When Dasani left home

September 28, 2021 8:20 AM

Many of you may remember the story of Dasani, the homeless girl in rapidly gentrifying Fort Greene whose experiences were chronicled in a NYT article several years ago. This article follows up on her experiences since, as she attends a boarding school for lower-income students.
posted by praemunire (14 comments total)

It's just so heartbreaking, for the whole family.
posted by BlahLaLa at 9:12 AM on September 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

There’s an episode about the Hershey School on the ethics/philosophy podcast Hi-Phi Nation, about how, essentially, the cold dead hands of dead white people and their money keep controlling modern-day institutions. That is, the Hershey Institution has a giant amount of money, and many people making a very good living administering this money and that school. But it can’t be disbanded. So the machine continues to require children to attend this school, even as the original supply of white male orphans dries up and the rules of who attends, and why, get tweaked. Every time you eat a Hershey’s kiss it funds this ridiculous institution.

It’s Season 1 Episode 1 if you’re interested, there’s also a transcript. The Wishes of the Dead
posted by Hypatia at 9:37 AM on September 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

America’s Richest School Serves Low-Income Kids. But Much of Its Hershey-Funded Fortune Isn’t Being Spent. (ProPublica)
posted by praemunire at 10:14 AM on September 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting, and posting non-paywalled archived links for the NYT at that, praemunire.
My mother grew up in a housing project in Fort Greene, in the same complex as Dasani's grandmother.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:46 AM on September 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it's heartbreaking. I wonder what happened to all the money that was put in trust for her after the first article (and doesn't it say something, that it wasn't used to just pay for their housing so the family wasn't homeless).
posted by stillnocturnal at 2:56 PM on September 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting. The comments section of the article is fascinating reading as well.
posted by ichimunki at 3:07 PM on September 28, 2021

Damn, this whole article is one big demonstration of the limitations of philanthropy as a safety net and means of ending poverty.

Think of all the billions of dollars in the Hershey school endownment, as described in the article praemunire links above. With money like that, you could:

-Build subsidized housing for homeless families, and/or make major infrastructure improvements to existing family shelters, including shelters that allow parents to stay with their children while undergoing drug treatment.
-Improve infrastructure or pay the salaries for new teachers at public schools with large populations of children who are homeless or in foster care.
-Give rental subsidies to older teens who are homeless or aging out of foster care.
-Fund community mental health centers for children and teens affected by intergenerational trauma to receive counseling.
-Fund subsidized day-cares for homeless or otherwise low-income parents so their older children don't have to become de facto babysitters.

Etc.

But instead you have all these resources poured into one school that seems to be operating on the principle that the areas its students come from are inherently broken.

Why not just fund the cities and all their resources, instead of this golden ticket for the small handful of kids who are able to handle the culture shock of assimilation?
posted by ActionPopulated at 3:18 PM on September 28, 2021 [11 favorites]

Yeah, this whole "being white is the only way to succeed" bullshit gets to me a great deal. Do children who've lived through trauma have some coping mechanisms that they need to lose to be more successful in a safe world? Yeah. But the way to do that isn't to make the child lose everything about themselves that makes them feel like a person. ActionPopulated is on the right path, instead of pulling up a some "deserving few" we could take that money and invest it in communities and find ways to PREVENT the trauma from happening and find a path for folks who are in poverty and despair to find a way out.

Cause seriously, can you imagine what life is like for the few who do make it out of the indoctrination? On one hand, there's so much pressure to succeed and to pull your family up behind you and then you're also full of shame about who you were and where you came from.

I hope Dasani can find a path to being her true self and successful in the way that she chooses. Regardless of what the world says.
posted by teleri025 at 3:41 PM on September 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Schools with free laundry facilities, open-access food pantries, afterschool programs, and without punitive "lunch debt" policies, help students & their families succeed.
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:03 PM on September 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

Why not just fund the cities and all their resources, instead of this golden ticket for the small handful of kids who are able to handle the culture shock of assimilation?

