Some of My Best Friends Are Black (13 page)

In personality, Myles and Malcolm Robinson could not be more dissimilar. “Had I not been in the delivery room,” their father jokes, “I would not believe that they are twins.” Myles plays basketball, Malcolm plays concert piano. Myles hangs with the jocks, Malcolm is president of the German Honor Society. Not being into sports—a one-way ticket to popularity—Malcolm found it a little tougher to adapt. “Myles had an easier time getting along,” Malcolm explains. “I had to make my own friends, which was harder for me. At our old school my brother and I had all the same friends. When we moved here, we got different ones.”

Far from having to stick together to survive, Myles and Malcolm both say they barely see each other during the school day. They have completely independent activities, interests, and peer groups. Twenty years ago, Tycely Williams had to make an either/or choice—in or out, black or white, Oxmoor or Oreo. Today, Myles’s and Malcolm’s choices aren’t solely dictated by their race. There’s still a color line, to be sure. There’s still a black cafeteria table and a cluster of black kids in the hallway before school. But navigating that terrain has become far less treacherous.

If the twins have one thing in common, it’s that they’re both honor students. Not the only black ones, either. The academic glass ceiling at Vestavia has not only been cracked, but shattered. In the class of 2008, William Desmond qualified as a National Merit semifinalist, took home the departmental honors in social studies,
and
was voted Most Intellectual by his classmates. Not only is William Desmond black, he’s from Oxmoor. One of the newer, middle-income families, but still. If you’d told me six weeks earlier that a bus kid from Oxmoor had been voted Most Intellectual by the students at Vestavia Hills High School, I would have swallowed my tongue.

James Robinson credits his own boys’ academic achievements and high self-esteem to their involvement in an early childhood education program in Birmingham known as Wee Care Academy, which focuses on the historic academic achievements of the black community throughout history. “The background that our kids got there was one that said, ‘You are as good as anyone else. You can achieve what anyone else can achieve, black, white, yellow, brown.’ So coming into this environment, it wasn’t intimidating. I had a little apprehension about whether they could compete academically, but
they
never did. Because of the foundation at Wee Care, they’ve never bought into that stereotype that being on the honor roll is ‘acting white.’ If being intelligent is acting white, does that mean being ignorant is acting black? I don’t buy that. That’s foolishness.”

Foolish or not, the problem of “acting white” still persists. It’s an accusation Myles Robinson says he still gets from some black students routinely. “There’s a long history of not achieving for black men,” Myles says, “and so when they see somebody doing something that’s not like them, they turn their back to it. They say, ‘You dress white. You act white. You talk white.’”

But both Myles and his brother seem to easily shrug it off. “They make straight As,” their father says proudly. “As of first semester of sophomore year, they each have a cumulative GPA of 4.3.”

As my days in Vestavia move forward, it’s easy enough to get a read on how black students and parents feel about the racial landscape here—I just ask them. Being in the minority, they’re acutely aware of what’s
going on. I quickly learn, however, that putting direct questions about race to white suburban teenagers is a useless endeavor. Painful, too. A sample quote:

And that was an honor student. Seeing as the direct approach isn’t going to get me very far, I decide to poll a wide sample, let them give their answers blind, and then look at the results in the aggregate. Three teachers in Sue Lovoy’s history department offer up time in their classes to hand out my two-page highly unscientific survey on the subject of race. All told, the sample pool covers 274 kids: 227 white, 33 black, and 14 other.

First question is a two-parter, asking the white kids how many black friends they have, meaning acquaintances, and how many
real
black friends they have, like the kind of friend you’d call late at night (or text or whatever) to talk about boys. The results:

In my class, there weren’t but six possible black friends to choose from total. Today, more than 60 percent of the white kids are at least chummy with five or more, and half of them have at least one close black friend. A
turn through the 2008 yearbook backs up what the kids are saying. In the candids section, you can actually see black kids and white kids together in the same photograph. That’s new. Same with clubs and activities. Certain groups tend to be more integrated than others, I’m told. So if you’re in band or choir, you’ll have a diverse set of friends. If you’re on the swim team, not so much. Like Myles and Malcolm, black students at Vestavia are increasingly defining themselves by what they do, rather than by their skin color.

“The strongest, most respected choir students are three black students,” Cas McWaters tells me. “Twenty years ago, I don’t remember a single black student in choir. Now you’ve got a lot of camaraderie. I don’t believe busing alone was ever going to do that. Back then? In the South? I don’t know what alternative we had, but I’m not so sure that the school can implement anything, any program, that says, ‘We can fix this.’ I believe you have to change the culture of your school.”

