Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  But there was a time, when I was a kid in Albuquerque, when my life could have unspooled in a very different way. We were poor, and my single mother, who was without emotional or financial support, worked two and three jobs. We were constantly negotiating the role my violent and addicted biological father played in my life. I’ve always been aware of a shadow life running alongside my own, a life of curtailed possibility.

  I was a smart, hardworking kid, but my acceptance to boarding school was a fluke. It was a fluke that the recruiter chose my middle school to visit; it was a fluke that I happened to be there the day the recruiter came (my parents frequently took us out of school when my geologist dad had fieldwork); it was a fluke that I managed to hang on to the pamphlet and request an application. And it was a fluke that I happened to fit the particular demographics that they were seeking to diversify the student body and that among all those other smart, hardworking kids, I was chosen.

  And yet that first fluke was followed by others—scholarships to college, graduate school, fellowships, residencies—until it became clear that they were no longer flukes—that I’d been accepted into a rarefied world where such opportunities came more frequently. I’d learned how to navigate that rarefied world and to behave more or less as if I belonged there.

  I didn’t fully understand this when I was twenty-four. I don’t flatter myself that in the end I could have made a difference to the dean’s decision. But as I stood before her, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was myself in that rarefied world only on sufferance, and not just because I was a new teacher at Elliot. My own sense of gratitude and indebtedness for having been allowed a seat at the feast kept me from fighting for Ana as hard as I should have.

  ■ ■

  I dreaded reporting to Ana that I’d failed her. But I never had to, because the next afternoon, Ana approached me, walking stiffly across the grass. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”

  “Ana. Please don’t leave.” I was begging now. But for what? For her to stay and be told each day that she didn’t belong at Elliot?

  “I’m letting them all down,” she said, meaning her parents and the people at church who’d donated to cover her flights and expenses.

  “You’re not,” I told her. “They’ll understand. It’s just summer school.”

  Ana’s head was bent. There was a long pause, and I knew she was crying only when the tears dropped onto her pink shorts. “I just really, really wanted to go to college.”

  I hadn’t understood until then that Ana actually believed that her chances for college had been ruined by this summer school math class. I was furious that Ana was leaving this place feeling so diminished. Elliot Academy was supposed to broaden her horizons, to expose her to new ideas and friends. It was not supposed to crush her. “You’ll go to college,” I said when I caught my breath. “Of course you will. There are so many ways to get the things you want in life.”

  She nodded, unconvinced.

  But we both knew that the one way, if you are born to a family without money, is to prove yourself smart enough and pleasant enough and eager enough to convince the gatekeepers to let you in, and then, once you’re there, to try with all your might to convince them to keep you.

  ■ ■

  It’s a worthy, essential aim to seek “youth from every quarter.” Institutions and individuals have a responsibility to work against centuries of structural inequality. And I’ve seen both as a student and as a professor the myriad ways diverse voices do indeed make for a richer learning environment. But it should go without saying that it’s not enough for elite institutions to accept students from racially, ethnically, and economically diverse backgrounds if those students are then told in a thousand ways—ways tiny and large, oblique and direct—that they are there only at the whim of the powers that be, that they haven’t paid for the privilege to err or falter, that, at root, they don’t belong.

  ■ ■

  I think about Ana frequently. I’ve imagined many futures for her. In my favorite, most self-indulgent fantasy, she’s a leader in her field, a mathematician, say. She’s invited to give an assembly at Elliot Academy, and when she stands on the stage before the dean and the rest of the Elliot community, she gives them hell.

  What I really hope is that Ana is happy. I hope she went to college and found other mentors who did right by her, that she’s doing a job she loves and that challenges her. The chances are good. The Ana I met that summer was smart and driven, and there are a lot of good teachers out there ready to encourage talented students to fulfill their promise. Someone, after all, told her about Elliot Academy. And Ana, who was, no doubt, already well aware that the deck was stacked against her, nevertheless found that application and filled it out.

  OUTSIDE

  Kiese Laymon

  THE DAY I MET DAVE MELTON, he asked if I could help him get rehired at a job he lost for being black, poor, scared, and desperate. I was a twenty-six-year-old adjunct at Vassar College and Dave was the first person I met in Poughkeepsie, New York. On the ride home, Dave claimed we clicked not because of our bald heads or our love for midrange jump shots but because Dave “rocked gold teeth and Jordans, and people from the South love gold teeth and Jordans, ked.”

  I’m not sure anyone from my South loved Jordans as much as Dave, but I’m absolutely sure Dave never knew the correct pronunciation of my name. He never called me “Kiese.” Sometimes he called me “Keece.” Usually called me “ked,” which was short—or long—for “kid.”

  While Dave Melton worked at Vassar, he sold drugs to sad people inside and outside Vassar’s gates. Like nearly every black dealer I’ve known, Dave wasn’t lucky. In the mid-nineties. Dave’s initial sentence was six years. He did three. In 1999, while still on parole, Dave went to Maryland with his sixteen-year-old brother who had some weed in the car. Police stopped the car. For the parole violation Dave got sentenced to another seven months of boot camp. That’s when he had to quit his job working Building and Grounds at Vassar.

