How to Be Black (10 page)

But I Don't Want to Kill People

The reason why people send their kids to a place like Sidwell is to get them into a place like Yale.

—Cheryl Contee

I
've always loved talking to people, asking them questions and researching options. From the time I was in elementary school, my mother began tasking me with all family phone-based research. Whether we were planning a vacation, searching for a gutter-cleaning service, or looking for just the right pair of Ma's cowboy boots, it was my job to call around and get the best deal. I was absolutely
made
for the college-search experience, and I especially loved college fairs.

Unlike in my phone research, I could interrogate these college representatives in person and collect the shiny brochures full of idyllic photos that make each campus look like a retirement home for young adults where everyone plays sports, everyone reads outside, and everyone is happy. There was never a question about whether or not I was going to go to college. Sidwell's tuition was an investment in improved college prospects, and I was not about to waste it. But, as sophomore year and standardized testing season began, I didn't have very strong ideas about where to apply. I just knew that cost and financial aid were going to be important.

I'd almost had to leave Sidwell for financial reasons after my freshman year, and convinced my mother to keep me there only after extensive lobbying. I sold her hard on my desire to stay there, explaining that I'd just been elected as vice president of the Black Student Union, was doing well in classes, and all my friends were there. Meanwhile, I made a bold and persuasive case directly to the school's development and financial aid office, explaining that I might have to leave because of money and asking them to increase my grants. I figured it would be a loss for both of us if I had to drop out for financial reasons. They looked good on my résumé, and I looked good on theirs! That experience taught me that sometimes the best way to get something is simply to make your case and directly ask for it. You might just get the affirmative answer you're looking for.

Most significant, I made a deal with my mother: she would continue to cover the cost of Sidwell, and I would be responsible for covering the cost of college. I readily agreed to take on that debt burden. It was easy to do at sixteen years old. I had no idea how much college tuition was or that it would increase at over three times the rate of inflation.
*
Like the U.S. government, I figured I'd have a way to get the money when it came time to pay up, but for my high school self, this deal meant that in addition to attending college fairs and information sessions, I attended special
scholarship
fairs and did independent research on every possible way to pay for school. At one scholarship fair, I had an unforgettable encounter with a man from the navy.

I never had any intention of going into the navy or any other branch of the armed services. I was a hyperpolitical, self-righteous, semimilitant kid who attended a Quaker school, railed against U.S. imperialism and “no blood for oil,” and remembered proudly and loudly that black folks had refused the Vietnam draft. As I was walking by the navy booth on my way to some non-military destination, a bald black man in uniform tried to sell me on the navy and how much it would pay and all the great leadership and technical skills I would acquire with its money. I had to cut him off.

“I'm sorry. I'm not really interested,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don't want to kill people.”

“Oh, you don't have to kill people! You can work on the mechanical side.”

“But then I'd be helping fix machines that people use to kill people, so basically I'll be killing people, and I don't want to kill people.”

“Okay, but you could work in our technology division. Satellites! Radar! Networks! All the cool stuff.”

“Right, but once again all that cool stuff is in the service of killing people, which I already told you I don't want to do.”

We were at an impasse. He was trying to convince me that the navy had all this great opportunity and money to cover my college costs. I was trying to convince him that murder wasn't really my thing. The man became frustrated and called in reinforcements in the form of an older white man drenched in medals (probably for killing people). The Decorated One warmed up:

“So I understand you have some hesitation about applying for a navy scholarship,” he said confidently.

“No, no hesitation at all. I'm
definitely
not interested. As I told your colleague here,
I don't want to kill people
.” Did the black dude think that a white man would be more effective at getting me to compromise my non-murder values? I stuck to my guns, and eventually both men moved on to other prospects.

By my junior year at Sidwell, when it was actually time to apply, I had developed a little more clarity around my college goals, and the last place I imagined I would end up was a New England liberal arts school. I had recently read Andrew Hacker's book
Two Nations
, which chronicles persistent racial and class segregation in America. According to Hacker, some of the whitest states in the U.S. at the time were in New England. The idea of committing myself to this region for four years freaked me out, but my fears weren't only over race. I had become obsessed with the region's notorious coastal and air pollution—I was also a little environmentalist—and I imagined stranded whales rotting on a litter-strewn, segregated beach patrolled by racist cops and owned by preppy frat boys who beat black kids like me with their lacrosse sticks. The End Times, basically.

