsibility to make sure not only that these stories are heard, but that they are acted upon in ways which allow us to fulfill the mandates of our mission.

To that end, we invited Black alumni of Browning to join an independently facilitated focus group, for the first of a series of conversations with the men of color who have attended our school. While this initial conversation will hardly be a panacea, it is our intention that it will become part of the record of lived experience of all students and alums of color. What we hear will likely demand responsible action from our community. Such action cannot come in the form of well-crafted letters from the head of school or performative gestures that live at the level of symbolism, but through substantive efforts like hiring more Black teachers and administrators, extending the education of community members in anti-racist protocols, and assuring broader cultural representation in our curricular offerings, among other efforts.

As we move through our fourth month of the COVID-19 crisis, we can reflect upon the ways in which we found success (even as that success was unevenly distributed) in “flattening the curve”: When we heeded the advice of experts, when we took responsibility for one another, and when we respected the magnitude of the threat at hand, we were most effective in protecting our collective health. Even though from the very start there were disparities in who was most likely to become very ill or die from the virus, we knew that lowering the possibility of infection would be good for all of us. Today, we have been called again to face another crisis—one much older and more deeply rooted in our national story, and surely as threatening to our community. Although it may more deeply affect certain members of our community, there can be no doubt it hurts us all. Our present moment is showing us once more that for too long, too many of us have ignored the stories of those who have been hurt, have been complacent in our sense of accountability to one another, and have failed to appreciate the relentless ways in which structural racism causes harm to dignity and to persons. There is no vaccine that will deliver us from this reality; the ways of slow healing—the necessary attention, action, and accountability—are things that our community requires, and which we must commit to delivering.