I've been trying to write this post all week and still failing

[larryhammer]

I grew up in Washington, DC, attending public schools. My elementary school was mostly white, but my secondary schools were more balanced. I estimated my high school was 40% black, 40% white, 10% hispanic, and 10% asian -- the only integrated one in the District, because if they'd bussed the white kids around, they'd've been a drop in each school.

My friends were a group that deliberately cut across cliques and races. I learned gutter Spanish¹ on the soccer field and Chinese chess² in the cafeteria. My best friend was black, others friends were Honduran and Guatemalan refugees, and another had been friends with Amy Carter. I knew someone who went back to Chile after graduation, and was killed. One long-time friend reconnected our senior year with the rest of his family, living in another state -- he and they both thought the others had been killed back in Cambodia. This sounds deliberate, but I mostly just fell into it -- I wasn't as adventuresome as I wanted to be, most of the time.³ I hung around with these guys while waiting for my chance to escape.

Yeah, privileged white kid.

I knew there were racial tensions in my school -- and if you poked certain people in every race, you'd find racism, in just about every direction. But I also knew we were better off that way than any of my acquaintances attending private schools. My breath was taken away one time, when the boy across the street looked at me and said, "You're not prejudiced, are you?" in the coded way that meant he was and didn't care. I said something like, "I try not to be."

Which was true as far as it goes. My friends and I, we tried to ignore the whole race thing. Avoided it. Presumed it wasn't an issue, amongst ourselves. We were black and white and brown and yellow, and if someone wanted to make an issue of it, well screw them. Class caused more tensions with us.

We did nothing to make our school a better place, aside from being ourselves.

I lost track of everyone after graduation, except for one who went the same university.⁴ I have no idea what happened to Jomoko, Grant, Eduardo, Melissa, Jennifer, Richard, Jim, Holmes, Elizabeth, and all. I left DC behind, when I went to college, and never looked back. The past few years, as I notice how homogenized my life has become, I've come to regret this. I suspect the boy that I was, for all he was an idjit (especially about the girl thing), could teach the man I am a few things.


1. At the end of Spanish IV, I could speak either fluently or cleanly -- on the field, while thinking of the next word, I'd toss in an obscenity; in class, I had to hesitate more.

2. Xiangqi, though I didn't know the name at the time -- they just told me to call it chess.

3. Though lest I forget, I was daring enough to take my English teacher's daughter to the Prom.

4. This would be the girl I asked to the Prom three times before asking my English teacher's daughter. The rumor about teenage boys not having a clue? Totally true.

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

1. At the end of Spanish IV, I could speak either fluently or cleanly -- on the field, while thinking of the next word, I'd toss in an obscenity; in class, I had to hesitate more.

Oh, hilarious! May I steal this sometime?

[larryhammer]

Sure. I'm likely to use it myself sometime, though.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

Which DC school did you go to? I graduated from Western.

[larryhammer]

I suspect your browser is doing something to LJ's cookies -- that's what it was for me.

Western! I hadn't known that. I went to Wilson.

---L.

[larryhammer]

By the time I was in high school, it would have already been worth way too many zeroes. My dad taught at Georgetown, so tho' we lived further uptown, I got to watch the gentrification and the complaints thereof.

---L.

[palomapus.livejournal.com]

why was this hard to write about? It seems to me that it is an interesting thing to know about you, and sort of makes the things I have noticed about you make much more sense! You certainly don't have to answer my question, but I could not figure out what the difficulty was. Could be because I had a rather blessed upbringing - not privileged but very emotionally secure for some reason - and so only associate really happy thoughts with childhood experiences. Except where MOnica Decker slapped me for no reason in second grade - that was the first and only time I have ever been hit.

[larryhammer]

It wasn't hard to write about, but I never managed to get it to something worth calling part of International Blogging Against Racism Week. I posted it anyway.

Make sense, how?

---L.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

it was interesting though. And part of the problem with racism is giving people those damn labels and forgetting their individuality and their needs. Just being a friend is anti-racism. Catching up on them years later would be cool though. Some of my old friends are freinds again, and some most definitely aren't.

[larryhammer]

I've missed my 20th reunion because I still couldn't quite face up to returning. Maybe the next one.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like to only once in all of one's childhood be hit by one's peers. Sounds like a lovely, lovely thing, and like how all childhoods should be.

Had the emotionally supportive family, but the school stuff was rough, for me, for all that I grew up in a white upper middle glass neighborhood--the sort where we thought we weren't racist, because everyone treated the two black kids in the school just like everyone else.