An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  BLSA, by charter, exists for the benefit of its members and God knows they didn’t need my help looking out for their own best interests. Anyway, I was always putting my foot in my mouth with them. Once, I was talking to a black classmate who is the son of a judge. I liked John; he never pretended to be a ghetto boy and never troubled himself much with what other blacks thought of him. We were so far apart in life experience, though. He’d come from California and was bemoaning the expense of relocating his things. I suggested he do what I’d done—get rid of all his possessions except for the bare necessities—and replace dishes, furniture, and such at thrift stores. He stopped mid-step and looked at me like I was recommending we eat from garbage cans. I withdrew the suggestion.

  As always, I was clueless as to how to navigate the social shoals of large groups. By the end of the first few weeks, the social doors were shut. There’d been a black admittees’ weekend in April which I’d thought extravagant. Most everyone else had come, though; the cliques had clicked before I knew what was happening. Since cliques have personalities, the window of opportunity quickly shut on establishing an atmosphere of open dialogue at BLSA. In the end, my high tolerance for solitude was my biggest impediment to social mobility; I voluntarily spent 90 percent of my time alone happily reading, renting foreign films, and working out. But when Bobby visited, I barely saw him. I was terrified the campus cops had him on lockdown for being big, black, and obviously non-Harvard. Instead, he’d melded right in with my classmates. For days after his visit, my phone rang with people looking for him. He simply expects to fit in, and so does.

  Also, Bobby was exotically “authentic” and I wasn’t, even though we’re siblings, raised in the same household. Knowing he was a huge rap fan, I took him to a panel on the significance of hip-hop held at the beginning of his visit, before anyone knew he was my brother. Wide-eyed with stunned disbelief at the pomposity and postmodern gobbledygook he was hearing, I couldn’t help laughing at him.

  “Welcome to my new world,” I said.

  “You need to think about moving,” he joked back, shaking his head.

  I finally persuaded him to offer his own comments. Even the rappers on the panel hung on his every word. People tripped over themselves trying to draw him out, “down” as he was with street lingo, the bona fides of a waiter, and a rough-hewn “street” exterior. I, indeed anyone who criticized them (especially women), was routinely cut off, ignored, and generally dismissed. I got the back of the hand several times as “not understanding the typical black’s reality” from millionaire rap stars and Exeter grads, presumably because I both spoke mainstream English and disagreed with them. To our great amusement, Bobby and I were specifically contrasted (him: relevant; me: irrelevant) several times, with comments such as those recommending I spend more time with “real brothers” like him.

  I forced myself to go to BLSA meetings for my first year, though I dreaded them more and more as time passed. They were typical students—no meeting ever started or ended on time. No one had ever accomplished the task he’d agreed to perform. No one could disagree with the party line without having his Négritude questioned. Why is it always that the biggest oaf has the loudest mouth, the most forceful personality, and is so persuasive to people who are perfectly reasonable away from the group?

  At one meeting, we were debating our response to both Colin Powell’s speaking at graduation and the gay students’ group’s plan to protest. He was still chairman of the JCS then, and his opposition to gays in the military was a hot topic. The gay students’ group had sent us what is one of the most diplomatic, neighborly, and reasonable letters I’ve ever seen explaining why they’d be protesting his visit and assuring us that it had nothing to do with race, only that one slice of his politics. Whoever penned that letter has my admiration, writer to writer.

  A consensus seemed to be forming that we could take the protesters at their word and stay out of it while we formulated our own response to his visit. One of the Beautiful People changed before our very eyes from suave party boy to Malcolm X lite. Spittle flew as he lapsed into field-hand-speak and fulminated about how “the white man come up in here and we house niggers s’pozed to run do what he tell us.” It went on and on. Any minute, I expected him to break character and lead us in laughter at his joke. He finished his spiel and turned back to the Beautiful Woman he’d been romancing before he took the floor.

