By virtue of being born a white child who spoke English as her first (and only) language, I was fortunate. I had my pick of mentors, my race was represented in most—if not all—curricular texts, and I excelled in school year after year. My academic fate was sealed in the most predictable of ways.
Not only were my teachers homogenously white, but in my 13 years of compulsory schooling, I do not remember being assigned a single text authored by a person of color.
Indeed, I was already at a social advantage long before my teachers even knew my name. My family and I were not tasked with learning what Lisa Delpit has famously coined the “culture of power”; as a typical neighborhood white kid, I was not ignorantly considered a cultural anomaly, nor was I a threat to the tried, “true,” and impenetrable pedagogies, practices, and policies of my teachers’ classrooms and those of the schools I attended.