Where racism dissipates

Ten years ago, the 14 of us graduated.

We were all close friends then, and though we’re farther apart in miles — one of us all the way in Chicago and another in South Bend — we’re probably even closer now. With pressure from school, parents and from friends, we know Wellesley isn’t always an easy place to grow up. But it’s hard to imagine a better place.

At least, for most of us.

For those who aren’t the targets of racial slurs that get painted on bathroom walls. For those who, once they graduate, won’t have to worry about teaching their kids to make sure they’re extra polite to the cops.

Wellesley is easier, we mean, if you’re white.

A few months before we graduated from Wellesley High, someone wrote the N-word all over the bathrooms inside the old high school. We had an assembly a few days later, though usually assemblies like these didn’t change many minds. It’s hard to get a bunch of kids in a town that’s overwhelmingly white to talk about race, let alone to consider they might play some part in a problem that’s more than 400 years old.

This assembly was different.

Mr. Kelton – or to most of us, just “Coach” – was at a small table in the center of the gym. He was with Mr. Reidy and the administration must have told them to “just talk.” Talk about your friendship dating back to the 1980s. Talk about growing up together, Drew Kelton, Black, and Mike Reidy, white.

That day, Kelton and Reidy also talked about a basketball game they played together in 1986 at Charlestown High. Coach Kelton recalled the bottles — glass ones — the crowd threw down on the Wellesley players’ heads as they jogged, then sprinted, off the hardwood after the game.

The reason for the bottles in '86 was the same reason for the bathroom slurs in 2010. And it’s the same reason Ahmaud Arbury, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many others were murdered in 2020. The reason: skin color.

It’s a belief not universally held, yet still pervasive among a minority of white Americans, that Black Americans deserve to have a metaphorical knee on their necks, and kept there.

Most white people know better than to be so hateful. But not nearly enough say so. Far fewer do anything about it. In Kelton and Reidy’s case, the hatred was specific: Wellesley players faced hate and violence – for playing basketball – because Wellesley is part of METCO.

For more than 50 years, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) has given kids of different colors from Boston and its suburbs a chance. A chance to learn from one another about how,when we work at it, that hate is overcome. METCO offers proof that when, like Dr. King dreamed, “little black boys and little white boys ... join hands together,” when they fight and cry together, when they compete together, study together, play together, win together, and lose together. We find meaning in mutual struggles and reverence for overcoming them. We are all made better from them.

METCO is why Kelton and Reidy are still best friends to this day. METCO is why the 14 of us are a family — 12 kids from Wellesley and two from Boston. The 12 of us who are white probably never would have grown close to a single person of color in all the years we grew up in town, but because of METCO, we did, and still are.

And though none of us realized it during that assembly 10 years ago, METCO is the reason we 12 white kids, who didn’t know much, knew enough that day to listen. We listened to our coach, a man we admired, and we heard him crying. All he wanted, coach Kelton said to 1,300 silent students in front of him, “was a break. When I heard about what happened in the bathrooms, I just ...” he choked up. “I just wanted a break from that feeling.”

The 12 of us who are white will never know what it’s like to be Black or brown in Wellesley. But because we respected Coach Kelton so much, his words and his tears had immense impact. Because of him, and because of METCO, his story made a difference in 12 young white minds that has lasted a lifetime.

We’re proud that since 1966, Wellesley has played a big role in, and remains an original district of, the METCO program. But across the state, METCO hasn’t grown since the 1970s. Over the past two decades, the program’s shrunk from a peak of 37 districts to the 31 that still participate today. Yet, at least by the numbers, it could not be more clear that METCO works. Where in Boston Public Schools, students graduate from high school about 73% of the time, 98% of METCO students from the very same ZIP codes earn their diplomas from suburban high schools each year. Nearly 90% go on to college and 88% finish, compared to just 80% of non-METCO students who start college, and just 52% who finish.

As the 14 of us know firsthand, it’s not just kids from Boston who benefit. Realizing just how much METCO matters, though, shouldn’t require the N-word on bathroom walls or an assembly. Coach Kelton’s words encapsulate what the 14 of us have realized as alumni, but for today’s Wellesley students, it's the classroom, the playground, backstage, the locker room, the cafeteria, the school bus, the play dates, the proms, and now, the Zooms — that is where racial empathy is learned. It’s in those everyday places where perpetual hate for blackness dissipates, understanding grows, and a community in which not prejudice, but pride, is what people feel when they call the place home.

But too often, largely due to factors beyond one town’s control, kindergarten classrooms — not just in Wellesley but in most every METCO district — have but one Black student, who, if not a METCO student, is assumed to be one because they are not white. Expanding METCO in Wellesley wouldn’t just make school better for that kid. Growing METCO in Wellesley would make racial fairness a priority in more young white minds because through interracial friendships, more young white kids — like the 12 white ones of us — will choose to care because they do, not because they’re told to.

As Wellesley, along with America, reflects this summer on race, we hope those who read our thoughts will think seriously about how Wellesley, a place our family still calls home, might commit to doing something that might actually make things tangibly better. We think expansion is that thing. But given the pandemic and its impact on state budgets, an expansion next year won’t happen — it’s a goal we hope all will consider.

There are things we can all do right now, though, that would make a difference for our METCO students this September. Volunteer to become a host family for METCO kindergartners, and become a support system for kids who wake up at 5 a.m. every single day just to come to school in Wellesley. Donate to Friends of Wellesley METCO, led by parents of current students from both Boston and Wellesley. Seek out corporate matching opportunities. As the private sector looks for the best ways to lend a hand in this time of racial strife, METCO’s track record demonstrates that donors large and small can be confident their return on investment will yield high — especially in social capital.

To start, the 14 of us, along with some of the officers from Wellesley High School's 2010 senior class, are each committing to donate $20.20 to Friends of Wellesley METCO. We challenge our classmates, in honor of our 10-year reunion, to match us. And we challenge other classes of Raider alumni to do the same.

We recognize METCO is not perfect, nor is it a fix-all solution to America’s racial divides. We realize too that our story, like Kelton and Reidy’s, is unique, maybe even an outlier. Our ask, if nothing else, is for Wellesley residents to ask themselves, and each other, what more we can do to make every METCO student feel more included at school, and more welcome around town. The N-word on the walls of the old high school may be 10 years gone, but we all know resentment toward Black Americans didn’t get torn down with the 1938 building.

We will always be grateful that there are not 12, but 14 of us who grew up together. Had you said 10 years ago we’d be writing an opinion piece, we would have laughed. But we are speaking up now because we care so much about each other, because we’ve learned so much from one another, and because we want Wellesley to do what Principal Jamie Chisum taught us: the right thing, even, and especially, when it’s the more difficult thing to do.

For reasons both practical and political, expanding METCO in Wellesley would be difficult. But at minimum, we want our story to spur conversation — because, yes, expanding METCO would bring new conflicts, new tensions, new issues in our schools. Addressing them the right way would be difficult. But we hope those now raising their kids in the town that raised us will agree that at a time like this, supporting METCO as best we can is exactly the right thing to do.

Written by Marcell Cooper-Teleau of Boston, Will Gotschewski of Boston, Reid Kapinos, Merrimack, New Hampshire, Casey Tanner of Boston, Conor McCormack of Boston, Dean Petzing of South Bend, Indiana, Brendan Brooks of Boston, Danny Schwarz of Boston, Liam Sullivan of Boston, John Kasparzak of Boston, Ethan Kaplan of Chicago, Illinois, Drew Clendenen of Boston, Chris Mele of Boston and Alex Saavedra of Boston.