  It was unhelpful, it was an act, and it was silly. Part of me wanted to laugh and part of me wanted to cry, because it’s forceful personalities like his that dominate the discourse in the black community and signal the rest of us to conduct ourselves in this defensive, self-conscious, dishonest, and ultimately masturbatory manner. To our credit, even though he wasn’t the only person who saw it this way, we published a letter supporting Powell in glowing terms but also supporting homosexuals’ right to serve their country. Many more of us disagreed with the Head Negroes than made a point of it, obviously.

  At BLSA meetings, I’d sit with two older friends (one ex-Army) who were also doing their best to go along with the program. Afterward, we’d go for drinks and try to make sense of the ridiculous things we’d just heard. Except for sporadic appearances, none of us stuck it out much into spring semester. As another friend put it, “For them, there’s only one way to be black and it aint my way.”

  Blacks at HLS were in a difficult spot and I felt the strain as much as anyone else. We knew we were in a high-visibility situation and we all fluctuated between being representatives of the race and being selfish individuals. This led to some silly and some harrowing situations. More than anything else, though, Harvard is a silly place and the politics often reflect that.

  Here’s a typical scenario: in our first year crim class, one of the least impressive black women who ever lived objected on racist grounds to Professor Meltzer’s hypothetical involving unopened crates of stereo equipment in a tenement apartment and the likelihood of their being stolen. Being both dumb and a bad loser, she wouldn’t let it go, so the class ended up having to vote as to whether we thought it more likely that said boxes in a mansion or in a tenement were stolen. I could have strangled her.

  In a housing law and policy class, Professors Jean Charn and Duncan Kennedy were detailing the history of ethnic housing patterns in the Boston area in the pre–Civil War period and how government policies affected them. This same woman accused them of racial insensitivity because they failed to account for the housing patterns of the large numbers of blacks she claimed lived there then. The next class, the professors (two of the most activist leftists at HLS) distributed information detailing how less than 2 percent of the area’s population was black during the relevant period, and therefore insignificant in our discussions. This woman and her all too numerous ilk were excellent arguments against affirmative action.

  This woman was actually dumb (a rarity at HLS. Lazy, we had lots of, but even the laziest usually was also frighteningly smart); disingenuousness was a much bigger problem. In another crim class, the usual argument erupted about police harassment of blacks. Professor Meltzer, to his credit, handled one of HLS’s most controversial classes with firm grace; we never knew what his opinion was, yet he orchestrated the class discussion with precision, bringing out all sides of the debate while (pretty much) keeping the lid on. In this instance, however, I can’t help feeling he dropped the ball.

  Again Professor Meltzer asked for a show of hands: how many people had been stopped by the police? Nearly every hand in the class went up (not mine, though; I’ve never been stopped for other than traffic infractions and never been badly treated). Whites looked around with smug jubilance at the forest of arms in the air. But the inquiry ended there. Professor Meltzer didn’t ask why they’d been stopped, how they’d been treated, or whether they’d been charged with anything. Suspicious, I took an informal poll and found out that most of my white classmates whose hands were raised had in mind perfectly benign episodes at their Ivy League campuses or chichi neighbor
hoods where the police had actually helped them. The context of the debate was adversarial police stops, yet that crucial element was ignored.

  While I think the professor’s lapse was just that, a lapse, disingenuousness and hypocrisy were rampant at HLS, not least among black students. Professor Randy Kennedy, black and a well-known criminal law and social theorist, was often dismissed by black students as an Uncle Tom and a sellout. I wasn’t familiar with him so I listened carefully early my first year to a group discussion about how his failure to publicly join the faculty diversity movement proved his self-hatred and cowardice.

  “Why does he have to weigh in? Why does he even have to have an opinion on faculty diversity—just because he’s black? Maybe he’s focused on other issues,” I said.

  But they had an “amen corner” going, most agreeing with each other that Kennedy’s silence condemned him as an Oreo. Few even addressed my argument that the First Amendment applied among blacks, that you can’t presume to know what his silence means, and, most of all, that he had the right to not believe in (or not even care about) faculty diversity as long as his reasons were intellectually defensible. They were so cruelly dismissive of him, I found myself in the library researching him; who was this man who was so viciously dissected and found wanting?

