The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  Zion, with its small, family feel and looser structure, feels like a throwback to an earlier time when motivated individuals like Doug Wheeler and Randy Finley stepped in and tried to achieve things on a case-by-case basis through the sheer strength of their personalities. While that type of work brought positive results in some individual situations, it was by nature ad hoc—it did nothing for the vast majority of kids. Ironically, the core philosophy of schools such as KIPP is not very much different from what Zion has been doing for nearly thirty years; it comes down to discipline, care, and expectations. KIPP has institutionalized and packaged it in a technocratic, scalable manner.

  Wheeler is well aware of the advances that have been made as far as teaching inner-city kids. He tells me that Lorraine Moore, known for her legendary results as head of Harlem’s Frederick Douglass Academy—a highly regarded, public middle and high school that partners with businesses—is coming to the school to speak to the staff. Still, he says, there just hasn’t been much chance to innovate at Zion. The financial situation means the focus has been on “survival, not revival.” The bottom line, Wheeler says, is that Zion, for all the good it does for its students, can serve only a small number of families. While there probably always will be some demand for an African-American Christian education for children in Seattle, the greater need in the community dwarfs Zion.

  Wheeler tells me he has agonized as the performance of black children in Seattle public schools remains far below that of their white and Asian peers. He was incensed after a local newspaper ran an article that purported to profile a student likely to drop out of high school. The answer was an African-American male from a single-parent household. Wheeler steams at labeling a whole group of people as potential failures. More than ever, he is convinced that drastic action needs to be taken on behalf of low-income black children.

  The only solution, Wheeler has concluded, is for Washington State to finally introduce charter schools; state voters have three times rejected referenda that would have introduced such schools. The staunchest opponent has been the teachers’ union. Wheeler, along with conservative and Christian groups, has been a vocal proponent. He envisions a string of charter schools in the Seattle area, running south all the way to Tacoma. When I ask Wheeler if he imagines programs such as KIPP moving in, he says, “I see professionals who know what they’re doing, who have been in the hardest areas, and have proven themselves.” If Zion is eclipsed in the process, he says, so be it.

  Wheeler is organizing a coalition of conservatives and pastors—he also heads his own church in the Central Area that focuses on helping the down and out—that will work to get the charter issue back on the ballot. Though these efforts have been led in the past by white conservatives, Wheeler tells me that this time he plans to step up and take a high-visibility role. “I can’t watch this generation continue going as it’s going,” he says. “I’m not going to allow you to lock them up anymore, not going to allow you to kick them out of schools anymore.

  “I’m sixty-two years old, I got a few more years, maybe twenty. I want to use those now to bring into this community the educational opportunities that we’ve never had,” he says. “We’ve been talking about the achievement gap ever since I can remember breathing, and we’re still talking about it—we did three more studies this year. The new superintendent is talking about what the old superintendent was talking about, which the superintendent before them talked about, which the superintendent before them talked about. I don’t want to talk anymore. I’m done.”

  Between Two Worlds

  When Eric Hampton and his wife attend social functions, Eric hates the question So what do you do? It is, he thinks, a lazy way to categorize people to decide if someone’s worth talking to. He laughs when the inquiry comes to his wife, who teaches sociology at the University of Washington—he finds that people can’t conceal their wonderment. “She’s young, she’s attractive, and she’s black, so people love to talk to her once they find out what she does,” Eric says. “And there’s a natural curiosity because, well, ‘How did she become a Ph.D.?’ Because it’s not the norm.”

  Eric and I speak at his house, a little before noon on a Saturday. Eric sits on a gray couch in the living room and wears black sweatpants and a black polar fleece jacket zipped over a white T-shirt. He speaks with the same quiet, slightly gravelly voice and thoughtful manner he had as a kid. He has a black goatee and a full head of hair, though he tells me that he’s starting to notice some strands of gray. A gold watch hangs loosely around his left wrist, matching his gold wedding band. His sentences are often punctuated with wry laughter.

