—Amy Sohn (’95)
The influence [Augustus A.] White ’57 has had on Brown’s racial and ethnic diversity reflects the steady, deliberate effort of an unlikely pioneer. A groundbreaking orthopedic surgeon, he was the first African American medical student at Stanford, the first black surgical resident at Yale, the first black professor of medicine at Yale, and the first black department chief at a Harvard teaching hospital. . . . White and his colleagues spoke to hundreds of students, faculty, and staff about diversity at Brown, and compiled, synthesized, and analyzed what they heard. The resulting report, The American University and the Pluralist Ideal, was released in 1986. It made seventeen recommendations, including broadened course offerings on race- and ethnicity-related subjects (the ethnic studies concentration was born as a result) and increased support for minority clubs and organizations.
—Beth Schwartzapfel (’01)
What Are You, Anyway?
AMY DUBOIS BARNETT
It was a muggy day in September of 1987. The dense New England humidity of a stubborn Indian summer had forced most of us pre-freshmen back into our skimpy August clothes. We’d hung the crisp new college outfits in our narrow dorm closets, and had retreated into the baggy shorts and long tank tops that all high school students wore that year.
Brown shoulders abounded as we nervously gathered for our first group event of the Third World Transition Program, or TWTP, as it was commonly known. All nonwhite members of the incoming freshman class were invited for a four-day orientation that was meant to acclimate us to our Ivy League surroundings. We were meant to commune together and develop bonds so that we felt comfortable and at home when the “snowstorm” (our term for the arrival of the Caucasian students) hit.
Upon arriving at TWTP, my first question had been: What’s up with the name? I’m from New York, not a third-world country. Apparently, the program had been created to appease the mostly African-American students who famously organized a walkout in 1968 to protest their lack of representation among the classes and faculty. Therefore, the nomenclature was not to be trifled with (even though the majority of students who gathered under its banner had graduated at the top of their classes from some of the best high schools found in the Western Hemisphere).
Chastened by the explanation of TWTP’s genesis and shamed by my lack of knowledge about what it took to make the program a reality, I took my seat in Andrews Dining Hall next to a cool Indian girl in an all-black outfit who was wearing only one enormous earring. In typical teen girl fashion, we became fast friends in about fifteen minutes, but were quickly parted when the program organizers announced that we would be gathering in ethnicity-based groups. She trotted off to join the Asian students and I was left alone to face a difficult choice: Did I join the large fun-looking group of black students at the far end of the room who were already laughing, high-fiving, and forming cliques? Or should I join the small sad group of biracial kids whose only unifying characteristic was parents of two different races?
Technically, I belonged with the biracial kids as my mother is black, while my father is white and Jewish. But that characterization did not feel like home to me at all. I had been raised black, felt black, and had never once called into question my racial identity. There was no confusion or conflict in my home either. My dad had always told me, “It’s simple. I am white and you are black.”
So, I made my decision and trotted off to join the black group. I sat down in a circle of girls who were complaining that the humidity was jacking up their straightened hair. My own curls were pulled back into a ponytail, so I had little to contribute to the conversation. They looked at me a little oddly until finally one girl asked, “You sure you’re in the right group? You look like you’re mixed with something. What are you, anyway?”
The dreaded question. I’d been asked “What are you?” my whole life as, apparently, my long nose, tan skin, and curly hair did not immediately indicate the identity I felt so strongly.
“I’m black, but my dad is white,” I replied.
“Well, aren’t you supposed to be over there?” The girl gestured with her chin in the direction of the biracial kids, who were in the middle of choreographing a skit that involved standing on either side of a rope and pulling back and forth to indicate their racial confusion. Ugh. Nevertheless, I knew I was too conspicuous to avoid grabbing a piece of that rope, so off I went. But I left feeling determined that would be the last time I would be deemed “not black enough” at Brown University.
I set about my focused overcompensation immediately. I joined most of the black groups at Brown, pledged a black sorority, mostly hung out with black students, and only dated black guys. In the middle of a Third World Center meeting that somehow devolved into a heated discussion about relationships, I even made a firm public declaration that I would never date a white guy.
