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244 Teach on That was sitting behind a table—unfolded himself, really, like a crane rising from a nest. He was indeed seven feet, a height that may seem normal in professional basketball but isn’t in real life. He dressed in jeans and a windbreaker. He wore glasses. His hand swallowed up mine entirely when he shook it; one of his hands appeared a bit crooked, unusable, but not too much. He took me to his baseball portrait, which was arranged among other pieces of his, and said proudly that since we talked, another person had offered to buy it. “It’s a very good piece,” I said as seriously as I could without being patronizing. I gave him an envelope with a note card of thanks and congratulations on his artistry, and, of course, his money. He graciously didn’t open it, but he did admit he’d been looking forward to my coming because he needed to buy clothes for some upcoming events—graduation, a dance. I gave him my business card, told him to keep in touch about his work. He said he would. I had the piece decently framed, and now it hangs in my living room with the prints of Klimt and van Gogh, and the jazz photos. That it is the only original piece of art in there is deeply and repeatedly satisfying. And last month I drafted Deandre’s pitcher as a kind of patron saint of the long-­ thwarted Angels as my husband and I watched them battle their way daily to their first World Series title. Fans in Anaheim proudly say that now, many more people in the world know the names of their players and where they live. Thanks to the magic of baseball and to a victory of a much more ordinary but no less self-­ illuminating kind, I can say the same thing about Manchester and San Pedro. Unsocial Studies T h e R e a l L e s s o n s o f H a m i lto n H i g h May 1999 The Hamilton High School story is not what you think it is. It is not what I thought it was. It is melodrama that can only be described in epic terms, so here goes: Unsocial Studies 245 This is a Greek tragedy playing out in the furthest reaches of the Western world—at a modest but comely red-­ brick high school in the hinterlands of West Los Angeles, just off the Santa Monica Freeway. This is a story riddled with ironies, some of which are infuriating but most of which are profoundly saddening, because they illustrate how real issues can be obfuscated by people who wrap themselves in the mantle of reform but who actually advance very small, and often poisonously small-­ minded, agendas. This is about no leaders . This is about the utter failure of collective reason in an age of fevered individualism. This is about the powder keg of racial frustration that keeps blowing up at odd and seemingly inappropriate moments because, thirty-­ five years after it relinquished its last legal claims as enforcer of a social and economic apartheid that was birthed in slavery, white America is content to live in a state of perilous ignorance about the persistent inequities of black and white. This is about the Faustian price black America often pays for being heard, about the ill-­ conceived celebrity of a justifiable rage. This is not about us, and all about Us. This is about a white friend living on the Westside who immediately and fearfully inquired upon hearing the rudiments of this story, “Is there going to be a riot?” This is about a flashpoint of brilliant possibility colliding with banal disbelief. This is L.A. I. The Big Issue In April, I got a call from a coalition of black parents who were eager to meet with me to discuss some distressing incidents of racism at Hamilton High School, which also houses two magnet schools, humanities and music. I didn’t know anything about the story beyond what I’d read in the April 17 L.A. Times. Some students and parents had staged a protest on campus against some magnet teachers they felt were racist and were exacerbating a separate and unequal educational situation. At a school that was once upon a time largely white and was now largely minority—chiefly black and Latino—minority students were doing markedly worse...

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