The Philadelphia City Budget signed in June 2021 is 5.26 Billion dollars. New York's budget is like 100 million. The scope of the problem people would like to see fixed within a single city is, sadly, beyond the spending power of a single billionaire.
posted by pwnguin at 5:06 PM on September 28, 2021

So, I'm pretty sure the Hershey will was written in an era where trustees' fiduciary responsibilities required them to invest in only the safest of funds, meaning the lowest of returns, meaning that it was that much more imperative not to ever spend the endowment. Legal expectations on that score have changed--for good and bad. The trust still operates as if it were under the older framework, in part because of the terms of the will. The ProPublica article goes into the (badly needed) struggle to modernize its approach while still remaining fiscally responsible on the trust's behalf.

Why not just fund the cities and all their resources, instead of this golden ticket for the small handful of kids who are able to handle the culture shock of assimilation? Such programs need to be sustainable. If you do spend down the endowment, eventually there will be no more support. So it's not quite as simple as cracking open the coffers and emptying them...they will empty. I was just reading about an arts (?) program in the Boston public schools that had to shut down because it ran out of funds...it was incredibly depressing.

I found it upsetting that Dasani's house parents kept correcting her vernacular. I mean, most boarding schools don't operate on the hidden presumption that the students' home lives are trash, so it's not implicit in the model that the Hershey school should do so. It's one thing to teach the most formal English for use in the most formal academic settings, quite another to suggest that her day-to-day language is somehow wrong, rather than different. The restrictions on communications with home seem similarly misguided. I know it's reasonably common for boarding schools not to issue weekend passes for the first month or so, to encourage the students to get comfortable in their new environment, but the harsh limits on phone calls again seem to stigmatize the child's actual family. But ultimately, even the most supportive school environment is not going to be sufficient for some students who are carrying individual and intergenerational trauma, which may even, as in Dasani's case, be still ongoing. How can twice a week therapy be enough to help a kid successfully handle having her whole family split up?

So many of Dasani's family's problems seem to trace back to, or at least be exacerbated by, the lack of decent, stable housing. We as a society seem unable to accept the idea that people like Dasani's parents, who are probably never going to be meaningfully employed in long-term jobs, never not going to have ACS cases open on them, never not going to be drug addicts, never not going to be having various brushes with the law, nonetheless should have adequate and secure places to live. If for no other reason than to minimize the harm caused by all these circumstances to the children they raise.
posted by praemunire at 5:18 PM on September 28, 2021 [13 favorites]

My mother was very much like Chanel. I think most of the people who read this story will feel sorry for Dasani. I'm just so, so angry with her. I could have been her. I very nearly was, but I had my 'white' family to fall back on when my mother failed at being a mother. Sure I think Hershey's super-focus on correct speech was stupid and unhelpful (you can learn to code-switch pretty darn fast in college), but all the other stuff? So what? SO WHAT? I grew up with my poor grandparents, my mom finally got me back in Jr. High and I lived on a Reservation with her. She was still drinking, and doing drugs. I helped take care of the house, of my younger half-sister. I could have been in an awful codependent relationship with my family like Dasani was. But I left at 16. I straight up told my mother she wasn't good for me, and I couldn't stay and watch her wreck herself. I would have literally run-away from home for the chance to go to a school like Hershey's. I weep with rage not at Dasani, but at Chanel for not being able to hold her shit together after her live-in house maid/nanny went off to a boarding school. I weep with rage because a middle school aged child should not be parenting her flock of younger siblings. I scream with rage because family can be your life raft, or it can be the stone that drowns you.
posted by sharp pointy objects at 6:01 AM on September 29, 2021 [16 favorites]

I found it upsetting that Dasani's house parents kept correcting her vernacular.

Yeah, I just happened to listen to the You're Wrong About episode about the Ebonics controversy this weekend (which, as usual, is excellent and depressing) and thought about it a lot when the article described Dasani's experience when she first arrived at the Hershey School.
posted by Drab_Parts at 8:20 AM on September 29, 2021

what struck me in the videos accompanying the original series was the way Chanel was glaring with jealousy at Dasani as she performed with the Bartendaz exercise troupe
posted by brujita at 9:23 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]