My own family is a case in point.
When growing up my mother always intoned the words “when you go to college,” never “if you go,” although she herself had not attended. My grandmother, an immigrant from Trinidad, had not completed high school, but education was so highly regarded that she (in embarrassment) typically withheld that information from her friends.
Attending an all-girls high school taught me that girls can be athletes and scholars; matriculating at historically Black Howard University showed me that African-Americans could be poets, politicians and physical chemists.
