I wondered if it was just me, but my mother noticed the same thing, and we were dressed well enough, didn’t smell, and were friendly folks. Where we came from, you greeted people, but that wasn’t the case in the Boston area.
Beyond a general coldness, Boston can be especially unfriendly for black people. There’s a rich and beautiful history of black people in Boston from the days of abolition to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, but recent history has overshadowed much of that.
Today, there’s a significant black community in Boston but relatively little in the way of black political or economic power, and of course as rich as the history is, it’s also plagued by ugliness. The Red Sox were the last Major League baseball team to integrate and chose to pass on Jackie Robinson in the 1940s. During the wave of forced busing and school integration in the 1970s, Boston stood out for its violent reaction, and the image of a white Bostonian wielding an American flag as a weapon, aiming it at a black man as if ready to impale him, has never left my head.
On an average visit to Boston, unless you know where to go, you don’t see the diversity in public that exists in other major U.S. cities and in Boston itself.* Never before have I been to an American city that so effectively hides its black population, and I lived there for twelve years. It’s as if the Underground Railroad were still active! All of this supports my conclusion that people in Boston generally are not friendly to outsiders, and I found this to be the case on my first day as a resident, even in the friendlier, more liberal town across the Charles River, mockingly referred to as “The People’s Republic of Cambridge.”
When someone finally did break the pattern by smiling and greeting us, my mother exclaimed, “Oh, thank you so much for saying hello!” This reasonable and well-home-trained person was a fellow freshman in my dorm, and she was black.
I didn’t know much about my roommate before arriving. I knew, like me, he had a unique name, Dahni-El (pronounced donny-el), grew up in Brooklyn, and had attended a New England boarding school. When I opened the door to our room, he had already moved in. The first thing I saw was a footlocker covered in a large red, black, and green flag. I thought to myself, “We are going to be the most militant-looking brothers on this campus!” Between his Afrocentric flag, my fresh-back-from-Africa kente clothing, and our names, I imagined our room would be the hub of the black Harvard revolution. We would convene late at night and strategize by candlelight over heavily marked maps with zones flagged “The Man” and “The People.” It would be great.
After the initial image of Afrocentric blackness, Dahni-El and I discovered that we also shared a general lack of financial resources. Neither of us owned a television,* so one of our neighbors used crayons to draw a picture of a television and taped it to the wall where she thought the real thing should have been. We left it there all year. To help cover our tuition and expenses, we both held campus jobs in a department called Dorm Crew. That meant cleaning hallways and stairways, removing trash from dorms, and scrubbing bathrooms inside student residences. Yes, we performed your basic janitorial duties, because it was one of the highest-paying jobs on campus. Its high wages meant Dorm Crew attracted financial aid recipients,* and a disproportionate number of workers were minorities.
I think I know what you’re thinking: “Baratunde, are you telling me that poor black kids at Harvard literally cleaned up the shit of their fellow Harvard students?” To answer you, I would clarify that it wasn’t only black kids, and we cleaned much more than shit. Bathrooms are diverse ecosystems, requiring the cleaning up of hair, toothpaste, and soap scum. It’s an admittedly strange dynamic, but it came with amazing privileges, and you would be hard-pressed to find a stronger advocate of the Dorm Crew program than me.
In the beginning, the arrangement is awkward for the cleaner and the cleanee. Imagine answering your dorm’s buzzer to find your chemistry lab partner standing there with a bucket of cleaning supplies and a mop, demanding access to your bathroom. But it’s something you get used to, and I relished not just the money but also the opportunity to escape the fast-paced world of ideas, debates, meetings, egos, papers, and the overall social noise of college and replace it with some solitary time scrubbing shower stalls. Dorm Crew was the least stressful part of my Harvard experience, providing much-needed downtime. Instead of thinking about my classes and assignments, I always carried a Walkman and either listened to books on tape (a habit I inherited from my mother) or conservative talk radio hosts Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Howie Carr. I didn’t grow up listening to conservative arguments—my mother loved me—but I found it oddly comforting to broaden my political ideology inputs while breathing in large amounts of cleaning chemicals.
Dorm Crew wasn’t just a dirty, well-paying job that offered mental escape. It was also a gateway to coveted jobs during Harvard’s class reunions each spring. Few places welcome alumni back like Harvard. The premise of the reunion weekend is to remind people how great Harvard is, how much fun they had (even if they didn’t), get them drunk, and get them to give money to Harvard so the cycle can repeat itself for the next generation. Through Dorm Crew, I performed a critical function in this process. I ran the liquor operations.
In order to hire students to work in various reunion jobs, the alumni office relies on Dorm Crew as a primary recruiting and filtering tool. People who climb the ranks and become Dorm Crew captains, with responsibility for scheduling, managing, and assessing multiple workers across an entire dorm during the school year, get the most sought-after jobs during reunion. Since your reunion clientele is comprised of twenty-six- to ninety-plus-year-old Harvard alumni who run a large slice of the world, there’s an amazing opportunity to earn a significant pile of cash through tips. During my time at Harvard, four major categories of competitive reunion jobs were available: Al Powers, a logistics crew, which sets up tables, chairs, and tents for the various events; Linen Crew, which prepares dorm rooms for alumni to live in again as if they were young; Bellhops, who carry luggage and drive alumni around town; and Liquor Crew, which manages the procurement and distribution of all beer, wine, spirits, and other beverages.