  I liked what I read; Kennedy is a free-range intellectual, loving, but not beholden to his tribe. I dropped off a package of my own writing to him and he asked me to become one of his research assistants. He was the first person to publish me, in his (now defunct) journal Reconstruction.

  From my perch as his research assistant, I got to see many of the same students who spit on his very name queue up to suck up. They came for those all-important letters of recommendation and for the grant money he controlled. Basically, they came to turn him into a connection they could trade on since he was a nationally prominent intellectual, a Rhodes Scholar, and Thurgood Marshall’s former Supreme Court law clerk. Butter wouldn’t melt in their vituperative mouths as they puckered up to win his favor. One woman, who had just the night before derided him as “incog-Negro” and said she had no respect for him, was quite shocked when I stepped out from behind his door and asked her to share with him the interesting conversation she’d led last night at the BLSA meeting. I curried favor with professors, too, but only those I respected and always with a stack of my own work in my hands. Why come empty-handed for help?

  Professor Kennedy was clueless as to the vipers in his nest; how could he not be, given the calculated dishonesty he faced? He’d mention some student he was helping with a clerk- or fellowship, and I’d have to bite my tongue. Once, after one of these Oscar-worthy performances ended, I teased him, saying, “When I was in the service, I always wondered if senior officers could tell when their asses were being kissed. Now I know: you can’t. I’ll have to remember that when I’m rich and powerful.”

  He had to chuckle, if ruefully. Most of them were probably only saying what they needed to say to be cool, in any event. Parroting the party line is rampant behind Ivy-covered walls.

  The other nonparticipatory blacks I knew tended to also be either loners or involved in pursuits BLSA blacks had little use for (like heavy metal music); even so, we’d all bemoan our inability to fit in racially. Eventually, though, we gave up. The politics and social arrangements just played themselves out in a way we couldn’t stomach and we drifted off to the activities that came naturally. Our absence, however, often made us racially suspect (just like Professor Kennedy’s not toeing the party line on faculty diversity). At forty, it’s still a knife in my heart to know that so many blacks consider me a Tom. It no longer silences me or affects my behavior—it just hurts. It hurts because the disapproval is of the playground variety—the Head Negroes make it known who is outside the pale and quickly punish those who fail to cut the offender off. You know it’s juvenile and inexcusable, and yet you can’t quite shrug it off. Even when I have little respect for them, as was true with those untested youngsters at Harvard, there is something about seeing other blacks’ eyes go slanted in negative judgment when I break racial ranks on a matter of principle that wakes in me a pubescent need to pretend to be something I’m not. I resist it, I leave like minds to think alike, but it saddens me. From the start, I was suspect.

  ——

  I joined a study group with four men, all white but one (he left the group later), all second-careerists except for one (but Patrick is an old man at heart). I chose them for their maturity, seriousness, and open-mindedness; I couldn’t be in a study group where I wasn’t free to speak my mind without being frozen out as either a political or a racial heretic. We met every day first year to study and argue for two to four hours, then I’d go back to my one-room, shared-bath in Wyeth Hall and study for four to six hours every day. I was in heaven. Such a luxury—all I had to do was think, read, and debate. I studied so much, I had to intensify my eyeglass prescription three times. The eye doctor at University Health Services actually laughed when I “read” the eye chart for her. Then she said, “First-year law student?” I hold it as a matter of pride that I did permanent damage to my eyes. And then grades came out.

  First-semester first-year grades at HLS determine your future in the law to a significant extent. Certainly, for those whose goals in the law lie on the well-trodden path, they determine the next five years. Law review is largely decided by those grades coupled with a grueling writing competition. Grades and law review determine, for the most part, clerkships, the fast track to academia, and access to the best firms, government jobs, and prestigious public interest organizations. While one need only remain upright and conscious to get a B at HLS, earning a first-year A means you are indeed something special. I made B’s.