The culture in Vestavia has changed, considerably. And most of that has come in just the last five or six years. The early 2000s, I’m told, weren’t substantially different from the late 1980s. Since then, things have improved radically, almost overnight. Vestavia’s culture changed because white administrators and black parents finally decided to change it. Banning the Confederate flag was a signal to black families that here, at least, was a principal willing to meet them halfway. Those families, like the Robinsons, set aside their reservations and moved into the community; their presence has made it such that their needs can no longer be ignored in the way they were during the years they spent grousing about Vestavia’s racism from the outside. And while this sea change in the school’s culture has taken place, the only change in the federal desegregation mandate was that it was eliminated. No longer beholden to the letter of the law, Vestavia is nonetheless making good on its spirit.

The faculty, McWaters believes, has played a major role in this as well. “As our teacher population aged out with retirement,” he says, “we’ve gotten teachers from other schools that weren’t all white and all rich. So they’ve brought different experiences. We had a young man from a single-parent family down in Oxmoor; he was in football and choir. When his mother died, the choir director became his legal guardian.
People of Vestavia went and put together enough money to get him through college. He’s at West Alabama now, graduating on time. The choir director is the legal guardian responsible for that situation. And that’s how you change the culture: through experiences.”

Among the faculty, the most immediately visible change is Tyra Williams, the youngest daughter of Vestavia’s Williams dynasty; she’s just started this fall, teaching in Sue Lovoy’s history department. By the late 1990s, her mother, Jerona, was the last black classroom teacher working in the core academic curriculum. Together with her daughter, that makes two. And Mom has it easy: she teaches fractions. Once you get past the Three-Fifths Compromise, there’s not a whole lot of racial tension over fractions. Tyra’s juggling American History: 1865 to the Present. She gets to take these kids through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and all the rest of it. A daunting task.

The institutional racism at Vestavia may be gone, but there’s still plenty of the garden-variety kind. As happened everywhere, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign brought a lot of it to the surface. Racist jokes and emails circulated. The day after the election, chants of “Obama-nation, Assassination” could be heard up and down the halls. And shortly before the inauguration, Tyra had to stop class and explain to a white girl that our new black president is not, in fact, the Antichrist. “Nuh-uh, Ms. Williams,” the girl insisted. “
It’s in the Bible.
”

It can get personal, too. When Tyra had just started teaching, someone snuck into her classroom between periods and wrote the N-word on her chalkboard. (They didn’t write “nigger”; they wrote “the N-word.”) She didn’t see it until she was up in front of her next class, mid-lecture. “It was a test,” she says, “because how do you respond when thirty kids are watching you? I just erased it and kept going like I didn’t see anything. After class I went into the bathroom and I cried and cried. I could not believe that happened to me. My mom told me, ‘You can’t wear your feelings on your sleeve. You can’t be all emotional.’ She’s tough as steel. I’m working my way to that point.”

So, just
how
racist is life in Vestavia Hills? One black student described it as “so ignorant it’s unexplainable.” Another simply sighed: “I could go on for days.” Out of all the surveys, I counted nine that one could objectively
categorize as “racist” in the true meaning of the word. Some students took the short-answer section and went off into the margins, filling them with angry diatribes. One white kid wrote, “Why do they smell? Why don’t they take showers? Why are they so lazy? Why are you even writing this book? Honestly, you’re white. Be proud of that.
Very
.” This same student also checked the box for “Racism is no longer a major problem in America.”

But that was only nine kids, out of over two hundred. In forty years, Jerona Williams has seen more of this than anyone. She pegs that kind of element as “not even 10 percent” of the students. “The rest of them are genuine,” she says. “Vestavia has changed almost 180 degrees.”

Whatever the quantifiable level of racism may or may not be, the more important question is how black students choose to deal with it. Out of those polled, only one black student checked the box that said, “Racism at Vestavia stands in the way of my advancement here.” The rest said it was something they chose to ignore; they have better things to do. Of that same group, 76 percent wish Vestavia had more racial diversity, but only 24 percent say they would rather be at a majority-black school, even if the quality of education remained the same. And only 33 percent say they prefer to sit at the black cafeteria table; the rest enjoy sitting wherever with whomever.

“It’s come a long way,” Sue Lovoy says. “I’m proud of the distance we’ve traveled in these years. In the early days you would see all the black kids sitting together in one group in a class, and the white kids would sit as far away from them as possible. But now black students in my class don’t feel the need to sit together. And you’re not going to grow if you only surround yourself with people just like you. You’ll never understand anybody else.”

What Vestavia’s children are, for the most part, is confused. Talk to half the kids here and they will tell you, with
absolute
sincerity, that the rebel flag stands for “school spirit.” On the survey, I asked all the white kids to write down one thing they didn’t understand about black people. “I don’t understand why there is so much violence associated with black culture,” one wrote. “Why do they talk one way in front of the
teachers and another way around each other?” asked another. And then there’s my personal favorite: “Why do black people drink Hawaiian Punch?”

They’re all legitimate questions. Even the last one. Most of these kids would be teachable if America were ready to teach them, which it’s not. I asked Sue Lovoy, “How much of the post–civil rights history on race has worked its way into the accepted high school curriculum?”

“None,” she replied.