Reporting for NBC's Southlake podcast on racial tensions revived my own childhood memories

It’s been a little more than a decade, but when I look back on the final months before my high school graduation I still feel bitter. I should have been celebrating my greatest achievement up to that point: I had finished four years of hard work and I was heading off to Harvard. Instead, I was humiliated. 

A group of classmates was furious about my college acceptance. I was one of the few Black kids in a class of more than 400 students, and I had taken – and excelled in – advanced courses with many of them. Just hours after my acceptance, they started telling everyone in school I’d only gotten in because I was Black.

They claimed that I had “stolen” the spot of one well-liked white male peer who had applied to the same school and been placed on the wait list. They weren’t content to just grumble about this behind my back – they asked me if I felt guilty and shouted jokes about affirmative action in the hallways when I walked past. One parent muttered an expletive at my mom in the parking lot before my senior prom. As an insecure 17-year-old I was mostly preoccupied with the public humiliation, but I had enough sense to know that the rage they felt was about something much bigger than me or my Black family.

Issues of belonging and backlash in a diversifying but majority-white American community were familiar ground to me, as I started to report on similar issues tearing apart a community just outside Dallas. Southlake, Texas, is certainly not like the suburbs of Boston where I grew up, but some parallels are unmistakable. It was one of the very first communities to begin the  conversation over diversity, inclusion and American history that has since swept the country. In most communities, the fight over critical race theory – a decades-old framework for studying the societal legacy of racism that has been turned into a catch-all for diversity and inclusion efforts that some believe are unfair to white students – began this past spring. In Southlake,  it started back in 2018 with the release of a nine-second video of Southlake students chanting the N-word. Our new NBC News podcast “Southlake'' is a six-part series that tries to answer the question, “How did we all end up here?”

To do that, my co-host, Mike Hixenbaugh, and I had to go back in time to reconstruct Southlake's identity and racial dynamics beginning in the early 1990s. We’re journalists but we’re also humans, so, naturally, over the course of eight months of digging and asking questions about school and acceptance, we were transported back to our own childhoods.

For me, it meant revisiting incidents that happened to me and my six siblings as one of the few Black families in a New England suburb.

For Mike, it meant grappling with the fact that he was a white kid from rural Ohio who didn’t have classmates of color and felt like he left high school without the skills and cultural knowledge to function in diverse communities.

Early on in our collaboration, we recognized that we each had a lot to learn from the other, that we would need to be patient and honest about each other’s blind spots, and that approaching our differences with empathy would serve us well as we covered a complex and emotional story together.

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In our reporting, I realized that so much of our discourse around race and American history has focused on the perspectives of parents, administrators and politicians, who have turned what happens in the classroom into a wedge issue. Mike and I knew then that we wanted to center our podcast on student experiences – to amplify the voices of the people who have the most on the line. When we give up on the opportunity to have uncomfortable dialogue about inclusion or the legacy of racism, it’s young people who have to live with the consequences. And I know, from reporting and from personal experience, that those consequences can last a lifetime.

Antonia Hylton is an NBC News correspondent covering politics and justice and is the co-host of “Southlake,” a six-part podcast from NBC News. She and her six siblings were raised in the suburbs of Boston. Follow her on Twitter: @ahylton26