I heard similar concerns about the gap between home and school cultures when I interviewed dozens of black mothers for my book, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. Many of us know about the disparities: Black students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be expelled or suspended. Less frequently discussed are the strategies black parents use to prepare their children for schools where they might be perceived as threats or expendable misfits who aren’t core members of the community.

Read: How school suspensions push black students behind

The mothers I spoke with were concerned about these disciplinary patterns. They were also worried about subtler ways black students are told they don’t belong in classrooms where the dominant culture, with its emphasis on obedience and hierarchy, is unlike the culture at home. These mothers talked about their efforts to encourage their children to question authority, speak freely, and express opinions—all things they valued—only to then watch as their children were reprimanded or even criminalized for doing so at school. They shared how nonblack peers would unexpectedly touch their children’s hair, making them feel violated and objectified. Some had placed their black children in predominantly white, suburban schools that offered strong academic programs, but that were limited by their own insularity and thus were unable to prepare black kids for the more racially and economically heterogeneous real world. Others felt that teachers had treated their children coldly, and were unable to see them simply as children.

I had many of those conversations around the time that I started taking my toddler—my first child—to a library story circle, a weekly sing-along, and other enrichment programs that were our earliest experiences of school-like environments. We were often the only family of color or one of few, and I began to think about the socialization that comes with schooling for black families of school-age children. The verb socialize means “to make suitable for society.” The word is typically understood as benign, but I wondered: What does it mean to encourage a child to become suitable for a society that isn’t really suitable for her?

Through my research, I learned that helping children survive and have positive experiences at school is another way in which mothering is different in black families. I came across a 1992 book titled Raising Black Children, co-authored by the psychiatrists Alvin Poussaint and James Comer. Poussaint consulted on The Cosby Show and was known as a kind of Dr. Spock within black communities in the 1980s and 1990s. In the book, the authors write, “Many black parents question and have mixed feelings about passing on the values and ways of a society that says in so many ways, ‘We do not value black men and women, boys and girls, as much as we do whites …’ The need to preserve our culture and community springs from a desire to maintain a real and psychological place, where we are accepted, respected and protected. For this reason we are concerned about whether ‘white psychology and child-rearing approaches’ will change us, hurt us, destroy our culture.”