Black Exonians Matter

By KELVIN GREEN II ’17

Guest Contributor, Former Co-President of the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society

Black Exonians, you are not alone. 

Each Black Exonian knows—consciously or subconsciously, while they roamed the Academy’s red brick buildings or after they graduated to attend institutions of higher learning, whether they went back to their homelands either across ocean waters or down the road from Main Street—Phillips Exeter Academy has a “race problem.” The Academy is five years junior to the United States (U.S.) Declaration of Independence and seven years senior to the ratified U.S. Constitution. The history of America reflects on the Academy and the Academy’s history likewise reflects on America. It is no coincidence the Academy teaches on land dispossessed from the Squamscott tribe, taught students funded by the American slave trade or that our admissions processes long engaged in exclusionary practices driven by racism and sexism.

Baldwin reminds us, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.” So, in an effort to repent from the criminality besieging this country and the Academy, we must seriously consider how PEA has handled its responsibility to the children living and learning in its midst. Children are the future of any society and the harm done to a child endures with memory. For us Black children, the Academy has failed us time and time again, notwithstanding the vigor by which it sought after and heavily recruited us to attend. Diversity efforts have increased the presence of Black Exonians at the Academy, but, without justice, the Academy has invited Black Exonians to a place unprepared to accept us. This imposes violence that, whether physical or not, actively thwarts a child’s health and a student’s success toward graduation.

After the first few weeks of my classes at the Academy, I felt like I had finally arrived at a place for me, where I could learn and mature my voice at the Harkness table. By the time I graduated, I felt like I had spent most of my time explaining principles of humanity and persuading adults with the ability to make a difference outside of the classroom. I was raised in a strong family unit with three siblings and parents who encouraged integrity, honesty and respect. Being African American and understanding both the history of this country and the beauty of my people were important to me when I arrived at Exeter. However, race—what I now know to be a socially constructed identity enforced for nefarious purposes—was neither a central component to my identity nor a consistent thought in my mind when I arrived at Exeter. This changed for me while I was an Exonian, a child maturing physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually in Exeter, all the while deprived of a school willing or able to name and seriously handle the demands of being such in an old and predominantly white institution. 

During the summer before my lower year, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, was murdered by police. The following month, Michael Brown, a teenage boy and recent graduate from his own high school, was murdered by police. Seeing Michael in the news reminded me of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin and his murderer who was acquitted of all charges the summer before I arrived as a prep. The pattern was not only the murders, though that would have been enough, but also the acquittals. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. Freddie Grey. These are lives killed by cops or those posing as such. These are lives deemed dispensable by America (New York, Missouri, Florida, Maryland). These are lives that have yet to receive rest, and whose names remind us to continue fighting for justice that they never received; lives like our very own Edmund Perry ’85.

What we frequently called the “Exeter bubble” could at times provide reprieve; however, after the summer of 2014. this bubble was forever permeable to the memories of those beloved lives that my friends in the Afro-Latino Exonian Society (ALES) and I held in memory. The disconnect and tension between what we were experiencing as Black children on campus and what the Academy felt responsible to address was palpable. This atmosphere exacerbated in the final week of November 2014, when Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy, was murdered on a playground in Cleveland by local police. Then, Darren Wilson was acquitted of murdering Michael Brown. While I, along with my ALES family, mourned the life of Tamir, and once again mourned the life of Michael, the Academy acted uninterested. There were teachers and students who knew, even those who sympathized and helped organize, but the Academy did not step in. Non sibi seemed to lose its value in the selectivity of the Academy to exercise it for Black Exonians.

During the winter term, ALES organized a protest following an Assembly, laying down our newly teenaged to freshly twenty-year-old bodies on the asphalt and grass between the Academy Building and J. Smith a minute for each hour Michael’s body was left on the ground in Ferguson—four. For me, the protest scene revealed what the Academy continues to suffer from—those lying down, those willing to kneel in solidarity, those standing afar and those walking past without a glance, signaling to Black Exonians that despite all being members of the Exeter community, we were only so in name. ALES was the space we carved out to be ours, where Black upperclassmen and Black teachers and staff who acted as ancestors guiding all of us through could come and sit with us and encourage us to push past the discouraging aspects of the community we were disappointed to realize, aspects they themselves already knew.

Who is responsible for a just PEA? Surely, it cannot only be the children. But, who doesn’t know of Exonians at the Academy that do and have done (and even been encouraged to do) the labor to teach adults, whether in classrooms or boardrooms, about justice while navigating assignments and classes and sports? And, if the children are not responsible, then whom? Adults must start taking responsibility. Adults in positions to enable action must educate themselves on how to bring justice to the Academy. We do not need more focus groups that delay justice. We do not need more half-baked solutions that delay justice. We do not need more one-off MLK ceremonies that inspire enough for people to cower back into mental spaces of isolation. We need adults with the right ideas at the table. We need adults with the right ideas to be given a decisive voice in the direction of the Academy. And we need courage.

There is and will be more dispossession of Indigenous people in this country. There is and will be more murder of Black people in this country by private and public citizens. There is and will be more xenophobia toward the Muslim communities, the Latino communities, the Asian communities. All of these people are now Exonians, represented as children and as students at the Academy, both now and forevermore. The Academy owes it to the children on its campus to turn away from criminality and engage justice. There are too many stories of Black Exonians who know all too well how PEA, like the country, has told them their person, their voice and their health do not matter. Diversity, equity and inclusion will not remedy the Academy’s race problem and its violent effects, only justice has this aim in mind.