Even beyond the issues of race and flesh-dissolving oceans, attending a New England liberal arts college felt redundant. Part of the reasoning behind attendance at such schools is to prepare yourself for mainstream society and figure out how to “play the game,” especially as a black person in America. I thought six years at Sidwell had already accomplished that. I had become comfortable among the upper class and the powerful. I went to parties in Potomac, Maryland. I got a part-time job at the
Washington Post
, due to a Sidwell connection. Chelsea Clinton signed my yearbook! I became an inside man.

Most important, my big lessons from Sidwell weren't
all
dark and oppressive and horrific. On the contrary, I made great friends and received a great education. The teachers there pushed my mind much harder than I'd been used to, and the resources I was able to exploit there are the foundation for most of what I've made of my life. Those resources included early access to the Internet (1993!), impressive science labs, a real focus on writing, and the general idea of entitlement. By “entitlement,” I don't mean “What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine!” I mean the sense of personal possibility. It's places like Sidwell that produce people who feel that they can do anything they want, and that the world is their playground. Their (our) default orientation is “Yes, we can.”

Still, all the acclimation had exhausted this brother, and I was pretty sure I'd had about enough of white people, at least for a while. I'd learned valuable lessons and was ready to go home.

In my mind, home was a historically black college, specifically Morehouse College in Atlanta. The older brother of one of my best friends had graduated from Sidwell and pursued a combined engineering degree program from Morehouse and Georgia Tech. I saw his path and wanted to walk in his exact footsteps. That would have been physically difficult, since I stand at about five feet nine inches, and he's over six feet, but metaphorically speaking, I saw his path as my future.

I looked forward to a college life in which I didn't feel the constant need to defend or speak for my entire race. I figured a black college would offer me that. Then my friend Paul, two years older and attending Harvard, sent me an e-mail that changed my life. I've since lost the original, but the gist of his message was, “You really need to check out Harvard. I'm having a great time, and I think you'd like it here.”

Paul is one of those guys for whom I have extreme respect. We had spent ridiculous hours together working on the high school newspaper,
Horizon
, and when you regularly work with someone until four a.m., you either discover that they're one of the best people you know, or you begin plotting ways to make them disappear. With Paul, it was the former. My mother loved Paul, too, so his opinion went a long way in our household. Shortly after his e-mail, I attended a Harvard information session at Sidwell early one weekday morning. I was shocked by the appearance of the man running the session. He was black, short, partially bald, and immaculately dressed in a suit, white shirt, and bow tie. My first thought was, “A Black Muslim is in charge of Harvard recruiting? Where's the bean pie!?” The man, of course, was not a member of the Nation of Islam. His name was David Evans, and he was (and still is) a senior admissions officer for Harvard College. He's responsible for much of the significant boost in the enrollment of minority students at Harvard since the early 1970s and has been honored numerous times in recent years for his contributions. I don't remember anything specific that he said during that high school information session—I think I was too distracted by the bow tie—but his presence was unforgettable, and the fact that he was at Sidwell representing Harvard left a massive impression on me.

With Paul's recommendation and the bean pie–less, bow-tied admissions officer on my mind, we added Harvard to the Summer Thurston Family College Tour 1994 (STFCT 1994!! Woohoo!!!).

Like our camping trips of yore, we loaded up the family vehicle, an Isuzu Trooper at this point, with the essentials: AAA map books, peanut butter, books on tape, and the family dog, Honey. There was no such thing as a Thurston family road trip without the dog, and her opinion probably counted as much as my own in the college-planning process.

This tour reminded me of my visits to DC private schools six years prior, and I had as many instant judgments this time around.

I don't remember much of Yale besides the physical darkness. I found the Gothic architecture a little frightening, and the city of New Haven felt like an afterthought compared to the school's campus. The whole place made me feel gloomy, and I couldn't get past it.

The idea of MIT was a natural fit in some ways. I was a big math and science nerd and figured I would end up working in math or computer science as a profession. MIT is a school that refers to its buildings by numbers, which I thought was cool, but it was also trying too hard to convince us that there were “women” and “fun” available there. The tour hosts actually showed us a video talking only about how much fun students at MIT have. The school doth protest too much, I thought, but once I actually became a student at Harvard, I was surprised to discover that MIT did indeed know how to party and certainly black MIT was the hub of much of black Harvard's social life.

