A Reflection by Joshua Bloodworth ’93

By JOSHUA BLOODWORTH ’93

Guest Contributor, Former Chairman of the Racial Awareness Committee

In this era of quarantining, as I watch my sons swell toward adolescence, my mind often wanders to my own teenage years, tarrying most on the four I spent at Exeter. In many ways, my time at the Academy was an idyll where the distance between desire and actualization was often short and bridgeable. Where else could I have joined Student Council, participated in competitive sports and written for the school newspaper while forming lifelong friendships with students who were not interested in any of the above? Yet, as a Black American, it would be dishonest to present my sojourn at Exeter as a time when my race did not shade my experiences. There were Ku Klux Klan marches through the town, racial slurs yelled from passing cars and the ever present store clerk eying me as I browsed their wares along Water Street. As a Black kid from the 1980s New York, where the city’s media was filled with stories of Bernhard Goetz, the Central Park Five and Yusef Hawkins, I was not surprised by racism, white supremacy or anti-Blackness in and around the town of Exeter. I was, however, empurpled when those triplets of injustice invaded the manicured lawns and red brick buildings of the Academy.

For example, in the fall of 1992, the Academy invited a prominent conservative of color to address the student body during assembly. I sat shoulder to shoulder with my fellow seniors, all in the process of deciding which colleges and university on which to gamble an application, as the speaker emphatically informed us that my white and Asian peers would be denied access to the best colleges and universities because of the Affirmative Action required those institution to accept their unqualified and unworthy Black and Latino classmates. The discomfort, anger and confusion (as least from the Black and Latinx students) were palpable. My initial reaction was bewilderment. Who at the Academy thought that the speaker’s message was one we needed to hear at that particular moment? Was it meant to undermine certain students’ pride in their accomplishment? Or to preemptively reassure other students that their rejection letters from one or more universities had nothing to do with any criteria they could control? As I spoke with my peers in the days that followed, my bewilderment and silent fury—one never wanted to be labeled as the angry Black guy—turned to horror as I had to confront an incontestable fact: many of the my friends subscribed to the anti-Blackness. Whether they believed my acceptance to the Academy was a product of Affirmative Action or that I, along with the other black and brown students, were brilliant exceptions, most accepted as self-evident truth that most people who looked like me were inherently and immutably intellectually (and morally?) inferior. What hope was there of racial progress when the future leaders of the world held opinions in 1992 that were no different from those widely circulated during the years of the Academy’s founding?

My fellow Exonians’ beliefs reflected their own flawed and myopic upbringings in a world that discounts the full humanity of Black and brown people. But it also indicted Exeter’s educational content, circa 1990. There was little to nothing in the academic programming that spoke of the intellectual and scientific contributions of people of African descent to human civilization. Though I graduated with a Classical Diploma, I never learned that many of the ancient Greek founders of ‘western civilization’ only made their famed intellectual discoveries after studying for years in Egypt or the Near East. There was no in-depth inquiry into the iniquities of slavery or the radiance of the abolitionist movement which in many ways prefigured the interracial, international racial justice movement that exploded in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. I was well past thirty when I discovered that Franklin Sanborn, an ardent abolitionist who served as a member of the Secret Six (the society which funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry) was, like me, an Exonian. Aside from an elective course I took my senior year on race and America, only two of the authors I read in my English classes over four years were Black. At best, my experience spoke to how even the best educations and intentions are actively deformed by white supremacy.

And yet, Exeter legacy regarding race is more than a story of missteps and omissions. I recall the spring of 1992, when roughly (only?) fifty students and staff of every background gathered in front of the Academy Building to protest the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating. Though on a different shore, they keenly desired to publicly align with those revolting against discriminatory law enforcement and judicial systems. The Academy willingly provided funds and space for the weekly meeting of the Afro-Latino Exonian Society’s Racial Awareness Committee, where staff and students grappled with the ever-present effects of racial bias in American society. And yes, in spite of all of the ‘microaggressions’ (which seem quite macro to those of us who suffer them) I cannot name, despite the protestations of my friends who graduated from that other institution a little further south, Exeter was a safer, more stimulating place for a young Black male, a demographic then as now cast as super-predators by highly placed federal officials, to spend his high school years.