By my sophomore year, I had successfully erased any doubt about my relative blackness. It had been a challenging process as the black student population at Brown was notoriously judgmental. The worst possible label a black student could have—and one that we threw around with relative ease and impunity—was incognegro. An incognegro was a black student who we did not feel “acted black” enough. Perhaps that person had too many white friends or, god forbid, hung out with the “Eurotrash” crowd. Perhaps the person didn’t listen to “black music” or preferred Wriston Quad frat parties over black Greek step shows. Maybe the hapless incognegro simply couldn’t shake his or her lifetime of prep school education and upper-middle-class suburban upbringing to develop a cultural bilinguality like the rest of us. No one thought twice when the black salutatorian from Exeter gave a pound (fist bump, for the uninitiated) to the Phillips Academy lacrosse team captain and said, “Wassup, bro.”
Yes, I successfully avoided the dreaded incognegro label and was a fully accepted, card-carrying member of Brown’s small but highly opinionated black community, until the unthinkable happened: I fell in love with a white student. Before Brown, I’d had an equal number of white and black boyfriends—a fact I had certainly not made public at college as I expressed my singular love for the “brothers.” But sophomore year, I got swept away by a half-Danish student from Vermont. In other words, I fell for not just a regular white guy, but the whitest white guy you could possibly imagine. I simply could not help it; we had a powerful chemistry and I was head over heels within weeks.
At first, I tried to keep the relationship a secret, but that didn’t last. We were nineteen-year-olds in love, which necessitated the requisite hand-holding between classes, sharing meals at the Ratty, and making out on the Green. Soon, everyone knew that we were a couple, and the shock reverberated across campus. I expected and received some ribbing related to my anti-interracial-dating comments of a few months prior. And I knew the black men of Brown would be less than thrilled that one of “theirs” had strayed from the fold. Interestingly, for as much as I had desired to have a place in Brown’s black society, I found myself not giving a crap what anyone thought. I was comfortable in my own skin and I had nothing left to prove. I was who I was: a biracial black girl who loved a white man.
It was during this time that I learned one of the most important lessons that Brown University can teach: Being yourself is more important than anything else. And dichotomy is okay because one extreme does not have to preclude another. I was African-American and Jewish. I was a member of a black sorority yet my best friend was Asian. I loved both hip-hop and classic rock. I liked hiking and camping and I also loved to go clubbing in New York City. And I loved my white boyfriend (and white father, for that matter) but never had any doubt about my black identity.
My boyfriend and I were together long enough that the campus got completely used to seeing us. He would come with me to step shows and I would play hacky sack on the green with him and his Deadhead buddies. The more confident and comfortable we were, the more Brown felt like my real home. And I finally realized that I had never been in danger of being labeled an incognegr
o, because their main distinguishing characteristic wasn’t actually lack of interest in the black community; it was lack of comfort in their own skin.
Sadly, the perils and temptations of junior year proved too much for my boyfriend and me. However, while he and I didn’t exactly stay ever true to each other, I remain ever true to Brown for helping me to understand that I could be anything and everything as long as I was true to myself first.
Mix Tape
ANDREW SEAN GREER
It was a very strange time to be in love.
I arrived at Brown in the fall of 1988. I was the now-impossible-to-recall age of seventeen, every bit the boy from the Maryland suburbs, looking wide-eyed around the dorm room in Morris-Champlain that I was to share with a yet-unmet roommate. My parents bought me a Thanksgiving sandwich at the Meeting Street Cafe and a Brown sweatshirt and drove away, leaving me quite perplexed as to what I was meant to do now. I was a tall, skinny redhead with jeans still short from my growing spurts and a steamer trunk filled with old T-shirts and sweatshirts. Years later, when a college friend moved to Washington, DC, he called me to say, “Now that I’ve seen the people out here, I understand the way you used to dress.”
