In my school, the majority of the black students are in "on-level" or standard level classes. During my two years of high school, I can count on one hand all of the black people in my honors classes. I am a black honor student, and I have been for my entire life. That itself can come with a lot of challenges and tribulations like having to work extra to prove that you deserve to be in an honors class with everyone else, dodging black stereotypes and having to suppress parts of my culture in order to protect it from scrutiny. But the worst part of all of this is that I don't feel as if I can truly connect with "on-level" black students.

The black community is a very interconnected society. You can almost go anywhere and find a black person who you can instantly connect with on a personal level. However, it is almost as if in high school, our two groups exist in subcultures. We dress, act, speak and think differently.

Now, I can only speak from the perspective of an honor student and on what I experience, but I have met black honors students that view on-level black students as either extremely obnoxious and don't care about their education, or people who are giving black youth a bad image. I was shocked when I started to witness the feelings of other black students around me. Then I thought about it, and I realized that a small part of me felt the same way. I remember thinking back to a time where I saw other black kids being rude or loud and then, automatically assuming that they were in an on-level class or thinking that on level black students only cared about drama and not their future.

But that larger part of me knew that this wasn't true, and there was more to a person's actions than their academic ranking. It wasn't on-level students against the honors students. It was all of us against the education system, and how it continued to divide us. It isn't that the on-level black students don't care about their education, but it was that the educational system didn't show them that they could be more. Honor black students aren't different from on-level black students. It was just that we are placed in a much more diverse environment that we tend to have different interest and philosophies.

My electives were the only time when our worlds would come together. I could talk and get to know more black students and to my surprise, I felt the most comfortable with them. I didn't have to pick and choose what parts of myself to share because they were raised the same. All of us strived for black excellence, and all of us understood each other.

Sadly, this divide is detrimental to the one thing that unites us: our blackness. In this day and age, the youth holds the most power when it comes to social justice. With people such as Grace Dolan-Sandrino and Yara Shahidi speaking out against racism and advocating for the Black Lives Matter movement, we can't afford to not band as one group. We can't expect others the accept us when we don't accept each other.

Even though I still believe that I can't 100% connect with on-level black students, I do see them in a better light than I did my freshman year of high school. At the end of the day, we are all in this together whether we like it or not. Hopefully, more of us black students can realize that.