About a decade ago, raising three kids as a single mom in Oakland, California, Sonya Brooks ’21 AM had her aha moment about the structural racism in education that holds back Black and brown students. Her elementary-age son, Chase, was assaulted at school by a white student, she recounts—but it was Chase who was suspended. “That,” she says, “left a really bitter taste in my mouth.”
Once her kids were fully grown, after periods of homelessness and sticking out a job she hated in order to support her family, she resumed her undergraduate studies at UCLA in 2018. She began to learn about the school-to-prison pipeline that often sends low-income students of color into the criminal justice system rather than on to success. “I started seeing how the challenges my own children faced at school were reflected in the broader system,” she says.
She was determined to continue her education so that she could play a role in creating policy that would empower Black and brown young people. This May, she received her master’s from Brown’s Urban Education Policy program. COVID has forced her to study largely via Zoom from Oakland, focused on research that centers young people’s reservoirs of excellence and resiliency rather than their deficits and pathologies, as white-driven research into so-called “urban education” has often done.
“I started seeing how the challenges my own children faced at school were reflected in the broader system.”
She has paired those studies with an internship in the Oakland school district, where she is a full-time counselor. In that role, she trains educators to recognize implicit bias and microaggressions toward students as one pathway toward pedagogic equity. She also started an area support group called Beautiful Brown Girls. “We talk about being girls in spaces that don’t normally allow us to show off our excellence,” she says. “I tell them, ‘God gives us all a test—but if we fail, he gives us a make-up test.’”
Brooks, who was chosen to speak at Brown’s graduate commencement ceremony, will now work toward her Ph.D. and law degree at UCLA, with a focus on the intersection between urban policy and the law. She wants to teach high school and college students and eventually become U.S. Secretary of Education. “Because of everything I’ve gone through, I want to fight for parents, students, and communities that don’t have the wherewithal,” she says. “And by that, I mean to fight for good policy.”
It was Chase who nominated his mother to appear in BAM. “She literally put her life on hold to raise my two sisters and me,” he wrote. “She tends to go unnoticed, so I wanted to take this time to let you know about this wonderful woman who always thinks of others before herself.”—T.M.
Source
https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2021-06-22/emerging-victorious