I was, as they used to say in the sixties, a “grind.” A bland adolescent used to pleasing my teachers. Other high school kids seemed angry and tearful about something, but I had no idea what. They skipped classes and showed up bleary-eyed. They blinked vacantly when asked questions about the reading. They went to Fugazi concerts and dyed their hair black and dropped acid. This way of living seemed as foreign as that of a desert tribe. What I didn’t realize was that they had already tasted life.
Reading over my diary from that freshman year is an embarrassing experience, and I will save us all the shame of quoting from it. Most are recountings of drinking blanc de blanc and playing card games in dorm rooms. Joining an a cappella singing group. Meeting with my advisor, Harriet Sheridan, and watching her smile patiently as I described my dreams. I still wrote papers a week early and finished every page of the reading. I was friendly, efficient, and numb. But I recall writing, deep in winter, that it was so strange everyone on my hall was having breakdowns. Coming to me asking for love advice. They all seemed to have such problems! I must be asexual, I decided. I must be some kind of rock when other people are falling apart. I ignored the very dark periods when I would stare at the floor in the shower and time would pass without my knowing. Time in which my mind blocked up some passage I had discovered in myself.
A rock. It shows my mind-set, that I would come up with such a myopic interpretation of what was going on. To others, it was already obvious that I was gay. Not, quite yet, to me.
Recall that it was 1988. Nobody was out. Absolutely nobody. The only gay people I had ever seen were Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly on TV. Gay sex was illegal in most states, including Rhode Island. Two years before, Californians had voted on a proposition to quarantine everyone with AIDS (it lost, of course). Ronald Reagan, president at the time, had only mentioned the existence of adults with AIDS the year before. There were clowns on TV, and there was silence. Behind the silence was death.
A cold, slushy winter in Providence; saving my breakfast meal credit to be used late at night at the Gate for pizza. Wearing a white tuxedo jacket and singing tenor with the Jabberwocks under Wayland Arch. Hoarding leftovers in a dorm room fridge so that my roommate, who was pledging Alpha Phi Alpha, could give his pledge brothers something to eat when they snuck away from their endless chores. Hiding cigarettes from my hallmate from Flushing who wanted to quit smoking. Taking a creative writing course where the teacher herself openly smoked. And Campus Dance, back in the days when you had to sneak in your own booze. I saw of Brown only the fantasy I had already made of it. I did the same with myself.
* * *
Cut to two years later. I was faltering in one class and about to fail another. Bs were more common than As. I had given up on my goals of taking a science class every semester and of learning a second foreign language. I had scandalized my singing group when they noticed a boy’s name written on my Converse high-tops with a heart beside it (the scandal was compounded by the fact that he belonged to a rival singing group). I was never going to graduate magna cum laude. And I didn’t care. I was in love.
I was a very irritating person to be around. I mooned around the Pembroke Campus like a ghost and wrote love notes in the snow below his window. I created terrible poetry. I played a particular mix tape at all hours in my off-campus housing. I wept and lost sleep and ate badly. I dressed all in black for Valentine’s Day. One particularly sad day, I found myself behind the women’s center crying and crying into the grass. In short: I did all the things that everyone else had done in high school. I acted like a teenager—which, in a way, I was. It always seemed a shame to me that gay kids back then got to progress in a normal way—with mash notes, and pulling pigtails, and chaste dates and prom and all that—the wading-in that straight kids got with love and sex. Back then, we had to throw ourselves into the deep end, which often proved complicated for those around us.
And, as I said, there was death. I remember reading the New York Times obituaries for young men who had died of “pneumonia.” There were dozens every week. Graduate students at Brown, those older than us who hadn’t the luck to be born a little too late, were dematriculating from their programs to go home. To go home and die, to be frank. The AIDS Memorial Quilt came to Brown and my friend Moore made a panel for Marco Clarke, a high school classmate who had died of AIDS. I remember walking downtown to the Providence clinic to have blood drawn and waiting a week before returning to hear my results. Imagine that horrible week!
