closest to in high school were actually socially awkward brainy loner types. I was brainy too, but I wasn’t a loner like many of my closest friends, and I don’t think I was socially awkward…I just felt out of place in most places.
Was race something you thought about a lot as a kid?
Well, the America of my youth was pretty much obsessed with race, so it would have been hard not to, at least as I became more aware of the wider world.
When I was very young, before I went to school, I was probably mostly oblivious to race. Almost all the people I knew were black. Indeed, I can’t remember knowing personally a single white person until I started school. I may have but none sticks out in my mind now. In early elementary school, my schoolmates were a mix of black and white people. So were my school friends, though not my neighborhood friends. At some point during my school career, students were heavily tracked. I think that started in 5th or 6th grade. Certainly by junior high we were definitely heavily tracked. I was put in the accelerated classes and from then on was, for the most part, the only black kid in many of my classes. I can’t remember any more than one other black kid being in any of them from junior high on. I eventually came to see the over-use of tracking in my school system as a way of segregating the schools without having to have separate facilities.
Absolutely. Happened in my school. How did this effect you?
It increased my sense of not really belonging anywhere in particular. Many black kids accused me of “trying to be white,” Many white kids were cool to me. Only a few were outright hostile to my face, though. At first, I deeply resented both black kids who thought of me as ‘trying to be white’ and white kids who were cool to me apparently because of my race. I just wanted to be me and to be accepted or rejected because of my particularity. I didn’t want to be either pigeonholed or restricted by race. I think that made rebelliously and deeply anti-racial, in a sense, in a highly racialized environment. Of course, figuring out just who I really was given the mismatch between my own rejection of race as a central defining feature of myself and the apparent obsession with race in just about every nook and cranny of the social world around me, led to many intense inner struggles. I think that’s one thing that made be drawn to quirky people, who were in general hard to pigeonhole, as my closest friends.
