“Guess what? I [her mother] translated all of our name into Nigerian!” yelled my best friend, Taylor. “Akeira, your name is ‘Ah-kee-ki-doh,’”
“Haha, cookie dough, that’s funny. Akeira your name is ‘kurabiye hamuru’ in my language,” said my other friend, Zahra. Taylor repeated her translation and Zahra admitted to believing she said cookie dough, we all like the name and for a while my name was “Cookie Dough,” but of course we shortened it to just Cookie.
A new school and new friends led to my world being forever changed.
Prior to eighth grade, I grew up in a predominately African American neighborhood, and went to a charter school that had a very diverse group of students. My entire world was my neighborhood– church, school, and friends, all within a 15-mile radius of my house. All of my friends were African-American and everyone I associated with had a similar socioeconomic background. Because of this, I always glamorized what it must be like to be “white.” I thought white families were stable and did not have hard times. I believed everyone with fair colored skin had a lot of money and a life free of problems. I reasoned that children with white parents were lucky because their parents would never get divorced.
I later received an academic scholarship to a new of school that changed my ideas and philosophies about life, and more importantly my future. I attended a college preparatory school, Fort Worth Country Day. …show more content…
I went from my comfortable learning environment with my best friends to a new environment where I had to learn how to interact and not make prejudice assumptions. It made me tear down the preconceived notions about race and stereotypes that I had been surrounded with since birth. More importantly, my new school helped me realize that one can learn from anywhere, not just from people that look like you and that there is only one world and one race: the human
“Haha, cookie dough, that’s funny. Akeira your name is ‘kurabiye hamuru’ in my language,” said my other friend, Zahra. Taylor repeated her translation and Zahra admitted to believing she said cookie dough, we all like the name and for a while my name was “Cookie Dough,” but of course we shortened it to just Cookie.
A new school and new friends led to my world being forever changed.
Prior to eighth grade, I grew up in a predominately African American neighborhood, and went to a charter school that had a very diverse group of students. My entire world was my neighborhood– church, school, and friends, all within a 15-mile radius of my house. All of my friends were African-American and everyone I associated with had a similar socioeconomic background. Because of this, I always glamorized what it must be like to be “white.” I thought white families were stable and did not have hard times. I believed everyone with fair colored skin had a lot of money and a life free of problems. I reasoned that children with white parents were lucky because their parents would never get divorced.
I later received an academic scholarship to a new of school that changed my ideas and philosophies about life, and more importantly my future. I attended a college preparatory school, Fort Worth Country Day. …show more content…
I went from my comfortable learning environment with my best friends to a new environment where I had to learn how to interact and not make prejudice assumptions. It made me tear down the preconceived notions about race and stereotypes that I had been surrounded with since birth. More importantly, my new school helped me realize that one can learn from anywhere, not just from people that look like you and that there is only one world and one race: the human