  For a few months, while on parole in Maryland, Dave worked two jobs and sent money back to his girlfriend, his mother, and his daughter in Poughkeepsie. Eventually Dave moved back to New York and traveled to Maryland once a week to meet with his PO. When money for bus rides got tight, Dave missed one week, then another week, and another. His PO told him he understood that Dave didn’t want to leave his daughter and money was tight, but he’d have to arrest him when he reentered Maryland for unlawfully crossing state lines while on parole. A warrant was issued for Dave’s arrest.

  One winter night in 2004, I got a call from Dave’s fiancée, Shauna. Earlier that day, Dave called my office and told me he wouldn’t make our City League basketball game because he had to take his daughter, CheChe, to the carnival.

  “Keece, they got Dave,” she said. “Can you take me to see him? You’re a professor. They’ll listen to you. Can you talk to him?”

  Shauna explained how two officers stopped Dave as he was paying a toll on the Mid-Hudson Bridge. The officer claimed Dave didn’t signal when changing lanes. Shauna, who was in the car with Dave, says he didn’t signal because at the last second, he saw that the tollbooth in his lane was closed.

  “The last time he got arrested in Maryland,” Shauna said, “they pulled him over ’cause they said he had too many air fresheners hanging from his front mirror.”

  After taking turns talking about how sick it was that Americans with the least access to healthy choice and second chances are given the harshest punishments, Shauna said she was calling the Kingston jail on three-way to see what they decided to do. “If Dave picks up, tell him some good words, Keece. Make my man feel better.”

  We were on hold for about five minutes when we heard a low-toned, gruff “Hello.”

  It was Dave.

  Shauna told Dave how much she loved him and wanted to marry him as soon as he got home.

>   “I love you, too,” Dave said. “Where CheChe?”

  “She’s in bed,” Shauna said. “You think you can come home tonight?”

  “Probably not,” he said. “Maybe. I’m saying, you never know.”

  “Stop lying,” Shauna said. “You know you ain’t coming home. CheChe wouldn’t stop crying.”

  “Yo, you act like I’m dead,” Dave said. “I just wanna get this behind me, you know?”

  “Keece on the line,” she told him.

  “You on the line, ked?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here. You maintaining?”

  “You already know,” he said.” “I’m strong, ked. You know what? You about to see how I used to looked back in the day when I was in shape. I always lose weight when I go to jail, don’t I, Shauna?”

  Shauna ignored his question and told him that I had some words for him.

  I sat there hanging in silence. I had three degrees and Dave hadn’t graduated from high school. I paid my own rent and Dave stayed illegally in Shauna’s Section 8 apartment. I earned nineteen hundred dollars a month after taxes for talking to young people about something called black literary imagination and Dave was legally unemployed because no one in the Hudson Valley wanted to hire a black man with several felonies on his record.

  “I’ll bring you some books next week,” I told him. “And I’ma put some money on your commissary. When you get out, I got you.”

  “That’s all you got to say?” Shauna asked me. “Ain’t you a professor?”

  Dave had neither the money nor the power to fight his arrest. I was the wealthiest, most powerful person Dave knew, and I had sixty-seven dollars in my banking account, a living room set filled with furniture students threw out, and plenty of family, friends, and students doing time in federal prison for murder, racketeering, counterfeiting, and drug trafficking.

  “Just bring me some books, ked,” Dave said. “I know this shit is awkward but can you write a little note on the front page of all the books? A nigga been locked up a lot and I never had no one write notes in my books.”

  Before and after Dave got out, white colleagues routinely put their hands on my back and called me lucky. They meant that Southern black boys like me were more likely to end up incarcerated than working beside wonderful white faculty at so-called elite liberal arts colleges. I looked in the eyes of those colleagues and routinely shook my head. These colleagues were lucky, not simply because their students demanded less of them, nor because their identities were never threated by security or armed police officers; they were lucky that they got to share professional space with poor young black professors who materially never invested in notions of academic excellence being a stand-in for innocence.

  Dave, the first person I met in Poughkeepsie, was a felon because he was black, scared, desperate, and guilty. My student Cole, a heroin user and dealer of everything from weed to cocaine, is a college graduate because he’s white, wealthy, scared, desperate, and guilty.

  I made good on my promise to bring Dave a new book with a new note every week before they shipped him out to boot camp. Every once in a while, Davie returned the books with notes he’d written on the second pages. Dave said he shared the books and notes with COs and other incarcerated men and they started a reading group. The books didn’t take any time off his sentence. They didn’t free Dave’s imagination. The books gave us more to talk about and feel through when he got out. One of the last notes Dave wrote me before being released was “It’s hard to get right when the free folks out there are more trapped than the criminal folks in jail. I just want to be free.”

