Growing up in an absolutely segregated neighborhood - Galewood on Chicago's Northwest Side - I never went to school with a black kid until my freshman year of high school. Even then, out of a class of some 250, only two were black.
One was named Dennis, from Maywood. He was the nerdiest character in the world. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and spoke in a precise King's English that would make Steve Urkell look like Jadakiss. He had no interest whatsoever in sports, frustrating the hell out of the school's football and basketball coaches who hounded him daily to try out for their teams. They simply couldn't wrap their brains around a young black man who wasn't a wide receiver or a point guard.
Dennis and I partnered up in Fr. Motl's speech class the first week of school. Fr. Motl felt that the first asset a public speaker should have was the ability to remember people's names. So he instructed us to create a set of mnemonics for each other. In this way, Dennis and I got to know each other and we became the fastest of friends, as 14-year-olds are wont to do.
I forget the name of the other black kid in my class because his time at Fenwick was so short. Let's call him Luke. He was tall, strong, and rangy. The football and basketball staffs had stood on their heads to recruit him from the time he was in sixth grade. He was the greyhound they expected every human of dark complexion to be.
By November, whenever Luke passed a coach in the hall, the coach would gaze upon him as if he were a prized poodle. When Dennis walked past them, they simply shook their heads.
Dennis and Luke had nothing to do with each other since their interests were so wildly divergent. Dennis had joined the debate and forensics team, for pity's sake! This mystified most of their classmates who wondered aloud why these two black guys wouldn't even sit together in the cafeteria.
They didn't have to wonder too long because Luke failed most of his classes the first semester, going on probation. After he failed most of his second semester classes, his scholarship was rescinded and he transferred to a West Suburban hoops powerhouse. I remember reading his name in the papers time and again.
I never read about Dennis in the papers even though he eventually graduated near the top of our class. Things have changed a lot since I was in high school but one thing hasn't: today more Americans know who Plaxico Burress is than Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I wish I could say that Dennis and I celebrated our graduation together. By that time, though, we were no longer friends.
I'd fallen in with a tough crowd that didn't attend Fenwick, which was ironic considering the fact that my parents had scraped their pennies together to send me to the private school just to keep me away from the neighborhood's bad element. We drank booze and fought and passed ourselves off as gangbangers. After every weekend, I couldn't wait to get back to school to show my high-toned classmates what a hoodlum I was becoming.
One day during sophomore year, on the stairway between classes, some poor freshman accidentally bumped into me. I was compelled to set him straight. I put him up against the wall and told him I'd fuck him up with a nigger-knife. See, I'd just learned the definition of the term in my impromptu street classes around Amundsen Park: in an alley fight, a guy who's too poor to own a nice switchblade has to use a broken bottle to achieve the same end. Ergo, nigger-knife.
The kid was duly petrified and I let him loose as though I now owned a significant portion of the world. I might have begun to strut down those stairs save for one thing - Dennis had sneaked up behind me to say hello just before the incident. He'd heard the whole thing. He froze me with a disgusted look. He never said another word to me the rest of our time at Fenwick.
I've related similar tales in these pages and elsewhere. I had to learn my lessons about racial sensitivity time and again. Even though I revered King, Julian Bond, Andrew Young, and even Dick Allen and Marvin Gaye, I still had a vestigial stink of bigotry within me.
It wasn't easy to wash myself clean of the influence of my all-white neighborhood. I'd still lapse into using slurs into my early 20s. It's a lot easier to remain stupid than to grow.
This whole thing came back to me because the other day All-American Bob and I had a debate at Dick's Pizza about affirmative action. All-American Bob said, "Isn't it time we dropped all this silliness? It's over. The fight's finished. They won the battle. They've got a black man as President. Let's move on."
A lot of people probably would agree with him. Few would notice, though, that he repeatedly referred to black Americans - his fellow citizens - as they. It ain't so easy just to move on.