All of that, laid on top of the awkwardness of courtship and dating and sex. On top of frat boys yelling faggot and boys refusing to date me because I was too “out” and the generally absurd politics of the era. On top of simply being young.
On top of that terrible mix tape blaring out the window on Meeting Street.
* * *
I am probably among the few who didn’t get royally trashed before our graduation. That’s because, along with my friend Alaraby, I was one of the commencement speakers. We walked at the head of the procession, through the gates, and down College Hill to the meetinghouse. We stood in front of President Vartan Gregorian and changed our speech without informing the graduation committee. We spoke out for need-blind admissions. We spoke about how hard it had been to be gay or of color or different in any way, even at liberal Brown. My classmates stood up, shouted at us, furious that we had ruined their graduation with politics yet again. A riot was beginning in the church. I suppose I froze up there, confused. I only remember feeling Gregorian’s hand pulling at my gown. “Keep going,” he said to me.
It’s funny to think back on it now. What a different person I had become from the skinny boy in a sweatshirt my parents had left behind. Hard to picture that boy in a black gown and mortarboard before his class, hearing those things shouted at him. That boy never wanted that. He had only come to school because it was what had always been expected of him. He wanted to join a singing group, and wear J. Crew blazers, and visit his new friends at their parents’ Cape Cod houses, and write a novel or a play or a story. That boy: he had a fantasy of Brown. That boy: he wanted to be loved by teachers and fellow students. That boy: he wanted finally, at last, to be popular. And this young man had spoiled that early dream so badly that he would have to skip graduation parties, for fear of people accosting him. This young man had spoiled everybody’s fantasy.
“Thank you,” a fellow classmate told me over a decade later. “I couldn’t tell you then, nobody knew, but it meant a lot to me.”
Of course it didn’t help on that summer day back in 1992, standing in front of people who hated me, trying to start my speech up again. And to be honest, I hadn’t done it for him. Or for the boy I used to be.
I spoke out that day, my graduation day, because I thought that out there, on the green, where our words were
broadcast from the meetinghouse to all the parents, grandparents, friends, and professors, the boy who had recently dumped me might be there, sitting with his friends, listening. Maybe he would think me brave. Maybe I would win him back.
I was very young. Very young.
It was a very strange time to be in love.
The Wheel of the Fuji Goes Round
DILIP D’SOUZA
The magazine, I remember, was Playboy. After I had ogled the yards of bare feminine flesh, feeling mildly guilty, I noticed an ad for Cutty Sark whisky. It had a sweepstakes coupon at the bottom: first prize, a DeLorean car, the sleek silver beauty in the news that year for reasons I no longer remember. Not unlike many others of my gender, I drooled over the women in that magazine, but damn, I wanted the DeLorean!
Not that I really expected to win. Still, I scribbled my name on the coupon and tossed it into the nearest postbox.
This was 1981, and I was in my first few weeks at Brown—my first few weeks outside my home country of India as a student in the two-year-old computer science department. So new to it all, I was still extrapolating with faultless logic from the word undergrad to tell people that I was a “new grad.” I couldn’t understand why they looked bemused.
I caught on, eventually: undergrad, but grad student.
One time I called a friend—a member of the Brown women’s squash team who regularly thumped me on the court—and burbled, “I’ve got music in my life,” because I had just bought a basic clock radio. She didn’t quite get my delight. And then there was the time I confessed to my landlady, “I really like Jews.”
Like, you know, I really like toffee. I really like redheads. I really like Jews. The prince of fresh-off-the-boat, cringe-inducing, suck-me-into-the-earth-please naïveté? That was me.
And so it was fitting that I sent in that coupon and lived, naïvely, in hope. Oh, the dreams I had! I’d drive down Thayer Street in my gleaming DeLorean with all of Brown staring as I pushed up the door, casual-like, to pick up the Sunday morning ProJo. Folks would admire the machine and when they walked up for a closer look, I’d say, cool to the max: “It’s mine! And get this, I’m a grad on a five-hundred-dollar-a-month fellowship!”
The Brown Reader Page 14