Becoming Educated

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.