White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Was This a Good School?

134 I was leaning against a pillow on the floor of my freshman dorm at Wesleyan University in 1979, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, when several people decided to start passing around their high-school yearbooks. I expected to laugh at everyone’s goofy senior pictures, but instead I found myself squirming. Next to the chronicles from the Madeira School, Concord Academy, LoomisChaffee , and Beverly Hills High School, my Open High yearbook looked like the Third World. My ragtag classmates played chess and Ping Pong in the school lounge. Teenage mothers snuggled their babies in class. Wannabe punk rockers posed behind the trash cans in the school alley. There were black faces on almost every page. It looked nothing like the green, manicured world in everyone else’s yearbook, a world that I claimed not to want but hated not being able to have. “Wow!” said the self-proclaimed Grateful Dead Head who lived down the hall. “Where was this?” “Let me see,” said a student from L.A., who already knew the make and model of the cars belonging to everyone in our dorm. He frowned and said, “Was this a good school?” I didn’t know how to answer that. By going to Wesleyan, I had walked into an elite club of students groomed for success. There was a small percentage of nonwhite students at Wesleyan; ironically, many had gone to prep schools and fit in better than I did. I felt like I was there by fluke, like everyone else was more sophisticated, more self-assured—in a word, superior. My high school wasn’t anything remotely “good.” Some of my graduating class didn’t go to college at all, and those who did never even considered schools like Wesleyan. I answered with a shrug, then choked down my shame with a hit from the joint that was going around. That year, I was finally experimenting with the marijuana I had so long resisted, holding in the smoke until my chest hurt. A paper I wrote about some of busing’s cruel realities received this response in red ink: “Basically, you have mis-identified the enWas This a Good School? 135 emy. Blacks (and the nasty things they can do to whites) are only a symptom of the real problem, U.S. capitalism, which ripped Africans from their families and tribes, and brought them here as slaves, and has kept them in a horrible, inferior condition ever since.” I could see a lot of truth in this leftist interpretation, but it was irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. I wasn’t prepared to turn my experience into a political discussion, so I stuffed the paper into a folder and picked a completely different topic for my next assignment. Why did I feel so ashamed? Wesleyan was the land of “Question Authority” buttons and “Divest from South Africa” rallies. My participation in a movement for social justice should have made me a hero. Instead, nobody knew what to make of me. The most searing lesson—what it felt like to be a minority, even though I’m white—seemed to have no value. I made people feel uncomfortable because I had not followed the familiar and understandable trajectory to success. I reminded them that they had not participated in desegregation, perhaps because they were never ordered to, perhaps because their parents prevented it. I choked down my shame all year as I learned to wear sweat pants to class, play the metallophones and gongs of the Indonesian gamelan, and write papers about Aristotle. Late at night, tired of trying to keep pace with everyone, I wandered through the tunnels under the dorms, trying to decipher some profound truth from the graffiti. The philosophy ranged from “A man without a god is like a fish without a bicycle” to support for Frank Zappa’s ambition to move to Montana and become a dental floss tycoon. I spackled over my Richmond past so thickly that by the time I graduated, I didn’t even have a southern accent anymore. I stuffed all of it into a dark place inside me because I didn’t want to answer any questions about it, didn’t want to reveal how different I was from everyone around me, didn’t want to be pushed away. Only in my African American history classes did my desegregation experience seem useful. After a lot of reading, I began to...