November 30th, it was the day New York Times had posted this article, it popped up on the corner of my computer, stayed trending on my phone for days. The effects of it caused me to run a hand along my desk of productivity, sweeping all onto the floor. I was in my history class, my notes still half-done from that day, words unfinished, history forgotten as my eyes frantically ran through the present.

This is our lives, screens and rings, freezing our surrounding at a sound, our arms and legs ice from the constant updates of life. Back then, there was a phone to listen, the coiled wire being there as a toy to fiddle with as the line would ring. There were cassettes to watch, the constant ache in your back from having to sit in front of the TV, waiting for the tape to rewind, to watch it again, your face scrunching when you don’t hear the constant hmmm of the cassette rewind. We listened to music from our computers, our young legs trembling from the weight of carrying it into our room, then playing the songs, muffled by wires and the thick casing over the hardware. We got the news when we bent and turned the antennae, the screen cackling and giving a constant shhh until you shaped it just right.

This was our desperation. A desperation we still hold. The same desperation I had when I had clicked on the link, being led to the site that had dominated my day. The bold words were there: Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.

When I had first read this, I was lead to another time, still where a screen lit my face. I watched in awe as people cheered, screamed, jumped as they read their acceptance letter. Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the list was endless.

The fact that the mere title had brought me to a memory I had watched through a screen, surprised me. The article’s title had not mentioned the videos, but of course, in this world, everyone knew who this was about.

I read the article, every word was birthed by the mere poison our technology has given us, the reputation we strive to build from it, and in this case, the career.

The videos were a shell of ™ Landry, there was no real application, resumes were doctored and mouths were sewn. The children had been forced to kneel on rice, had been humiliated in front of peers. Their skulls were in shape, but inside their minds had crumpled, they were oozing tears, all inside.

At a point, the gates were opened, the tears flood out, instead of blocking their voices and breathes within. They had nodded their heads to the authors of this article, they wanted to risk it all, all for others, by telling the truth.

And the truth had flown out of them, the article throws information at us rapidly, one after the other, our eyes, larger with every word.

That day, I had gone searched the school online, scrolling past the news on the NY Times article, and setting on an interview on The Ellen Show. Ayrton and Alex Little, brothers, had been all smiles in the interview; jumpy, the word “achieve” and “dream” coexisted in their every sentence. I watched closely, as if watching a movie trailer, I searched for a crack, a sudden ooze of emotion.

There was none.

Their mother was proud, Ellen herself was proud, astonished by their history in comparison to their place today. Struggles, struggles, struggles. It was all ‘built from nothing up to something,’ I had shown the interview to a friend who hadn’t heard of the recent NY Times article, who was awed at their every word. She asked what school it was, she called her brother to watch it, now both awed. I waited for their eyes, now shaped in hearts, to, at one point, look away from the screen. I recited the article in front of them, we were all surprised at their initial reactions, still fresh on their minds. They talked of how they couldn’t trace it, not an eye twitched, not a tear surfaced, the brothers were the true men of steel.

The show puts it clearly: Ellen had listed the colleges they had been accepted and going to. She listed the struggles of Ayrton and Alex Little. She asked if the mother was proud. She listed the colleges again.

And just like that, the interview was over.

What we did not know, what we did not catch was that this was a simple nursing we provided to the ego of the school. We were an added strength, more people came, more people opened emails of Ivy League colleges and came onto shows.

More people were humiliated and forced to be quiet, faking their way into a storyline.

The question is: Who do we blame? Is it ™ Landry for doing all this? Is it the children for staying quiet?

Is it us?

It is not an answer I can hide,

it is us.

We had demanded that storyline. That simple story, from bad to good. The end. Nothing in between, nothing after or way before. No plot to reveal, just a flip of a coin, heads, then tails.

Our faces are always shades lighter, a device constantly beaming at us, deepening the darkness beneath our eyes from our constant, late use. Our eyes are slot machines, spinning along with our scrolling screens. Frantic, we are, desperate to hold onto something and stare at wide-eyed for hours.

Now we see children silenced by being handed an iPad, cracked? No worries, a new one is on its way, let me take out another device to track it. Children are being taught at a young age to listen to the screen they hold in their hands, the screen they are both silenced with and given a voice with.

A mix that is simply its own venom.

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. These all plug into us like a USB, download into our brains like a virus, the kind that a white blood cell cannot simply engulf to destroy. They stay in us as the brain’s plaque, eerily similar to the plaque young kids are too lazy to brush off from their teeth today.