There are many important jobs at Harvard University: the president, the heads of academic departments, deans, real estate directors, and the executives who manage the Harvard endowment. But Liquor Crew is the most important job at Harvard because it makes all other elements of Harvard possible, and for a time I ran it. My very first year, I worked as a bar back, serving non-mixed drinks and restocking ice, making sure cups and napkins were available, and generally being a grunt. It was because of this job that I first consciously became aware of how many hours are in a week: 168. Because the job paid an hourly wage, and because it only lasted for one week of the year, the goal was to work as many hours as possible, regardless of the effect on one’s body. I worked over 100 hours that week. I learned how to rapidly set up and tear down a bar several times a day whether inside a two-hundred-year-old dining hall or in the middle of a football field. And I learned that no matter the time of day, there’s some class of Harvard alumni ready to drink, from Bloody Marys in the morning for older alumni to cup after cup of beer for the younger reunion attendees.
The job was thrilling, chaotic, and entertaining, offering crash courses in supply-chain management and interpersonal communication. It also taught me that serving alcohol to alumni is the best way to understand the value of a Harvard education. I got the opportunity, time and again, to interact with people at every stage of post-college life. I saw their hormones on a rampage at the fifth-year reunion, their parenting skills under pressure at the fifteenth, their hairlines receding at an inverse rate to their income for the twenty-fifth, and their dwindling numbers beyond the fortieth. I spoke to and learned from all of these people, and the lesson was consistent and simple: “What you study here doesn’t matter. Pursue your passion, and you’ll figure out a way to earn a living at it down the line. Be yourself.” Sometimes I received this lesson from people who had failed to apply it to themselv
es. Other times, it was clear they were living their dreams and proving their own point by example.
Not all of my Liquor Crew alumni interactions were so high-minded and positive, though. Many of these alumni attended Harvard at a time when people who looked like me cleaned their bathrooms, not as a campus job but as a lifetime career. The clash of generations and cultures could be intense, like the time a very old white man accused me of lying to him.
It happened during a reunion event for one of the older classes and took place at Eliot House, a dorm along the Charles River. We set up the bar on a terrace under a shining white tent. A string quartet played off to the side, setting an elegant mood. The bar was slammed with throngs of alumni, and my job was to keep the universe intact by serving as many of them as I could as quickly as possible. I felt like I was deployed with a MASH unit in a war zone. Ice was flying. The ground was slick, covered in an alcoholic sludge. Knives and corkscrews were scattered across the tables, providing a dangerous obstacle for fast-moving hands. Knowing who had asked for what and in what order was impossible to keep straight. There was no line, no numbered ticketing. There was pure adrenaline, instinct honed by training, and chaos, out of which a lone voice managed to commandeer my attention.
“Young man, you served three old people before me,” a very tall, very pale, white-haired man shouted at me.
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s really busy. I didn’t see you there. What can I get for you?” I offered, with an apologetic smile.
“You’re a liar!”
I turned to face this amazing charge, and his finger was in my face, pointing at me and shaking. He yelled again with even more vehemence, “You’re a liar!”
This was no normal yell. I heard the words with my ears but I also felt them in my soul. There was such anger and contempt in his tone that I froze. It felt as if the voices of his incredulous ancestors were also yelling at me for daring even to be present.
I apologized again, and he responded by threatening to have my financial aid pulled! At this point, someone else came over to calm the lunatic down, but in that moment, I felt extraordinarily black and angry and embarrassed.
Moments like these were rare. With all that I knew of the world intellectually, with all that my mother had taught me, and with all I had experienced firsthand at Sidwell, I was well prepared for, but rarely encountered, such raw ugliness. There was an incident in which someone scrawled the word “nigger” on the walls of my freshman dorm, and while it was painful, to me it also felt a bit like old news. In the wake of The Bell Curve, a book that tried to intellectually support the idea of black people’s native inferiority, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield provoked a reaction by claiming most black students at Harvard were unqualified and only enrolled because of affirmative action. Again, incidents like these didn’t make me feel great, but “intellectuals” and leaders and all sorts of people have been claiming black people’s inferiority for centuries. I wasn’t about to let their ignorance completely define my experience.
More often, my experience of race at Harvard was full of joy and excitement.
The Class of 1999 had a special bond. Not only did Prince personally write a song about us and us alone, we just came together quickly and well. This class cohesion crossed racial lines, but it was especially strong among the black students in my class. We regularly erupted into self-congratulatory chants of “Nine nine! Nine nine! Nine nine!” with absolutely no prompting. We were as likely to explode into cheers at a sporting event as in the dining hall or crossing the quad. The fact that it annoyed other classes was proof to us that we were right. “They’re just jealous because they don’t love themselves as much as we do, because we’re clearly more awesome,” we thought. We roamed the campus and the city, a sprawling swarm of self-love and blackness. One moment we were taking part in impromptu “Black Olympics” in Harvard Yard. The next moment we were taking over a weekend dance party in one of the upper-class houses. In one unforgettable event, we decided to go to the movies to see the film Dead Presidents starring Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker, and many more. Our Swarm of Blackness flooded the sidewalks and T station and subway cars, and as we crossed a bridge nearing the movie theater, we broke out into a run, descending the hill like Gandalf and the Rohirrim on the fifth day of battle at Helm’s Deep in the Lord of the Rings movie. It was beautiful.
