There were things I liked about Williams: the well-maintained, bucolic campus; the welcoming, community vibe; and the generous dining and janitorial staff who went out of their way to be kind and gracious with their time. There were also things I loved about Williams: primarily the tutorial courses that consisted of two or three students who wrote papers and critiqued one another’s work and one professor who gave each of us a lot of individual attention. These courses in particular gave me an opportunity to argue vigorously, ask tough questions, and dig into complicated subject areas. Even better, my own ideas were readily challenged, and I welcomed this. I was hungry for intelligent, invigorating debate and found tutorial sessions intellectually thrilling at their best.
One of my tutorial professors during freshman year was a brilliant black woman with a radical leftist bent. She was as sharp as a tack and absurdly well read. An influential black activist on campus had recommended the class, which was about the history of racial injustice, and when I heard that the professor had studied under Cornel West, I didn’t hesitate to sign up.
In class, the professor pushed forward my analysis and understanding of gender in challenging and productive ways and taught me more about how black slaves found agency through subtle forms of resistance. But when discussing American history, she resisted acknowledging the contributions of the white men who were typically glorified, something I found problematic. American history includes a multitude of white men who, despite their many flaws, laid the foundation for the democratic ideals we all value and defend today. To deny their contributions because of their immoral decisions and hypocritical deeds was to throw out the baby with the bathwater. So I pushed, not too forcefully, and sometimes not even directly, but decidedly, for an account of American history that acknowledged the relevance of their contributions. These discussions were always respectful and friendly, but I was never successful in persuading her.
While I had several other terrific professors freshman year, the one who had the greatest impact on me was Professor David L. Smith, who taught an African American literature seminar. Professor Smith impressed me right away with his sharp clothes, refined sensibilities, and encyclopedic knowledge of history and culture. In class he consistently helped me make my own arguments stronger and deepened my perspective on the authors we read. Without sacrificing any nuance or complexity, he presented a range of sophisticated interpretations of the material we covered, compelling me to reconsider my own.
Outside class, Professor Smith became the most influential mentor and black male role model I’ve ever had. I spent hours at a time several days a week talking to him in his office about everything from literature to black feminism to what drives people, and he found a way to enhance my understanding of every topic we discussed.
Despite all the new intellectual stimulation, it took me a while to adjust to the laid-back campus life at Williams. It is remote, with very limited accessibility, to say the least. Williams is located in the rural Berkshires of western Massachusetts, and our campus is in the middle of a tiny college town. Just to see certain movies, my friends and I would have to drive an hour to Albany, New York. I was always eager to do and experience and take in more, and the campus, while comfortable and scenic, felt almost claustrophobic at times.
But I didn’t let constraints stop me from taking on all that Williams had to offer. In addition to my demanding course load, I regularly attended meetings of several campus clubs and ran for leadership positions in three of them, becoming the communications director of the Black Student Union as a freshman. I admired the passion and moral vision of many of the other BSU board members, and I was especially pleased by the fact that a woman named Sevonna Brown led the board and that there were more women in leadership roles than men. To me, that was a clear sign of progress, albeit a small one.
I enjoyed working with Sevonna and the other BSU board members. I shared their deep concern for the advancement of black people, though we had other differences of opinion. Namely, I wasn’t as radical a leftist as most of them. Though I considered myself liberal and a progressive, I was more moderate. Most of the other board members spent a lot of time hanging out together in Rice House, where the BSU meetings were held. I liked them all personally, but it was important to me to spend time developing relationships with people in different social and student groups on campus.
I wanted it all, to be just as engaged socially as I was intellectually. In the dining hall, I often grabbed a meal with several students or groups of people a day, sometimes one after the other. Some groups talked about sports and whom they had hooked up with the weekend before. Others talked about politics and history paper assignments. I didn’t care so much about the topic. I cared more about connecting with people and getting to know them better. So when I had something to contribute, I did. But I was also content to listen to what my new friends had to say and to learn more about them.
Going into my freshman year, I wanted to gain perspective by hearing other people’s stories. I was curious to understand what motivated people from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. And I also wanted to understand how they defined suffering, success, and failure, and what gave them joy. That first year, I also had high hopes of meeting the perfect girl. But reality settled in soon enough. I talked to a few girls but didn’t find the right one for me. It was disappointing, but I told myself that it was only a matter of time.
The more meaningful relationships I formed my first year were with mentors like Professor Smith and two close friends, Cole and Walford. Cole was a basketball player who was one of the most consistent, supportive, loyal, and laid-back friends I’d had, the kind of guy who always wanted me around, understood when I had other things to do, and was happy to hang out and kick it even when he wanted to drink and I didn’t. Walford was a close black friend on campus who was deeply religious but practical and open-minded and one of the coolest guys I’ve known. Walford was smart, funny, and sincere. He was one of very few people I spent time with at Williams or anywhere else whom I found I could just be myself around. He was the kind of guy who made you feel that, even if you didn’t share them, your secrets were safe with him. If I could go back and do things over, I would like to have spent more time with Walford.