  WHITE DEBT

  Eula Biss

  THE WORD FOR debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I’m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that’s one of the qualities of debt that I’ve been pondering lately—how easy it can be.

  I had very little furniture for the first few months in my new house, and no money left to buy any. But then I took out a loan against my down payment and now I have a dining room table, six chairs, and a piano. While I was in the bank signing the paperwork that would allow me to spend money I hadn’t yet earned, I thought of Eddie Murphy’s skit where he goes undercover as a white person and discovers that white people at banks give away money to other white people for free. “It’s true,” I thought to myself in awe when I saw the ease with which I was granted another loan, though I understood—and, when my mortgage was sold to another lender, was further reminded—that the money was not being given to me for free. I was, and am, paying for it. But that detail, like my debt, is easily forgotten.

  “Only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory,” Nietzsche observes in On the Genealogy of Morality. My student loan debt doesn’t hurt, though it hasn’t seemed to have gotten any smaller over the past decade, and I have managed to forget it so thoroughly that I recently told someone that I’d never been in debt until I bought a house. Creditors of antiquity, Nietzsche writes, tried to encourage a debtor’s memory by taking as collateral his freedom, wife, life, or even, as in Egypt, his afterlife. Legal documents outlined exactly how much of the body of the debtor the creditor could cut off for unpaid debts. Consider the odd logic, Nietzsche suggests, of a system in which a creditor is repaid not with money or goods, but with the pleasure of seeing the debtor’s body punished. “The pleasure,” he writes, “of having the right to exercise power over the powerless.”

  The power to punish, Nietzsche notes, can enhance your sense of social status, increasing the pleasure of cruelty. Reading this, I think of a white Texas trooper’s encounter with the black woman he pulled over for failure to signal a lane change. As the traffic stop became a confrontation that ended with Sandra Bland facedown on the side of the road, she asked Brian Encinia, over and over, whether what he was doing made him feel good. “You feelin’ good about yourself?” she asked. “Don’t it make you feel good, Officer Encinia?” And then, when a female officer joined them, “Make you feel real good for a female. Y’all strong, y’all real strong.” After asking the same question Nietzsche asked, the question of why justice would take this form, she came to the same conclusion.

  When I was nineteen and in college, the head of campus police escorted me to an interview with the Amherst police. The previous night, a friend and I had pasted big posters of bombs that read “Bomb the Suburbs” all over Amherst, Massachusetts. Bomb the Suburbs is the title of a book by the graffiti artist William Upski Wimsatt, whom we had invited to speak on campus. The first question the Amherst police asked was whether I was aware that graffiti and “tagging,” a category that included the posters, was punishable as a felony. I was not aware. Near the end of the interrogation, my campus officer stepped in and suggested that we would clean up the posters. I was not charged with a felony, and I spent the day working side by side with my officer, using a wire brush to scrub all the bombs off Amherst.

  Twenty years later, I try to watch a video of a black man being shot in the head by a campus police officer. I don’t want to see this, but then I think of Emmett Till’s mother asking the whole country to see her son’s body and mourn with her, so I search for the video. But I don’t get past the first frame because the Chicago Tribune website runs an Acura commercial after I hit play, and the possibility that the shooting death of Samuel DuBose in his old Honda is serving as an opportunity to sell Acuras makes me close the window. With the long, slow pan across the immaculate interior of a new car on my mind, I reconsider the justice behind my own encounter with a campus police officer.

  The word privilege, composed of the Latin words for private and law, describes a legal system in which not everyone is equally bound, a system in which the law that makes graffiti a felony does not apply to a white college student. Even as the police spread photos of my handiwork in front
of me, I could tell by the way they pronounced “tagging” that it wasn’t a crime invented for me. I was subject less to the law as it was written than I was to the private laws of whiteness. When the laws that bind a community apply differently to different members of the community, Bettina Bergo and Tracey Nicholls observe in their collection, I Don’t See Color, then privilege “undermines the solidarity of the community.” And that, in turn, undermines us all.

  “The condition of black life,” Claudia Rankine writes, “is one of mourning.” Mourning this, I ask myself what the condition of white life might be. I write complacence on a blank page. Hearing the term white supremacist in the wake of the Charleston church massacre has given me another occasion to wonder whether white supremacists are any more dangerous than regular white people, who tend to enjoy supremacy without believing in it. After staring at complacence for quite a long time, I look it up and discover that it doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it meant. “A feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements” might be an apt description of the dominant white attitude, but that’s more active than what I had in mind. I thought complacence meant sitting there in your house, neither smug nor satisfied, just lost in the illusion of ownership. This is an illusion that depends on forgetting the redlining, blockbusting, racial covenants, contract buying, loan discrimination, housing projects, mass incarceration, predatory lending, and deed thefts that have prevented so many black Americans from building wealth the way so many white Americans have, through home ownership. I erase complacence and write complicity. I erase it. Debt, I write. Then, forgotten debt.