People “put you in group so that they can try to understand you better”
Natasha Jain-Poster is a graduate of Clayton High School and an activist who has joined recent protests to demand racial equity and an end to police brutality. She is also part of a petition effort calling for changes in the Clayton school district. She is now a student at the University of California Irvine. These are excerpts from an interview with Richard Weiss about her experiences as a student at Clayton High and her activism.
Weiss:
Tell me a little bit about how your folks first came to be in University City and then Clayton.
Jain-Poster:
I am a biracial woman woman: Indian and Jewish. My mom is Jewish and then my dad is Indian. He had left India when he was 18. He met my mom at UC Berkeley freshman year of college. And he was in medicine. My mom got her PhD in sociology and now she’s a professor at Wash U. My dad works at the Washington University Med School. So we started out in U City, in 2000 they moved there, and then I was there until I was 9 and then I moved to Clayton and I started at Captain, which was a huge transition for me even at such a young age.
Weiss:
When did you become, I guess what you’d call “woke”?
Jain-Poster:
I think there were a lot of factors. It was pretty gradual accumulating factors until I reached the woke part. First of all, just being a woman of color in this highly racialized and patriarchal society. You know, you just know, you feel it. I have to walk around and live my life with anxiety every time I step out of my house of men harassing me, of people always trying to make microaggressions about my race and trying to fit me in some kind of racial category. Because I am, like I said, mixed, and bi-racial, people don’t know what ethnicity I am. And, in this country and this world we live in, people are always trying to figure you out and put you in group so that they can try to understand you better, right?
It isn’t with animus all the time, but to me it feels like a reduction. It feels like it reduces me to labels. But, I’m very proud of my identity, my Indian roots and my Jewish roots.
Weiss:
What galvanized you to get involved with this particular petition in regard to Clayton?
Jain-Poster:
I think many of us, and when I say us I mean minority students of color, felt violence, but we had to be silent about what we go through at Clayton. And everyone I talked to at Clayton has experienced some sort of horrible, traumatic story that affected the way that they are and that’s because of the staff there, the faculty, and has to do with the Clayton culture.
Weiss:
You got into great schools, your talent in organizing and advocating and so on has to come from what you learned in the classroom. But apparently it was a very painful experience. Can you cite, in your own experience, just one incident or two that was painful for you personally?
Jain-Poster:
Yeah. First I want to say, you’re completely right, going to Clayton has tremendous benefit. It’s a privilege for anyone to be able to go there. When we say the culture is toxic, we mean it’s competitive. It’s so, so competitive. And, yeah, we go to Ivy Leagues, we get to these good schools. But it’s through pain. It’s through harassment, it’s through competition, toxic competition. Students doing whatever they can to put you down and make sure that they’re above you, and shaming you if you get B on a test, shaming you, calling you stupid, worthless, it’s horrible.
At one point, Clayton opened up some policies to allow Black people from the inner-city to come in, I can’t even imagine how they felt. So out of place. So many people are denied the type of education that people at Clayton get, and then Clayton turns around and says, “Oh, but, the people that go here just… They work harder, they deserved it, they earned it.” Everybody deserves that type of education. You can’t tell me that someone else doesn’t deserve it just because they live in a different neighborhood. Do you know what I mean?
Weiss:
What do you say to people who say, “Look, take a pill here for a year. Why don’t we just get kids back into class and then we’ll pick up the things that matter to you?” What would be your response?
Jain-Poster:
In regards to our demands, I think this is going to be a long process. I’m already aware of that. When we created this petition, I was aware of this. I mean, they don’t want to budge. We have talked with the superintendent, we’ve talked with the principal and they just keep sending back diplomatic responses. They don’t want to budge. So, it’s going to take effort like every other social justice movement has, but, we’re willing to fight.