My roommate freshman year was a kid named Michael who was artistically gifted, easygoing, and funny. He could ease his way into any conversation with self-deprecation. Michael and I were living in the same room, but we came from drastically different backgrounds and had dissimilar demeanors and ambitions. He went out most weekend nights and came back tipsy. When he had a girl with him, I let him have the room and slept on the couch in the common room. Like some other people I met at Williams, Michael was going with the flow and sometimes just going through the motions.
Early in the year, I wanted to get to know Michael better. We were very different people; I wanted to understand how his experience at Williams differed from my own. What made him tick or feel some strong emotion? Late one night I was sitting at my desk reading while Michael lounged on his bed, strumming his guitar. “Are you happy here?” I asked him.
Michael shrugged and looked down at his guitar strings. “Happy enough, I guess,” he said with a subdued smile.
“What does it mean to you?” I prodded, hoping to get to a more nuanced and truthful answer. “What do you want to get out of your time here?”
This time, Michael looked up at the ceiling, as if the answers were written up there. “I don’t know,” he told me. “I’m just trying to make my way through the crowd.”
I paused, and though he was nothing at all like Michael, I thought about my dad. The best way to get through to him was to ask him about the things I knew he cared about and could relate to. In my dad’s case, those things were basketball, girls, and maybe something on the news. With Michael, I figured it was girls, music, comedy, and art. So I switched gears and asked Michael about the elaborate cartoon images he’d
drawn on his backpack. “What inspired those?”
Michael’s face lit up. “Do you know Angel Boligán Corbo?” he asked. I shook my head no. “He’s a Cuban cartoonist; he’s amazing. His work really captures Cuba’s dark history, but it’s also hilarious.” I eyed Michael’s backpack with a new appreciation. “I wanted to skip college completely and try to get my own art career off the ground,” he told me. “But after high school you go to college. It’s just what you do, right?”
I chose my words carefully. To me, going to college wasn’t merely the status quo. It was a hard-won means to what would inevitably, no matter where it led, be an even harder-won end. But everything about Michael—particularly his unhurried, mellow demeanor—spoke to an untroubled, uncomplicated life, so it made sense to me that he was moving forward merely because no one else was standing still. After our conversation that night, I felt restless and missed my friends like Moe back at Stanford, whom I had a lot more in common with. After Michael went to sleep I stayed up rereading poems by Robert Frost and e. e. cummings until he got up to go to class in the morning.
* * *
—
Unlike most of my peers, I still didn’t enjoy drinking. But I also didn’t like letting people down, so it could be stressful at times. Most Friday nights, I’d get texts from several people inviting me to pregame with them at their dorm before going to a party. I didn’t really want to drink, but I did want to experience different social scenes on campus, and the few times I’d been out before coming to Williams, I had fun.
One Friday night I was pregaming with some football guys who’d go hard three nights a week. One of them tossed me a beer and I said, “Good look.” But I only said that because I wanted to fit in. A week later, I found myself in a somewhat similar situation. But this time the crowd was different, and I wasn’t the only guy who didn’t want to drink. So I talked with a few guys while other people played beer pong. Before long, I’d shared with them my ambition to one day run for president. A few days later, one of the guys I’d been talking to that night named Eric found me on campus and asked me to hang out and grab a meal with him.
We sat down together in the dining hall, and Eric told me that he’d decided that he wanted to run for president of South Korea. His family had moved to the States from South Korea when Eric was in fifth grade. I asked when he’d landed on this goal. “At the party last week when you were talking about running,” he told me. I didn’t say it then, but I was touched. We talked about the global economy and Eric’s desire to one day unite the two Koreas under democratic leadership.
Right away, I appreciated Eric’s intellect, thoughtfulness, and self-discipline. As we became closer throughout the year, I saw that he was very focused, hardworking, and loyal, and he won more of my admiration and respect. We became great friends in part because we were both so highly motivated, but also because we both had an abiding interest in using our talents and resources to help others.
After Eric and I finished our meal and he went to the library, I went over to sit with some friends from the football team.
“Aye, you a forehead-having-ass nigga.”
“You a face-ass nigga, Larry the lobster big-body-looking-ass nigga.”
“Nappy-ass nigga, got pubic hairs on your chin. Boy, you so ugly you made your momma cry when you came out.”
I was used to it by now, the way some of my black friends on the football team at Williams roasted one another. The dynamic was interesting because even though I wasn’t on the team, we were boys. Yet I never really got roasted. At most, one of them would jokingly say, “Damn, nigga, can you wear shorter shorts next time?”
