Trevor Noah wasn't wrong: Integration Wasn't It.

Maybe It’s Time We Said That Out Loud.

He wasn’t being controversial.
He was telling the truth—loud, Black, and clear.

Trevor Noah didn’t say something reckless.
He said something real.

And for some of us, it wasn’t a surprise.
It was a scar.

Integration wasn’t the solution.
It was the surrender.

It wasn’t a love story.
It was a hostage exchange.

We didn’t get a seat at the table.
We got served on it.

Before integration, we had our own.
Our own schools. Our own doctors. Our own libraries.
Our own coaches, our own bus routes, our own damn rhythm.

Yes, it was born from segregation.
Yes, it was underfunded.
But it wasn’t broken.
We weren’t broken.

We had systems. We had pride. We had culture.
We made bricks out of crumbs.
Built empires on borrowed land.
Turned dialect into defiance.

And they couldn’t stand it.

Because we weren’t supposed to survive without them.
We definitely weren’t supposed to thrive.

So they burned it.
Tulsa. Rosewood. Wilmington.
And the names they erased before we ever learned them.

They didn’t grant us access.
They handed us erasure dressed as opportunity.
Assimilation dressed up like equality.
And they sold it back to us as progress.

Integration didn’t save us.
It undid us.

We got access to their schools—
but we lost our teachers.
Lost our Black principals.
Lost our cultural pedagogy.
Lost the people who saw us as whole before we ever learned to shrink.

We didn’t just integrate classrooms.
We integrated trauma.

We learned how to shrink.
How to contort.
How to code-switch before we could read.

We were taught how to make ourselves palatable.
Because exceptionalism wasn’t a celebration—it was a muzzle.

We didn’t get to bring our full selves.
We had to leave our mothers’ tongues in the hallway.
Check our joy at the door.
Trade our wholeness for their approval.

And still be called angry when we refused to smile through it.

Respectability became a leash.
Excellence became survival.

We weren’t applauded for thriving.
We were tolerated for performing.

The reward?
A seat at a rigged table with a side of imposter syndrome.

We weren’t included.
We were filtered.

We weren’t being raised—we were being reprogrammed.
And some of us wore it so well, they called it professionalism.

But we remembered.

We remembered the cookouts that turned into strategy sessions.
The churches that doubled as freedom schools.
The barbershops that were town halls.
The grandmothers who carried revolutions in their purses.

We remembered the cipher before the syllabus.
The drum before the diploma.
The lineage before the LinkedIn.

We remembered who we were before they told us what we had to become.
And we started asking the question we were never meant to ask:

What if we were never supposed to integrate?
What if we were supposed to reclaim?

Because what did we actually integrate into?

A system that never wanted us whole.
A culture built on our erasure.
A machine that needs our labor—but chokes on our presence.

We weren’t asking to be included.
We were asking to stop dying.

They ignored the ask.
Handed us assimilation.
And then called it equality.

They called Trevor’s comment “dumb.”
I call it lived memory.
I call it truth.

Because for some of us, integration didn’t give us identity.
It cost us the chance to form one.

I’m a 46-year-old light-skinned, light-eyed Black woman raised in the South.
I went to private schools where I was called an Oreo.
Where white kids asked why I didn’t “look Black.”
Where my hair and nose were jokes, not features.

And the Black kids didn’t know me either—
because they hadn’t been around rich white kids since they were four.

A lot of what I knew about “being Black” came from TV.
Or out the window of the car,
driving through neighborhoods I didn’t live in—
but was somehow still expected to be part of.

I had my family. But I’m an only child.
And my parents were in the same system I was.
Trying to make it work.
Trying to be the people we were all lied to and told we could be.
Trying to survive systems that were never designed to hold us.

My mother was one of the first Black students at Newcomb College at Tulane.
My father was the first Black Student Body President at Tulane Law—
and later, the first Black Secretary of Commerce for the State of Louisiana.

I had shoes to fill.
And an image to uphold.

Now they’re watching it happen again.
Watching everything they worked to overcome get passed down—
Not to their grandkids (I’m smarter than that)—
but to the generations they thought they were protecting.

They are both lifelong educators.

My mom was the first Black teacher at Isidore Newman School in New Orleans.
The year she came on board was the same year they ended the policy
that allowed teachers’ children to attend for free.

She was good enough to teach their kids—
but not welcome to the same benefits as everyone before her.

Still, they showed up.
They taught generations—Black, white, brown, all of them.

My dad still teaches today.
He now teaches the child of a former student from decades ago.

And now they’re watching it all get trashed in sixty days.
It’s the biggest slap in the fucking face.

They’re watching it all unravel.
And it’s breaking their hearts.

We did it with Tulsa.
We did it with Rosewood.
We thought integration was helping us.
But it wasn’t.
It was helping them.

And now we know.

So maybe—even though most of us have adapted,
even though the world says it values diversity—
maybe until Americans (ALL Americans) learn the actual lesson,
we focus on rebuilding our communities for ourselves.

Not for them.

That doesn’t mean buying Black everything.
(I wrote about that, too.)
But it does mean building schools, clinics, centers, and spaces
that don’t require translation.
That don’t need permission.
That aren’t built to be palatable.
They’re built to be ours.

They’ve only been “less than” because we were told they were.
Because we relied on federal systems to protect us.
And those systems still won’t do their job.

So maybe it’s time we ask
why we wanted to belong to them in the first place.

Because what have they truly given us
that we weren’t already building on our own?

History taught me that.
Just… a lot fucking later.
Because they only taught it once a year.
If that.

This is reclamation, not revisionism.
FAFO2025.