in most cases). Integration would be of limited success because whites had been ill-prepared to open up the gates of access and opportunity wide enough for any but a few to squeeze through. Those few managed to leave the old neighborhoods and take their money with them, but the rest were left behind, access to suburban life limited, their own spaces transformed by interstates, office buildings, and parking lots, in the name of progress.
Just a mile or so from Fisk—the city’s historically black private college—TSU was seen as the university for working class African Americans, and more to the point for local black folks, while Fisk (long associated with alum W.E.B. DuBois’s “talented tenth” concept) attracted more of a national and international student clientele. At the time of my enrollment at TSU, the college was embroiled in a struggle with state officials who had been seeking to establish a branch campus of the University of Tennessee in downtown Nashville. Concerned that such a school would allow whites to avoid the mostly black campus by attending a predominantly white state institution in town, and thereby siphon resources from TSU to the newly-created UT-Nashville, TSU officials were battling valiantly to remain the flagship of public education in the city.
As a student in TSU’s early childhood program, my classmates would be principally the children of faculty or families living in close proximity to the college, which is to say, they would be mostly black. Indeed, I would be one of only three students in the classroom who weren’t black, out of a class of roughly twenty kids. Although several of the teachers who ran the program were white, the ones I remember most vividly were African American women. They seemed quite clearly to own the space. It was their domain and we all respected it.
I can’t remember much about my time at TSU, although I can vividly recall the layout of the class, the playground, and the drive to and from our Green Hills home each morning and afternoon to get back and forth. But despite the vagueness of my TSU memories, I can’t help but think that the experience had a profound impact on my life, especially as I would come to understand and relate to the subject of race. On the one hand, being subordinated to black authority at an early age was a blessing. In a society that has long encouraged whites to disregard black wisdom, for a white child to learn at the age of three to listen to black women and do what they ask of you, and to believe that they know of what they speak, can be more than a minor life lesson. It would mean that a little more than twenty years later, listening to African American women in public housing in New Orleans tell me about their lives and struggles, I would not be the white guy who looked them square in the face and inquired as to whether it might be possible that they had lost their minds. I would not be the white guy who would assume they were exaggerating, making things up, or fabricating the difficulties of their daily routine. I would go back to that early imprinting, and remember that people know their lives better than I do, including those whom the society has ignored for so long.
Attending preschool at TSU also meant that I would be socialized in a non-dominant setting, my peers mostly African American children. Because I had bonded with black kids early on, once I entered elementary school it would be hard not to notice the way that we were so often separated in the classroom, by tracking that placed the white children in more advanced tracks, by unequal discipline, and by a different way in which the teachers would relate to us. At Burton Elementary, with the exception of the African American teachers, most of the educators would have had very little experience teaching black children, and in some cases, very little interest in doing so. At one point in my first grade year the teacher would actually pawn off the task to my mother, who had no teaching background, but who knew that unless she intervened to work with the African American students they would receive very little instruction in the classroom.
While few white children at such an age would have noticed the racial separation going on, I couldn’t help but see it. These were my friends, a few of whom I had been at TSU with. Even the black kids I hadn’t known before were the ones with whom I would identify, thanks to my TSU experience. Although I hardly had a word to describe what was going on, I knew that whatever it was came at a cost to me; it was separating me from the people in whom I’d had some investment. Although the injury was far more profound to them—after all, the institutional racism at the heart of that unequal treatment wasn’t aimed in my direction, but theirs—I was nonetheless the collateral damage. My mother had never tried to push me into whiteness or put me into a socially-determined space. But what she would not do, the schools would strive for, from the very beginning.
WHATEVER RACIAL SEPARATION the school system sought to reimpose, even in a post-segregation era, it was something against which I struggled for years. I had a few white friends, but very few. Albert Jones, who is still my best friend to this day, was among the only white classmates with whom I bonded at that time. Frankly, even that might have been a case of mistaken identity. Though white, his dad worked at TSU in the School of Education, so even he had a connection to the black community that made him different. But other than Albert, pretty much all of my friends at Burton were black.
Yet, as I would discover, interpersonal connections to racial others say little about whether or not one is having experiences similar to those others. Even when a white person is closely tied to African Americans, that white person is often living in an entirely different world from that of their friends, though we rarely realize it.
It would be early 1977, in third grade, that I received one of my earliest lessons about race, even if the meaning of that lesson wouldn’t sink in for several years. The persons who served as my instructors that day were not teachers, but two friends, Bobby Orr and Vincent Perry, whose understanding of the dynamics of race—their blackness and my whiteness—was so deep that they were able to afford me the lesson during something as meaningless as afternoon recess.
It was a brisk winter day, and Bobby, Vince, and I were tossing a football back and forth. One of us would get between the other two, who stood at a distance of maybe ten yards from each other, and try to intercept the ball as it flew through the air from one passer to the next. Football had really never been my game. Though I was athletic and obsessed with sports, I was also pretty small as a kid; as such, I saw little point in a game that involved running into people and being tackled. I preferred baseball, but since baseball season was several months away, the only options that day during P.E. class were kickball or football. Normally, I would have chosen kickball, but when Bobby and Vince asked me to play with them I had said yes. Because we were so often separated in the classroom, I treasured whatever time I could carve out with my black friends.
Our game began innocently enough, with Bobby in the middle, usually picking off passes between Vince and me. Next it was Vince’s turn, and he too picked off several of the passes between Bobby and me, though the zip with which Bobby delivered them often made the ball bounce off of Vince’s hands, too hot to handle.
When it came time for me to be in the middle, I frankly had little expectation about how many passes I could intercept. My size alone virtually ensured that if Vince and Bobby wanted to, they could simply lob the ball over my head, and so long as they did it high enough and fast enough, there would be very little opportunity for me to pull the ball down. But strangely, I caught every one. Each time they would pass just a bit beyond my reach and I would jump to one side or the other, hauling their efforts into my breast, never dropping a single one or allowing even one pass in thirty to make it past me.
At first, I reveled in what I assumed must be my newfound speed and agility. What’s more, I beamed with childish pride at the smiles on their faces, assuming that Bobby and Vince were impressed with my effort; and I continued to interpret this series of events as evidence of my own abilities, even as they both began to repeat the same refrain after every pass, beginning with about the tenth throw of the series. As the ball left Bobby’s throwing hand and whizzed toward its destination in Vince’s outstretched arms, only to be thwarted in its journey time and again by my leaping effort, they would repeat, one and then the other, the same exclamation.
“My