Yet for as much as I bonded with my black classmates and happily joined in the swarm, I also forged my own path based on interests that had nothing to do with race, and chief among these was technology.
My other campus job—I had several—was as a computer “user assistant,” offering technical support in the campus computer labs and to students in their rooms. I worked my way up to the advanced support team, which was basically a tech support SWAT team. When all others failed, they would call us in to solve the problem. To this day, I still get Facebook messages from college classmates asking me for computer support. I also worked a job as a software tester and was active in the Harvard Computer Society, leading its tenth-anniversary book project. But the activity that consumed the largest share of my time was the Harvard Crimson, the school’s paper.
Back in high school, I had discovered a deep love for and addiction to both the consumption and creation of news. I worked part-time as a copy aide at the Washington Post, was an editor on the school paper, and devoured news in print, and on radio and television. The Washington Association of Black Journalists offered a weekend journalism program that I enrolled in, which bolstered my interest in the field and led me deeper into the world. We even got to visit the press briefing room at the White House, an opportunity I used to get a photo of myself behind the podium striking a revolutionary pose, naturally.
Presitunde.
When I told Ken Cooper, the then-director of the program and former national editor for the Boston Globe, that I was going to Harvard, he didn’t hesitate: “Do the Crimson,” he said. I took his advice, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.
The Crimson is a legendary institution. The daily has been around since 1873, is run by undergraduates with no oversight from the university, and claims some impressive alumni like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the technology investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson, and CNBC’s Jim Cramer (sorry!). The process of joining the staff is known as the “comp,” and generally people choose one department to comp: news, photography, graphics, et cetera. I couldn’t decide, so I went with news and photography. Over my years at the paper, I had a chance to cover a wide swath of campus activity, from student protests to the dean’s office to science and technology policy. Merging my technology interests with the paper, I became cochair (with Jennifer 8. Lee) of the first ever “online” department in the paper’s history. What I especially relished was the opportunity to have input into the staff editorial, the paper’s official position on affairs of the day. Sunday nights, I got to experience directly how diversity in media could affect what the paper published, through the mentorship of an older black student and executive on the editorial board named Dave.
In one of the first meetings of the Black Students Association I ever attended, older classmates warned us, “Don’t talk to the Crimson. They’re racist!” A series of incidents that had occurred before the arrival of The Nine Nine had led to a total collapse of the relationship between the paper and black student leadership. The advice I got was not only to avoid talking to the paper but also avoid working there. As a budding newspaperman, my missing the chance to work on one of the top college newspapers in the nation wasn’t an option. Enter Dave. We would often be the only black voices in the room when Crimson staff opinions were being debated, and I saw how he dropped in bits of perspective and knowledge, strongly advocated for certain positions, and often shifted the entire room. By engaging internally, Dave showed me an approach completely opposite of what I’d been told by some of the BSA leadership. The next year, Dave and I made a joint presentation to BSA members, encouraging them to join the paper, not ju
st to affect the politics but also to take advantage of the ridiculous opportunities the place offered. If nothing else, it hosted some pretty sweet parties and was one of the few buildings on campus at the time to have a solidly working television.
Sure, race absolutely played a role in my Harvard experiences, whether friendships, political events, or other. But in general, the beauty of my Harvard experience is that I could often just be a student without having to actively and continuously think of myself as a black student. Upon graduation, I was conscious of the fact that I could be me and thus be black but not have to be black in order to be me.
Upon receiving my Harvard degree, an overwhelmingly proud mama embraced me on behalf of her efforts and the efforts of those who came before, exclaiming, “We did it!”
How to Be The Black Employee
When I graduated from Harvard, I considered three basic employment paths: journalism, grad school, and some combination of technology and business. Despite my intense devotion to the Harvard Crimson, my journalistic career path was derailed the summer before my senior year when I had to bail on an internship at the Washington Post due to repetitive strain injury, commonly referred to at the time as carpal tunnel syndrome. Basically, I had gone hog-wild with overtyping on all the campus computer and Internet resources, and my wrists stopped working. I couldn’t type, write, carry a lunch tray, or turn a doorknob without excruciating pain, so that summer, I chose instead to do a summer theatre program. In terms of grad school, I looked at a few options, but there was no particular academic problem I felt so passionately about that I wanted to stay in a university setting. I was ready to get out! Plus, it was 1999, and Internet-related anything was hot. Kids were getting venture-capital money for adding the word “Web” to almost any idea, and the tech geek in me wanted to be close to that world, so, long before I worked full-time in writing and comedy, I took a job with a strategy consulting firm in Boston that focused on telecommunications, media, and Internet-related business.
How to Be Black Page 10