They all get their jobs from our fingertips, our sign-ups and our interests and content. It was all okay at first, then in Snapchat there was a tracking concern, Facebook was caught for spreading false news, Instagram superglues children onto itself, and Twitter initiates hate and hides it under the veil of its Top Trending Hashtags list.

And now, there is this.

An entire school, held with a gun of media to their heads. Each repost and like online guaranteeing an extra moment of their safety, another wrap over a wound, preserving their future.

All because of us.

We have told the world what we want, and now we take it like a drug. We don’t work for it, oh no we do not, we watch it. We tell others to do it. We point at a man’s fat with one hand, and our other is buried in a bag of chips, guilty.

We hear the word Harvard and our ears stand, we intake a breathe; we have been told to look up to these names, the Ivy League, if you go here, you are smart. We have applied this common knowledge, and multiplied it by a thousand online.

™ Landry followed suit, their motto proves it: “Your past should not define your destiny!” And that were the students, no more, their individuality taken, their life sliced up in the admission essays. What was their weakness? What could you fill in in the “past” section of their motto?

It was simply cuts of their life: flash a scene of pain, then flash a scene of smiles, story over.

As the article says itself, toxic stereotypes were birthed from all this. The children were forced to talk about deaths in their families, to talk about the worst stereotypical bumps they could find in their past. They took this microscopic point and fed it steroids, defined it as their only past.

The second part of the motto is “destiny,” fake, but still a destiny one can live in. This was the Harvard, the Yale, the Princeton that are now etched onto their resumes. The school made the students into something very similar to statistics, but, unlike the stats, they were not stripped of their struggles, they were not stripped of their successes,

they were stripped of everything in between, reality.

Their admission essays are all painfully similar to the stories of many minorities in media, started off poor, maybe homeless, struggling in a cloud of violence and shackles and now wearing diamonds and living a life one could only imagine of. ™ Landry fed off of these storylines, the media’s respect to the artist’s journey was now the school’s framework. They added the one thing that would join both the online pages supporting black education to the album covers of hands filled with diamonds: education.

And we watched hungrily, our hands out, asking for more. We engulfed every cheer and scream in those videos, and we, still, asked for more.

We treated the school as a factory, struggling kid goes in one door, Harvard student comes out the other. What we needed was a slaughter house with glass walls. What we needed were raw tears, confessions, the only things that could break the students’ shackles, since we chose not to do that ourselves.

And it broke. The secret is out, the kids are relieved, we did not do a thing except read and watch and react. This is the shame of society today. We do not hold ourselves responsible, and people had pointed to the founders of ™ Landry after this article instead. There is no spread of this article on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Snapchat. It sits only to the eyes looking for the truth, hidden from those who want a factory like this painted over.

Bryson Sassau is mentioned in this article, he had followed this path and now looks around him for an escape. The reality was clear to him, as stated by him and in the article:

“‘It became this thing where it was no longer about a family,’ Mr. Sassau said. ‘It was more so about publicity.’” (NY Times)

In his statement, there is the clear juxtaposition of family and publicity. They stand on opposite sides of the ring, no one to tag and swap with, just them, gear ready, arms raised to fight.

And family had lost.

We are embarrassed to admit that we had slipped the drug to publicity before the ring of the bell, we are embarrassed to admit that the scars these children had gotten, physically, mentally, it was because of us. We think we might as well go along with this, or that, simply because everybody else is, but at the end of the day, ten pennies make a dime, and ten dimes make a dollar.

We can see this in our own lives: Abraham Lincoln, the man who abolished slavery. Queue the heroic music, queue the marching band’s entrance. He has his great tall hat in a museum, he was honest.

He is an American icon.

What our teachers brushed under the rug is the constant racism from this man. He abolished slavery, but claimed the white race is superior. He tortured Native Americans, taking their land, and stayed a hero to all of us because hey, he’s on a coin!

And we didn’t try to look behind the coin, behind the mere act of going against slavery. There was dirt, hiding; hidden.

Whether Abraham Lincoln did the toxic action of going along with the crowd when he claimed the superiority of the white race, we will never know. But what we do know, is that we defined him by a simple act: abolishing slavery.

All else a blank slate.

We made him a hero.

Sources:

ERICA L. GREEN and KATIE BENNER. (November 30th, 2018) “Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.”, NY Times.

Youtube. “Ellen Meets Viral College Acceptance Brothers”, Online Video Clip. Youtube, January 5th 2018. Web. November 30th 2018.