My mother and I tried to visit Northeastern University but couldn't find it for the longest time. In the search process, we came across the intersection of Tremont Street and Tremont Street. I'm not kidding. If you wonder why Boston drivers are so famously terrible, consider that they have to navigate space-time paradoxes like this, and cut them some slack.

Harvard, contrary to these other experiences, just felt right.

My tour leader was named Peter, and he was a member of something called the Crimson Key Society. After I enrolled, I determined that these student volunteers are disturbingly enthusiastic and love Harvard a little too much. They smile
all
the time. They have little anecdotes about
everything
. I don't think they are capable of expressing anger. If you are ever in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you should test this out by doing your best to annoy them. They're unbreakable. But on my first-ever visit to campus, I actually found Peter's excitement exciting.

Cambridge was beautiful, and so was the school's campus. People were playing sports and reading outside, and just like in the brochures,
everyone
looked happy. That tour affected me for reasons other than the pleasing appearance, though. I also got this inexplicable feeling that this was a place I could be myself.

My mom and our dog, Honey, had not joined me for the tour. They were posted in the Cambridge Common, a triangle-shaped park at the center of Harvard Square where, in 1775, George Washington first gathered a group of volunteer fighters that would become the U.S. Army. In her own stories of how I ended up at Harvard, my mother would always recount how she saw me returning to them in the park: “You were floating, and I knew it. This boy wants to go to Harvard!”

Being Black at Harvard

N
o one said hello.

The day I moved into my freshman dorm in Harvard Yard began early that morning in a room at the Susse Chalet motel three miles north of Harvard Square. My mother, our dog, Honey, and our Isuzu Trooper arose in the modest accommodations, like on so many previous Thurston Family road trips. My mother boiled water for tea in her portable hot pot. I walked the dog. But there was more excitement on this day. Moving into your freshman college dorm is an exciting time. The kids are moments away from being able to do whatever they want with whomever they want. For parents, it's the same: “Get out of my house, you freeloader. I want to invite some friends over and drink without having to worry about you ruining it.” In my memory, the actual act of moving in is replayed in slow motion, like a car crash. But to this day, beyond the visual impression of station wagons, footlockers, and hugs, most of what I remember is that no one in town or on campus looked me in the eye or said hello as they passed.

I wondered if it was just me, but my mother noticed the same thing, and we were dressed well enough, didn't smell, and were friendly folks. Where we came from, you greeted people, but that wasn't the case in the Boston area.

Beyond a general coldness, Boston can be especially unfriendly for black people. There's a rich and beautiful history of black people in Boston from the days of abolition to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, but recent history has overshadowed much of that.

Today, there's a significant black community in Boston but relatively little in the way of black political or economic power, and of course as rich as the history is, it's also plagued by ugliness. The Red Sox were the last Major League baseball team to integrate and chose to pass on Jackie Robinson in the 1940s. During the wave of forced busing and school integration in the 1970s, Boston stood out for its violent reaction, and the image of a white Bostonian wielding an American flag as a weapon, aiming it at a black man as if ready to impale him, has never left my head.

On an average visit to Boston, unless you know where to go, you don't see the diversity in public that exists in other major U.S. cities and in Boston itself.
*
Never before have I been to an American city that so effectively hides its black population, and I lived there for twelve years. It's as if the Underground Railroad were still active! All of this supports my conclusion that people in Boston generally are not friendly to outsiders, and I found this to be the case on my first day as a resident, even in the friendlier, more liberal town across the Charles River, mockingly referred to as “The People's Republic of Cambridge.”

When someone finally did break the pattern by smiling and greeting us, my mother exclaimed, “Oh, thank you so much for saying hello!” This reasonable and well-home-trained person was a fellow freshman in my dorm, and she was black.

I didn't know much about my roommate before arriving. I knew, like me, he had a unique name, Dahni-El (pronounced
donny
-el), grew up in Brooklyn, and had attended a New England boarding school. When I opened the door to our room, he had already moved in. The first thing I saw was a footlocker covered in a large red, black, and green flag. I thought to myself, “We are going to be the most militant-looking brothers on this campus!” Between his Afrocentric flag, my fresh-back-from-Africa kente clothing, and our names, I imagined our room would be the hub of the black Harvard revolution. We would convene late at night and strategize by candlelight over heavily marked maps with zones flagged “The Man” and “The People.” It would be great.

