White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (12 page)
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Authors: Tim Wise
Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race
BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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JUNIOR HIGH WAS
hell. To begin with, it looked like an industrial building where a call center might be housed: one level, bland office park architecture, and hardly any windows. It was (and still is) just one big brick structure, capable of squeezing all the joy out of the educational process by virtue of its physical plant alone. Though internally it had been constructed as an experimental, even progressive attempt at “open classroom” learning—no walls between classrooms, the idea being that teachers would co-teach in learning pods, linking, say, a literature lesson with a history lesson, and then with a geography lesson—none of the teachers at John Trotwood Moore made use of the open classroom approach. They didn’t seem to believe in it, so the internal architecture of the building, which could have been liberatory in the hands of the right teachers, became little more than a wall-less, open arena for noise.
hell. To begin with, it looked like an industrial building where a call center might be housed: one level, bland office park architecture, and hardly any windows. It was (and still is) just one big brick structure, capable of squeezing all the joy out of the educational process by virtue of its physical plant alone. Though internally it had been constructed as an experimental, even progressive attempt at “open classroom” learning—no walls between classrooms, the idea being that teachers would co-teach in learning pods, linking, say, a literature lesson with a history lesson, and then with a geography lesson—none of the teachers at John Trotwood Moore made use of the open classroom approach. They didn’t seem to believe in it, so the internal architecture of the building, which could have been liberatory in the hands of the right teachers, became little more than a wall-less, open arena for noise.
Adding to the absurdity of the school, Moore was part of a larger campus, which included a Metro Nashville Parks and Recreation facility. This meant adults had access to the campus grounds at all times of the day, even when the kids were in session—a strange arrangement that led Moore to be considered one of the easiest places to buy drugs in the city. A national news program had actually done a feature on drug availability at Moore a few years after its opening, contrasting its iniquitous activities with the otherwise bucolic, upscale neighborhood in which it was located. After all (though I don’t think the news special had mentioned this), the parents of squeaky-clean crooner Pat Boone (and grandparents of Debbie Boone, whose song “You Light Up My Life” would become the biggest hit of the 1970s) lived right across the street from the school. Whites had been shocked (and I’m sure the Boones were) to learn that there were drugs in their communities too, let alone that those who were selling them from their neighborhood school (and buying them) were mostly white like themselves.
On the first day of seventh grade, as we were trying to acclimate to the new surroundings of junior high, I noticed my old friend Bobby Orr headed my way. I hadn’t seen Bobby since the end of baseball season (we played on the same team), and so I greeted him with a hearty, “What’s up?”
I got no reply.
Thinking that he hadn’t heard me, I repeated myself. “What’s up?” I inquired.
This time he looked my way, and his words, spoken forcefully, stung.
“Hey man, ya’ know I don’t speak to white people anymore.”
“What?” I replied, not understanding why Bobby might have said something like this to me.
He could tell I was hurt, and being a nice guy and a friend, he backed off his previous proclamation of racial separatism.
“You know I’m just kidding!” he said, laughing a bit.
“Oh, okay,” I replied, frankly not sure if he
was
kidding, and thrown for a loop by this ad hoc discussion of race in what had started as a fairly simple greeting at the beginning of the school year.
was
kidding, and thrown for a loop by this ad hoc discussion of race in what had started as a fairly simple greeting at the beginning of the school year.
As it turned out, that exchange would serve as a bit of a metaphor for the next two years at Moore. The school was so divided racially—with whites, regardless of intelligence, being placed overwhelmingly in advanced classes, and folks of color, regardless of theirs, overwhelmingly in the standard classes—that it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that most days, we white kids would hardly see any black students. Perhaps a few in a class here and there, but for the most part, only in the halls between classes, or in the lunchroom. This, in a school that was about one-third African American.
For most white students this separation wouldn’t probably have struck them as all that big a deal, but for me it was like social death. Most of my friends in those first six years of school had been African American kids, and with the exception of Albert and two other friends, Zach Vietze and Rob Laird (the latter of whom went to a different school), I wasn’t really close to any white people. I was having to relearn everything: how to make friends, how to interact with people whose interests were different, and how to basically be white again. At first I probably blamed Bobby and other black students for pulling away from me, but that feeling wouldn’t last long, since it was obvious that the institution was doing the dividing, not the black kids, or the white kids for that matter.
Years later I would understand the context of Bobby’s words to me that first day, after traveling across the country and speaking with hundreds of people who’d had similar experiences: whites and blacks, typically, who had been close right up until about that same age, and then suddenly the students of color began pulling away, cleaving to themselves. In almost each story, the white person had been confused about why it had happened, but the people of color never were. It hadn’t been personal, they would insist, as indeed it hadn’t been for Bobby. It was just business; in this case the business of self-protection, and the business of developing a secure identity as a black person in a society built on whiteness. Our experiences had been so different, our treatment so disparate, that by junior high, we just didn’t have much in common anymore. The institution had accomplished what we alone never would have. It had forced us into our racial slots, whether we liked it or not. And Bobby, like the other black kids, knew where his slot was, far before I would realize mine.
