BEING BLACK IN AMERICA'S SCHOOLS

A Black educational leader and strategist uses his personal experiences to expose the racist underpinnings of America’s school system.

Fuller began his schooling as a student in a predominantly white, Reggio Emilia–inspired preschool in Richmond, Virginia. The author remembers that being the sole Black child in his class made him feel “a strange sense of otherness,” a feeling that followed him as a high achiever in his elementary school in Sumter, South Carolina, and as a hardworking student selected for a prestigious International Baccalaureate program at his high school, where academic tracking separated him from most of the other Black students—and especially Black men. Racism continued to affect Fuller after high school, from Emory University to his time at the Success Academy Charter School and New York City Department of Education, as well as during his pursuit of an advanced degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “I began to contemplate how systemic racism is the symbolic center in our education system and what it would mean to truly dismantle it,” he writes. The author encapsulates that vision within this narrative, which “flows from a deep commitment of mine to storytelling, to a belief in the way personal stories hu­manize the policies and systems that give rise to present inequities.” At its best, the book is perspicacious, passionate, and insightful, and the author shines in his analyses of how the pressure to overachieve intersects with racist systems, as well as how, though his personal awards were celebrated, their effect was not fully positive. At times, Fuller seems torn between specifying and generalizing: Moments when he refers to the broader, systemic problems often lack citations and pull focus away from his gift for storytelling.

A promising debut by a Black educator with a vision for change.