After the initial image of Afrocentric blackness, Dahni-El and I discovered that we also shared a general lack of financial resources. Neither of us owned a television,
*
so one of our neighbors used crayons to draw a picture of a television and taped it to the wall where she thought the real thing should have been. We left it there all year. To help cover our tuition and expenses, we both held campus jobs in a department called Dorm Crew. That meant cleaning hallways and stairways, removing trash from dorms, and scrubbing bathrooms inside student residences. Yes, we performed your basic janitorial duties, because it was one of the highest-paying jobs on campus. Its high wages meant Dorm Crew attracted financial aid recipients,
*
and a disproportionate number of workers were minorities.

I think I know what you're thinking: “Baratunde, are you telling me that poor black kids at Harvard literally cleaned up the shit of their fellow Harvard students?” To answer you, I would clarify that it wasn't only black kids, and we cleaned much more than shit. Bathrooms are diverse ecosystems, requiring the cleaning up of hair, toothpaste, and soap scum. It's an admittedly strange dynamic, but it came with amazing privileges, and you would be hard-pressed to find a stronger advocate of the Dorm Crew program than me.

In the beginning, the arrangement is awkward for the cleaner and the cleanee. Imagine answering your dorm's buzzer to find your chemistry lab partner standing there with a bucket of cleaning supplies and a mop, demanding access to your bathroom. But it's something you get used to, and I relished not just the money but also the opportunity to escape the fast-paced world of ideas, debates, meetings, egos, papers, and the overall social noise of college and replace it with some solitary time scrubbing shower stalls. Dorm Crew was the least stressful part of my Harvard experience, providing much-needed downtime. Instead of thinking about my classes and assignments, I always carried a Walkman and either listened to books on tape (a habit I inherited from my mother) or conservative talk radio hosts Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Howie Carr. I didn't grow up listening to conservative arguments—my mother loved me—but I found it oddly comforting to broaden my political ideology inputs while breathing in large amounts of cleaning chemicals.

Dorm Crew wasn't just a dirty, well-paying job that offered mental escape. It was also a gateway to coveted jobs during Harvard's class reunions each spring. Few places welcome alumni back like Harvard. The premise of the reunion weekend is to remind people how great Harvard is, how much fun they had (even if they didn't), get them drunk, and get them to give money to Harvard so the cycle can repeat itself for the next generation. Through Dorm Crew, I performed a critical function in this process. I ran the liquor operations.

In order to hire students to work in various reunion jobs, the alumni office relies on Dorm Crew as a primary recruiting and filtering tool. People who climb the ranks and become Dorm Crew captains, with responsibility for scheduling, managing, and assessing multiple workers across an entire dorm during the school year, get the most sought-after jobs during reunion. Since your reunion clientele is comprised of twenty-six- to ninety-plus-year-old Harvard alumni who run a large slice of the world, there's an amazing opportunity to earn a significant pile of cash through tips. During my time at Harvard, four major categories of competitive reunion jobs were available:
Al Powers
, a logistics crew, which sets up tables, chairs, and tents for the various events;
Linen Crew
, which prepares dorm rooms for alumni to live in again as if they were young;
Bellhops
, who carry luggage and drive alumni around town; and
Liquor Crew
, which manages the procurement and distribution of all beer, wine, spirits, and other beverages.

There are many important jobs at Harvard University: the president, the heads of academic departments, deans, real estate directors, and the executives who manage the Harvard endowment. But Liquor Crew is
the most important job at Harvard
because it makes all other elements of Harvard possible, and for a time I ran it. My very first year, I worked as a bar back, serving non-mixed drinks and restocking ice, making sure cups and napkins were available, and generally being a grunt. It was because of this job that I first consciously became aware of how many hours are in a week: 168. Because the job paid an hourly wage, and because it only lasted for one week of the year, the goal was to work as many hours as possible, regardless of the effect on one's body. I worked over 100 hours that week. I learned how to rapidly set up and tear down a bar several times a day whether inside a two-hundred-year-old dining hall or in the middle of a football field. And I learned that no matter the time of day, there's some class of Harvard alumni ready to drink, from Bloody Marys in the morning for older alumni to cup after cup of beer for the younger reunion attendees.