WITHIN MONTHS OF
beginning school that year, even as I tried to carve out some time with my black friends down at the Metro Park Board, shooting hoops or playing ping-pong or pool, it was obvious that we were drifting in different directions. Still unclear at the time as to what was happening and why, it sent me into an emotional tailspin for the better part of the year. My grades suffered miserably, I failed a class for the first time, and generally, I had no appetite for school any more. My dad thought I was on drugs, which probably made sense to him because
he
was on drugs, but I wasn’t. I was just lost.
beginning school that year, even as I tried to carve out some time with my black friends down at the Metro Park Board, shooting hoops or playing ping-pong or pool, it was obvious that we were drifting in different directions. Still unclear at the time as to what was happening and why, it sent me into an emotional tailspin for the better part of the year. My grades suffered miserably, I failed a class for the first time, and generally, I had no appetite for school any more. My dad thought I was on drugs, which probably made sense to him because
he
was on drugs, but I wasn’t. I was just lost.
I wasn’t really sure how to be white, but I figured I could fake it. The music I listened to changed almost overnight, or at least I would claim that it had. When people would ask me what kind of music I liked, I felt compelled to lie, to say things like Foreigner, and Journey, and Cheap Trick, even though I hated the first, could only stomach two songs by the second, and knew nothing about the third. Albert was a huge Billy Joel fanatic but I couldn’t abide him either, so when Al would rave about “Piano Man,” or even occasionally break into the song himself, I would just roll my eyes. Alan Green and David Harvard tried to turn everyone on to various music—Alan had one of the most extensive record collections you’d ever want to see, while David seemed to wear a different concert T-shirt every day from the latest heavy metal show he’d been to—but I wasn’t into any of that either. I was over KISS by then and as for hip hop, I got the impression that I wasn’t supposed to like it. It wasn’t what the other white kids were listening to, so I figured I should get with the program. In fact, for most of seventh and eighth grade, I think I just stopped listening to music altogether.
Adding to the general awfulness of junior high, Moore was the school where all the white teachers who had tenure and had steadfastly refused assignment in the blacker schools before busing, had insisted they be placed after it. By the time my class would get there, it was filled with a gaggle of right-wing teachers unlike any public school I’ve seen since. Though a taxpayer-supported institution, John Trotwood Moore’s faculty and administration might as well have been culled from a directory of some evangelical Christian ministry. There was the teacher who told Albert that his father (a devout Christian and church deacon) was likely a communist for taking him to see the critically-acclaimed movie
Reds,
in 1981, and another who penalized me on an eighth grade term paper concerning the subject of school prayer, for ostensibly blaspheming God. Why? Because I had titled the paper, “Our Father Who Art in Homeroom,” which I thought (and still think) was pretty damned clever.
Reds,
in 1981, and another who penalized me on an eighth grade term paper concerning the subject of school prayer, for ostensibly blaspheming God. Why? Because I had titled the paper, “Our Father Who Art in Homeroom,” which I thought (and still think) was pretty damned clever.
The only exceptions to the right-wing rule at Moore were the two black teachers I had while there, who were the only teachers in the school from whom I ever learned anything valuable: Milton Kennerly and Barbara Thornton. Mr. Kennerly, my geography teacher, made a lasting impression on me when explaining that Western concepts of “civilization” were subjective, and that the term should not be used when referring to the U.S. or the industrialized world, especially not in relation to non-Western societies who have their own social and cultural understandings of what a good society should look like. We use the word “civilization” to mean “materially wealthy” and technologically advanced, even though material wealth and technology are often used for uncivilized, unethical ends, he explained. It is the only lesson from junior high that I remember.
I WAS MISERABLE
all throughout my two years at Moore, but never so much as the day we were corralled into the auditorium so as to listen to the personal testimony of some twenty-something fundamentalist Christian, who had been brought in to encourage us all to join Young Life, a Christian youth group. As one of seven or eight Jews in the school, I sat utterly amazed that we were being required to attend this modern-day equivalent of a tent revival. I looked around the auditorium, hoping to lock eyes with any of the other Jewish kids, wondering what they were thinking, but had no luck. Finally, after about ten minutes of the presentation, I could stand no more. I stood up and walked out of the assembly. A few seconds after exiting the auditorium, and not really knowing where I intended to go, I was met in the hallway by the principal, Paul Hood.
all throughout my two years at Moore, but never so much as the day we were corralled into the auditorium so as to listen to the personal testimony of some twenty-something fundamentalist Christian, who had been brought in to encourage us all to join Young Life, a Christian youth group. As one of seven or eight Jews in the school, I sat utterly amazed that we were being required to attend this modern-day equivalent of a tent revival. I looked around the auditorium, hoping to lock eyes with any of the other Jewish kids, wondering what they were thinking, but had no luck. Finally, after about ten minutes of the presentation, I could stand no more. I stood up and walked out of the assembly. A few seconds after exiting the auditorium, and not really knowing where I intended to go, I was met in the hallway by the principal, Paul Hood.
“Where do you think you’re going,” Mr. Hood asked, clearly agitated by my having exited the pep rally for Jesus that he’d thrown together, with little or no regard for such niceties as the Constitution.
Thinking as quickly as I could, I offered the only answer I could conjure on such short notice. “I’m going to call my lawyer,” was my reply, offered confidently and without hesitation.
“You’re twelve. You don’t have a lawyer,” Mr. Hood replied, calling my bluff.
“No, but my parents do,” I responded, not really knowing if this were true, “and it’s illegal for you to make us listen to that guy.”
Mr. Hood stood like a deer in headlights in the hallway of the school over which he ostensibly had control. Frankly, I’d been scared to death to challenge his authority that way, but had done it because I knew my parents would back me up if I didn’t get satisfaction—in this case, an apology and a promise not to let it happen again. And I knew I’d have their support because they had made certain things clear to me from the beginning of my school experience. As I stood there facing down the principal, I flashed back to my very first day of first grade—the day I’d been given the encouragement to do exactly what I was doing that afternoon at Moore.
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