Before I came to Williams, Peggy had bought me some clothes from stores I didn’t have the money to shop at, so I had a few pairs of J.Crew shorts and some other preppy-looking athletic clothing. Most of my black friends on the football team usually wore athletic apparel: Dri-FIT shirts, with joggers, Nikes, and the like. I hung out with them at least once a week. And they joned on one another all the time. Sometimes it would go on forever.
A lot of the jokes were hilariously stupid, but some were clever, and some of the guys were quick on their feet. Others were less inclined to go back and forth and would usually get annoyed or leave after a while. Battles could get intense, but ultimately it was friendly. When I first started hanging out with the guys, it was uncomfortable sometimes. Everyone would be joning on one another energetically, and I’d be in the awkward position of laughing but not too hard because I didn’t feel comfortable roasting anybody myself and didn’t want to give someone a reason to flame me, either. But it would have been too weird to sit there with a straight face while everyone else was engaged.
I’d played on inner-city basketball teams and gone to summer camps in Detroit with guys who joned on one another. I’d seen it at Bullis playing football, too. I’d even seen fights break out over roasting at the Anacostia Metro station. But I hardly engaged in it myself. I lacked the confidence and didn’t feel the same impulse to participate, perhaps because I had other friends who didn’t habitually flame one another.
I also avoided engaging sometimes because I could sense that beneath their facade, most of the guys I’d been around resented the feeling of being excessively targeted. I’d never heard anyone say that, but I could read their body language. The culture of joning had often made it more difficult for me to fit in, especially at first, but I’d always found my way around it. Yet I’d never really thought about why joning of the sort I’d experienced was far more common among black people, particularly among young black men.
Was it a way of bonding and belonging? A way of flexing and surviving? A way of emulating hip-hop culture and being cool? Or was it a combination of those elements and other psychosocial factors? I’m not sure if there is one clear-cut explanation, but I know that with roasting often comes an uneven mix of love, laughter, vulnerability, resentment, and power. Sometimes it’s playful. Sometimes it’s fraternal. Other times it’s defensive, contested, and barbed with sharp edges. At Williams, I fit in with the guys enough to dap them up, grab dinner, and go out on the weekend. I fit in enough to be in the group message but was still known as the guy who may turn down a pregame to reread a book by a dead white man.
* * *
—
During the fall of my freshman year, I heard that a group on campus called Uncomfortable Learning was inviting Harvard Law School professor and author Randall Kennedy to come to speak about his book Nigger. A group of three Williams students had started Uncomfortable Learning the year before. It was a guest lecture series meant to facilitate further discussion of topics that they felt were presented and supported one-sidedly on campus.
I held Randall Kennedy in high regard and had already read his work, so I was looking forward to meeting him. During the weeks before his visit, I reread each of his books and contemplated what questions I should ask him.
In anticipation of Kennedy’s talk, I also spent time thinking about how my view on the use of the word nigger had evolved over time. During high school, I’d generally thought that with art being one of the few exceptions, only black people should use the word. My reasoning was simple: because the word nigger had been used to oppress black people, black people should be able to dictate its use. To me, that made using the word nigga as a term of endearment perfectly fine.
I also thought that it was obnoxious and inconsiderate of white people to ask for permission to use the word. The very idea of their asking annoyed me. As I saw it, a white person could not be genuinely sympathetic toward black suffering without understanding the need for them to refrain from using the word nigger. Yet since I’d started going to GPA in fourth grade, I’d been asked by white friends for permission to use the word many times.
Despite what I actually thought, I rarely, if ever, objected to white peers using the word around me. I knew that I was only being asked for permission in the first place b
ecause that peer sensed that saying nigger might bother me. Why give them that power? Why let them think that saying a single word in front of me could ruin my day or make me want to cry or start a fight?
My mom had taught me that it was important to make an effort to be in command of your own emotions because revealing anger, or even irritation, would give some people the satisfaction of knowing how to get under your skin. As a kid, I sometimes found it difficult to heed this advice. But as I grew older, it influenced my thinking on the word nigger and other offensive speech.
By the time I was at Williams, I largely agreed with Kennedy: I would not be friends with any white person who used the word unreflectively. But I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with white people using the word. I believed context mattered and that they should be mindful of potential consequences. In the classroom and in other, similar settings, I thought it reasonable to establish speech restrictions conducive to learning and productive dialogue. But aside from that, it is up to individuals whether to be judicious in how they express themselves.
On the day of the event, I spoke to Kennedy before his talk, and he told me to keep in touch. When it was time for the question-and-answer session, I was prepared. I asked Kennedy a question that required him to either explain or reconcile seemingly contradictory statements written in two of his books: How could he be okay with white people using the word nigger when permitting their use of the word could also encourage the very “casual and unreflective reliance on racial distinctions” that he challenges?
Uncensored Page 18