Throughout my high school career I was one of few black students in honors and AP classes. I can name multiple classes where I was the only black person in the room. This experience led to impostor syndrome. Not seeing other black students in the room made me feel like I didn’t belong. It made it difficult for me to advocate and speak up for myself. It's hard to argue, or bring up feeling uncomfortable when you’re in a space that you don’t feel you should be in anyways.

 

In eleventh grade English honors, we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The N-word is repeated multiple times in this book, and it's only read in honors classes because of its mature material. My teacher encouraged us to have a discussion and debate about who could and couldn’t say the N-word. With only a handful of Black students in the class, we had to argue and defend why non-black people couldn’t say the word. How can there be such a discussion, with so few black people in the room? The discussion ended with our teacher saying that if students felt comfortable saying it, they could say it. When reading aloud I had to sit and endure hearing some white students say the N-word again and again, even though they were given the option to skip the word when reading because “they felt comfortable”. Though they felt comfortable, I felt uncomfortable, but no one asked or cared. There shouldn’t have been any sort of discussion, there was nothing to discuss. Non-black people should not and cannot say the N-word. It’s ridiculous that at 16 I had to explain, defend, and plead that fact.

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Paris Fisher

NRHS Alum, Class of 2017