But now, when I think about it, the thing that hits me first and is the most horrible part of it is to be locked up in an area where you have to listen to that hatred and that hollering--"Git that white boy!" "Kill that n-word!"-- over and over and over and you can't get away from it. I couldn't go to jail again. I just couldn't. I think I wuld have to kill myself rather than go through that again."
GN:
This is a fair description of my junior high school experience, except that the racial divide was hispanic/white. A former girlfriend, describing her similar high school experiences in D.C., said that her name in high school was "white bitch" as in "outta my way, white bitch" when students were getting on the bus, etc.
Mere propinquity does not guarantee social harmony. But the biggest problems one has as a nurd trying to navigate through the maelstrom of the racial class wars in the country is that the typical nurd is not part of a gang. This makes him/her especially vulnerable to the aggression of those that do. And it is fair to say that gangs beget gangs, in the sense the logical thing to do if threatened by one group is to join another of your own. Now, if you're in *school* and don't want to be a part of a gang, the question arises, "what on earth am I doing here"?
But the most singular memory I have of the whole experience is not from "doing time" on the race war front, but from about five years later: I was a student at Berkeley, the sun was shining, I was walking out of Dwinell Hall, where I was studying French. And it came to me with a start that I hadn't been slugged, threatened with a knife, cornered, or otherwise humiliated for four or five years; and that many of the people around me considered that normal, and had grown up that way; but that somehow I had inside the grim expectation that the campus world that I was in was not "real" and that it would all revert back to the way it was when I was in my early teens.
It's a particularly vivid subject for me as I have indulged in purchasing a table saw for doing some woodwork around the house. It's a complicated assembly job. But chiefly the barrier to enjoying the task for the sake of enjoying the task is that my exposure to toolworking was in metal shop and wood shop. In the social structure of my school, "advanced" students were in their own classes, and that was relatively tranquil; in other non-academic courses, "democracy" prevailed and shop was an opportunity for "integrated classes" and all the jabs, pokes, kicks, and other such abuses that would be delivered when the teacher wasn't watching. And then of course one would be targetted for following between periods or during the various breaks. It was not the ideal environment to get into the zen of woodworking.
In any case it was about that time in US social history that women started complaining about having to take cooking classes and what have you; they wanted to take shop too. Or maybe it was a few yers later. Anyhow, I recall reading about it, and thinking it was one of the most insane things I could imagine, as I could not possibly construe why anyone would want to be in the hell of those classes, nor could I fathom the concept of doing work with one's hands because it was pleasurable. In fact, I couldn't imagine that taking a wood shop would be: an opportunity to learn how to work with wood. Only one thing made sense, I liked the idea of enrolling in a home making class and doing some cooking, because, thought I, my tormentors would not be likely to follow me there, no more than, as a general rule, they would be found in the library.
It is nonetheless peculiar, thirty years later, to be working in the tranquillity of a suburban setting and getting into the zen of assembling a table saw (which seems to be a good 8 or 10 hour job, for this table saw, anyhow) and to have a feeling of imminent calamity, when in fact the greatest likely danger is that of making a poor angle cut. (and maybe losing the odd finger) But I think mainly it is a totemistic kind of thing, that the fairly innocent desire to do some work around the house has involved a partial reconstruction--because of the universal look, feel, and smell of tools--of the scene of past abuse.
(Note to Rosenberg: there was a "Homocide" episode where a kid killed a star basketball athlete who was torturing him. Afterward two cops on the case--I don't know the show well enough to know their names--were having a drink and the fat one, who, the dialog suggested, had done a fair amount of tormenting himself, offered to let the skinny one (who had been tormented because he was Jewish at a Catholic school or some such) "take his best shot." Whereupon the skinny cop picked up a large heavy ashtray and looked imminently about to bludgeon and do severe damage and/or kill the fat cop. "You said take my best shot," the skinny one said: Really intense, even though he was a middle aged guy like me and it was all supposed to be long behind. This show said a good deal, to me anyhow. But the tension of the whole episode would have been ratcheted even higher if the violence between the high school star and his victim had not been white-on-white. For the record I haven't raised any ashtrays at anyone lately.)
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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