  For a couple of days, I was reeling, as were the other 95 percent of us who were now officially no longer the smartest kid in class. I got over it by writing about it in the school newspaper, the Record. First semester, the ridiculousness of daily life at Harvard had seemed so surreal to me, I’d written two humorous pieces about it for the paper. They’d asked me to do a regular column, but I’d declined because I thought it would interfere with my studies. Now, realizing that I could make those same B’s with a lot less effort, I began a weekly Record column that I continued until graduation.

  To this day, I have no idea why or how I started writing. I’d always done it effortlessly but never saw any future in it, if only because writers were gods to me. I never studied journalism and, at Mizzou, I dropped the only creative writing class I ever took after two weeks because it was so inane (the girls were writing bodice rippers about voluptuous redheads with one green and one blue eye and star-shaped birthmarks on their buttocks; the boys haiku about their bowel movements). Virtually overnight, though, page after page poured out of me; I suppose it was finally having the luxury of entertaining thoughts not directly aimed at survival. In any event, I knew somehow not to try to figure it out and I still haven’t tried; it’s the only thing in my life I’m unself-conscious about.

  The process of becoming a writer was a sublimely seductive experience. Little by little, writing crept into my thoughts like a cat burglar through a skylight or like the voices goading the insane. Lucky for me, my voices forced me to put words down on paper, not set empty warehouses on fire. I’d find myself walking through Harvard Square talking and laughing aloud to myself, forced to run home and boot up my computer. I worked most of the summers to help defray tuition, so I got up at dawn to write before work. The last third of the first and the full second half of my second summer I took off to write full-time, giving up $1,500 a week to do so. I left dates early to write. I woke up from REM sleep to type one sentence which had come to me, then went back to bed. I’d find sentences scribbled on notepads all over my room that I didn’t remember writing. Writing made me a very unreliable friend and just a little bit crazier than I already was, because it made me not care what else I had to do to make the writing possible. Writing is like sex with someone whose sensuality over
powers you. I resist it even though I want it because the only way to experience it fully is to let go fully. So, I resist even though I know I’ll enjoy it once I yield, but not until I yield. I was a pushover; I always gave in. By third year, I was skipping classes for the first time in my life and showing up unprepared (but never backbenching). I was writing a bad novel instead.

  ——

  My scholarship included a summer job split between the NAACP LDF and the Shearman & Sterling law firm. There are only twelve summer slots at the LDF, for which hundreds of the nation’s top students apply. Jobs at the top ten law firms are equally sought after, so not having to spend my spring semester desperately seeking employment was a blessing. We 1992 S&S scholars (two of whom were my classmates; one was at Stanford) split our summers between them, earning the weekly wages of a first-year associate—$80,000 a year.

  I spent the summer of 1993 in Manhattan, living in a overpriced crackerbox room in the NYU Law School dorms. Most of the LDF interns were an interesting and committed bunch. Unfortunately, several were a sad continuation of DNC/HLS faux radicalism and hatefulness masquerading as a belief system. One woman, a Howard Law student, constantly berated us for attending Harvard, charging that we needed to be with whites to feel worthy, and kept insisting (unasked) that Howard was its academic equivalent. Even as we spoke, Howard Law was in danger of losing its accreditation, a situation it struggled with for many years. (That, of course, was mere white trickery.) Worse, this woman was a flat-out racist and thug. She exulted in her memories of terrorizing the white Howard Law students when they agitated for a White Law Students’ Association. She and her comrades had circulated details of the whites’ meeting and a goon squad of black students showed up to intimidate them. Her eyes glowed as she relived crowding the hallway outside their meeting and following them to their cars, all but yelling “KILL WHITEY!” She made no bones about the fact that they consciously intended to frighten them out of organizing (they were successful). As well, a fellow S&S scholar was treated like a race traitor for being a successful businessman, anti–affirmative action, and a social conservative; he might as well have been an open pedophile. Several claimed to disdain the S&S scholarship program itself as “pimping” for white law firms.