The job was thrilling, chaotic, and entertaining, offering crash courses in supply-chain management and interpersonal communication. It also taught me that serving alcohol to alumni is the best way to understand the value of a Harvard education. I got the opportunity, time and again, to interact with people at every stage of post-college life. I saw their hormones on a rampage at the fifth-year reunion, their parenting skills under pressure at the fifteenth, their hairlines receding at an inverse rate to their income for the twenty-fifth, and their dwindling numbers beyond the fortieth. I spoke to and learned from all of these people, and the lesson was consistent and simple: “What you study here doesn't matter. Pursue your passion, and you'll figure out a way to earn a living at it down the line. Be yourself.” Sometimes I received this lesson from people who had failed to apply it to themselves. Other times, it was clear they were living their dreams and proving their own point by example.

Not all of my Liquor Crew alumni interactions were so high-minded and positive, though. Many of these alumni attended Harvard at a time when people who looked like me cleaned their bathrooms, not as a campus job but as a lifetime career. The clash of generations and cultures could be intense, like the time a very old white man accused me of lying to him.

It happened during a reunion event for one of the older classes and took place at Eliot House, a dorm along the Charles River. We set up the bar on a terrace under a shining white tent. A string quartet played off to the side, setting an elegant mood. The bar was slammed with throngs of alumni, and my job was to keep the universe intact by serving as many of them as I could as quickly as possible. I felt like I was deployed with a MASH unit in a war zone. Ice was flying. The ground was slick, covered in an alcoholic sludge. Knives and corkscrews were scattered across the tables, providing a dangerous obstacle for fast-moving hands. Knowing who had asked for what and in what order was impossible to keep straight. There was no line, no numbered ticketing. There was pure adrenaline, instinct honed by training, and chaos, out of which a lone voice managed to commandeer my attention.

“Young man, you served
three
old people before me,” a very tall, very pale, white-haired man shouted at me.

“I'm sorry, sir. It's really busy. I didn't see you there. What can I get for you?” I offered, with an apologetic smile.

“You're a
liar
!”

I turned to face this amazing charge, and his finger was in my face, pointing at me and shaking. He yelled again with even more vehemence, “You're a
liar
!”

This was no normal yell. I
heard
the words with my ears but I also
felt
them in my soul. There was such anger and contempt in his tone that I froze. It felt as if the voices of his incredulous ancestors were also yelling at me for daring even to be present.

I apologized again, and he responded by
threatening to have my financial aid pulled
! At this point, someone else came over to calm the lunatic down, but in that moment, I felt extraordinarily black and angry and embarrassed.

Moments like these were rare. With all that I knew of the world intellectually, with all that my mother had taught me, and with all I had experienced firsthand at Sidwell, I was well prepared for, but rarely encountered, such raw ugliness. There was an incident in which someone scrawled the word “nigger” on the walls of my freshman dorm, and while it was painful, to me it also felt a bit like old news. In the wake of
The Bell Curve
, a book that tried to intellectually support the idea of black people's native inferiority, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield provoked a reaction by claiming most black students at Harvard were unqualified and only enrolled because of affirmative action. Again, incidents like these didn't make me feel great, but “intellectuals” and leaders and all sorts of people have been claiming black people's inferiority for centuries. I wasn't about to let their ignorance completely define my experience.

More often, my experience of race at Harvard was full of joy and excitement.

The Class of 1999 had a special bond. Not only did Prince personally write a song about us
and us alone
, we just came together quickly and well. This class cohesion crossed racial lines, but it was especially strong among the black students in my class. We regularly erupted into self-congratulatory chants of “Nine nine! Nine nine! Nine nine!” with absolutely no prompting. We were as likely to explode into cheers at a sporting event as in the dining hall or crossing the quad. The fact that it annoyed other classes was proof to us that we were right. “They're just jealous because they don't love themselves as much as we do, because we're clearly more awesome,” we thought. We roamed the campus and the city, a sprawling swarm of self-love and blackness. One moment we were taking part in impromptu “Black Olympics” in Harvard Yard. The next moment we were taking over a weekend dance party in one of the upper-class houses. In one unforgettable event, we decided to go to the movies to see the film
Dead Presidents
starring Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker, and many more. Our Swarm of Blackness flooded the sidewalks and T station and subway cars, and as we crossed a bridge nearing the movie theater, we broke out into a run, descending the hill like Gandalf and the Rohirrim on the fifth day of battle at Helm's Deep in the
Lord of the Rings
movie. It was beautiful.