A memoir of race, public schooling, and identity as an "integration guinea pig" in the 1980s Midwest. Becoming Educated is Simone C. Drake's engaging and bold memoir about race, class, gender, and the meaning of education in the urban Midwest. Drake, a scholar of literature, culture, and law, uses her own story as a Black girl attending recently desegregated Columbus public schools in the 1980s and 1990s to explore the United States' most entrenched social problems and how local systems have tried to combat them. From starting kindergarten the year after an Ohio court decision called for busing to end school segregation, to climbing the ranks of academia, to her decision to send her sons to highly rated but largely white suburban schools, Drake weaves a lively and erudite accounting of her identity formation as an "integration guinea pig." She punctuates her story with rich evocations of the music, TV, and film that shaped her generation, powerful reflections on relevant works by Black writers and artists from Dawoud Bey to Jay-Z, and images of her own artwork. This prismatic book is a must-read for Gen Xers, Midwesterners, and Americans of any race wanting to think more deeply about how our nation's educational systems--and by extension, all of us--must reckon with inequalities past and present. "Set against the often-discounted 'flyover' terrain of the Midwest, Becoming Educated braids memoir and educational becoming, music and murals, and the quiet violence of policy, distilling how race, class, geography, and law choreograph our lives long after the gavel falls." --T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor in Humanities, Vanderbilt University "In revisiting her educational journey, Simone Drake shines a poignant light upon the endurance of Black girlhood in this wise and bighearted memoir." --Wil Haygood, author of Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America "This memoir is imbued with authenticity and intellectual rigor. Simone Drake interrogates the complexities of race, colorism, and class with a musical rhythm and visual vibrancy that brings to life a multisensory narrative of Black womanhood, illuminating how personal and collective histories are shaped by law and geography. Constructing a coming-of-age narrative that is as real to the Black American experience as it is emotionally resonant to us Black mothers, professionals, and daughters, she challenges the persistent erasure of Black women's genius and is refreshingly unapologetic about her own intellectual achievements. A vital contribution to the contemporary discourse on identity and resistance." --Stacia Jones, Esq., Employment Lawyer and Global Human Resources Leader Simone C. Drake is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University and holds a courtesy appointment in the Moritz College of Law. A proud graduate of Columbus City Schools, she lives in central Ohio with her family. She recently returned to making art and cannot believe she had tucked it away for so many decades. Riding the Bus with My White Boy I finally was a big girl. I got to ride the bus to school. A long maize-colored bus, like one of those delightful colors included in my big girl box of twenty-four Crayola crayons. No more primary colors for me. Hair braided in two pigtails, or maybe divided hemispherically and down the middle in four neat plaits. Eyes wide. Mind ready to continue the lessons Mommy taught me at home. What I was not prepared for―surprised by, really―was that school involved other people. Lots of kids in my classroom and throughout the school. Large groups of people unsettled me. My first five years of life involved a closed group of people. My brother, Jason―only fourteen months younger―was my best friend, and my parents allowed only my maternal grandparents, known to us as Oma and Opa, to watch us. Preschool, consequently, had been a grand crying fest for me. Riding the bus was far more socially manageable for me than negotiating an entire building streaming with children and teachers. So, in spite of the smell of old vinyl seats that I worriedly noticed had no seatbelts (I knew that a girl my age and her family, who lived one street over, all died in a car accident, wearing no seat belts) and smelly exhaust fumes, especially in the back of the bus, I enjoyed riding the bus. My enjoyment was influenced by Allen B. He was older than me. Maybe it was only by a couple of years, but it did not matter, because Allen was a big boy. I was a little girl who enjoyed the idea of school and riding the bus, but nonetheless was timid and shy. Allen was white and had orange hair and freckles. He wore plaid shirts and corduroy pants. He smiled a lot and was happy to see me when I got on the bus. Maybe he was the only white boy on the bus. Maybe not. We both were, after all, two guinea pigs living in the legislative experiment of forc