New York has always been my home, but growing up as the daughter of Latin American immigrants, I did have a lot of questions about why my family was here when it was clear that our roots were elsewhere. My dad explained that it was because in America, anyone could achieve whatever they wanted if they were willing to work for it. It didn’t occur to me that he could be wrong.

When I was 12, I received a scholarship to an elite private school on the Upper East Side. Before my transfer, I had been a student at my local public school like all the other kids in my neighborhood. Most of my classmates came from immigrant families like mine. The school ran a free lunch program in the summer, and by fifth grade, they had to install an annex on the other side of the 12-lane deathtrap known as Queens Boulevard to house a surplus of students. It was not an ideal place to learn: in sixth grade, we made a teacher cry because we wouldn’t shut up after repeated calls to attention.

Private school was different. I had always been a dedicated student, but at my new school, there were plenty of kids who were better than me. Our classes were sometimes only six students large, and nobody was afraid to show off by raising their hands to answer questions. There were free class trips to Boston and Washington DC, fine arts and music classes, and a full biology lab where we got to dissect baby pigs. Even the lunch food was great: they gave us name-brand yogurt with fruit on the bottom, and offered a daily salad bar – with feta. For someone used to frozen pizza and milk, this was the height of luxury.

There were other differences, too. Whereas my school in Queens had been free, by senior year, my K-12 private school was charging a tuition of roughly $50,000 per year, similar to the annual tuition and board fees at most private four-year colleges. And whereas my school in Queens was filled with mostly brown faces, my private school was almost entirely white.

I shuttled back and forth between two drastically different worlds – one at home, filled with other brown faces like mine, and one on the Upper East Side. In the morning, I borrowed a Nikon camera from school to snap photographs of Central Park; in the afternoon, I returned to my neighborhood in Queens, where I buried the camera deep in my bag, heeding my mother’s warnings about not being flashy, especially not at night.

It wasn’t long before I became deeply unhappy. I didn’t fit in with my white, wealthy peers, though that didn’t stop me from trying. I went out to eat meals with them, despite the fact that my classmates would inevitably have to pick up my tab, and even after I learned that I had earned a solid reputation as a “mooch”. Once, a teacher asked me to explain to the class who the Virgen de Guadalupe was, even after I told her I wasn’t Mexican. Her response was that I was close enough.

Moreover, I began questioning my father’s narrative about hard work. According to him, anyone from anywhere had a fair chance at success. If that were true, why wasn’t my school full of more students like me? I was the only Latina in my grade, if you didn’t count the couple of students who were half-white. With last names I recognized from actors in movies, my classmates were somebodies, and with apartments on Fifth Avenue and blocks away from the Met, they certainly were from somewhere.

My father had no idea what it was like to have millionaires for friends, and couldn’t fathom what it was like to go to schools with people who carried their books in Louis Vuitton bags. The only time we came close to talking about inequality was when he reminded me I had it lucky because I’d never been called a spic, like he had as a kid. When my parents received a phone call one day from my school psychologist expressing concerns that I may be depressed, they asked, “What did we do to make you so sad?” I never went to the psychologist’s office again.

In spite of everything, I knew how lucky I was. At my school, it was a given that everyone would not only graduate, but that all of us would go to college. For most kids in my neighborhood, that wasn’t the case. During senior year, when I asked a friend who went to the local public school what colleges his adviser told him to apply to, he said: “I don’t think I have a college adviser. How do I find out if I do?” At a school were everyone was applying to college, many of them Ivy League schools that were often their parents’ alma maters, his response stunned me.

Once in college, I met more people who were exactly like the ones I went to private school with: mostly white and mostly wealthy. I always knew that going to private school wasn’t just about eating really great lunch food; it was also about being set up for a very comfortable future. But for the first time ever I realized that the future I was being set up for would not include many brown and black faces.

Brown and black students are much more likely to attend under-resourced schools, where their rates of graduating are less than the nationwide average. Many of these underfunded schools are considered apartheid or near-apartheid schools, where only 1-10% of students are white. But segregation doesn’t stop after receiving a cap and gown. Graduating from a top-tier college is likely to catch a job recruiter’s eye – and industries across the board are known for favoring candidates from elite schools.

As an adult, I continue to be a minority in most professional and social settings, and more than ever, I find myself disputing the narrative that success is a product of merit. Well-meaning white people will tell me I’m wrong when I suggest my success has largely been determined by circumstance and chance. In high school, I didn’t know anything about income inequality or the top 1%, but I did know that earning a scholarship to a prestigious high school wasn’t about hard work: it was luck. I knew plenty of Latino kids in my neighborhood who were just as smart as I was but because of my school’s elite reputation, my college application would be considered much sooner than theirs would, and that the much sought-after financial aid scholarships given to select low- and middle-income students would more likely go to me.

When only 15% of Latinos have a bachelor’s degree, it is foolish, if not dangerous, to frame my success in terms of how much I deserve it, or in terms of how intelligent I am. As my experience shows, it isn’t uncommon for non-white students to receive scholarships based on how “gifted” or “talented” they are, but the implication is that being both smart and a person of color is a rarity, and only those considered intelligent as proven by a certain set of criteria are worthy of being educated well.

Hard-to-earn scholarships, educational achievement programs, and even school vouchers that benefit an ordained few will never be a stand-in for a subpar public education system that fails many more. Likewise, attributing an individual’s success to their own personal work ethic conceals the way in which mass incarceration, a broken immigration system, underfunded schools, and state-sanctioned violence plays a role in the systemic oppression of brown and black communities.

In 10th grade, we took a lesson on social justice. The teacher was an older nun, and she introduced a term I’d never heard before: “Cycle of poverty”. She said some people never escape it. Though I was shy in class, I raised my hand immediately. “That’s not true,” I said. “Anyone can be as successful as they want.”

My reaction was rooted in one deeply held and cherished belief: if I worked hard enough, the sky was the limit. Back then, I had no conception of systemic oppression or marginalization. I believed in the fairness of the world. But as adults, it does us no use to believe in fairytales.

As long as we continue to have separate schools for the rich and the poor, for white people and people of color, we will continue to have segregated work places, segregated neighborhoods, and ultimately, a divided country. We will continue to talk about difference in terms of “overcoming” it. As long as we continue to live in a segregated country, mainstream America will never be able to see that the biggest deficiency among communities of color is not merit or motivation, but real opportunity and justice.