  “Everybody has a perception of what certain people are supposed to be or what they are,” Eric says. “It’s like, if there’s something really bad that happens, the first thing I think about is, ‘I hope it’s not a black person.’ Because then it’s going to be, ‘See, that’s how those black people are.’ Whereas if it’s a white person, it’s, ‘That’s how that individual is. He’s a bad guy but he’s not reflective of all of us.’ ”

  A black coffee table sits in front of us, bare except for a copy of Time magazine and two white candles in maroon holders. The beige-carpeted living room is spotless. A line of six paper grocery bags sit against the far wall, full of clothes and toys for the baby girl Eric and his wife are expecting in four months. A large window offers a view out over the street. It’s a quiet neighborhood—the road dead-ends a bit past Eric’s house—in South Seattle. The houses are large and well tended, and Lake Washington is only a few blocks away.

  Eric continues, “That happens with all minority groups. Even with the terrorist stuff that’s going on, everybody that’s Middle Eastern is a terrorist now. I mean that’s just what happens. It’s unfortunate, but people get lumped into these groups.

  “If you get out of those boxes, then people are always looking at you funny. So you almost get forced into these boxes to act in a certain way,” Eric says. “If you don’t fit into the box, you become invisible.… What you see on TV constantly, or what you see on the rap videos or what scares you, you’re going to see that. But the black guy in the suit, downtown, he’s unthreatening and just doing his thing, you kinda don’t pay him no mind.

  “A lot of times, for instance, in college, I felt totally invisible, and at Lakeside.”

  When we played basketball together, Eric seemed to adroitly straddle the two sides of the team. He could advise me on how to respond to Myran’s caps, but a minute later he could be holding his own with Tyrell. Will McClain Jr. describes Eric as the “translator” between the two sides. His wife, the sociologist, using a term from her profession, calls Eric a “code switcher”—a person who can employ the language and cultural signifiers of more than one group.

  At first—it had been about fifteen years since we’d last seen each other—Eric was gracious but guarded. In conversation he often seems to pause before deciding how much he wants to divulge. He tells me that he finds people are often most interested in putting their own opinions out there. In those situations, he lets them go right ahead. “I like to watch and listen a lot of times and just see what other people have to say,” he says, “then go from there.”

  Over the course of meeting with Eric several times, I realize that—despite all the basketball games, sitting at the same lunch table, and suffering through years of German classes together—I never really knew him very well. Some of that, I think, was being stuck in the midst of adolescence—it’s hard enough to figure out yourself at that age, much less anyone else. But race was its own barrier. Because Eric was black, I shied away from talking to him about some of the things I did with some other friends—I worried that I would say or do something that would offend him, although I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly that might have been.

  That line of separation, I think, also affected Eric. When I tell him that I felt uncomfortable at Lakeside—that playing on the basketball team was one thing that helped me feel like I fit in—Eric is surprise
d. “I was clueless to the fact that someone like yourself would have experiences at Lakeside that were confusing, that might not have been so pleasant,” he says. “I would have assumed it was just fine for you.”

  “It’s too bad we couldn’t talk about it back then,” I tell him. “I guess I just acted out by listening to lots of heavy metal.”

  Eric laughs. “Also, when you’re living it, you’re not thinking about it—you’re little kids,” he says.

  I’d been surprised when I heard that Eric had left Lakeside in the middle of his junior year, a year and a half after I did. I always thought that he would graduate; no matter what happened, it seemed like he would deal with it stoically and move on. His feeling that he was cheated out of playing time on the football team was the catalyst for his departure. As we talk, though, it becomes clear that other issues were gnawing at him at Lakeside.

  “I never felt part of the whole thing,” he says of his seven years at the school. “I felt more tolerated than anything like being fully embraced, fully accepted. It was like I was accepted on the periphery.”

  Eric remembers that teachers would hardly ever call on him, something I observed in the classes I had with him. He felt that some didn’t think he should be there, so they just ignored him. Others, he thought, wanted him to succeed but were worried they might embarrass him by making him speak in class, so they tended to look past him. At the time, it was fine with Eric, who was shy and soft-spoken anyway.

  “I think maybe I was the token. I was there to a certain degree to make people comfortable to say, ‘I have a black friend,’ ” he says. “You’re dealing with a situation of people who are not used to being around a bunch of black folks, who don’t know very many. And you’re in a safe environment, so obviously it’s an opportunity for you to delve into the world of black people, to get a little taste or a flavor of what black people are about, so you can say, ‘I know this black guy, and he’s my friend,’ and therefore if you have any type of negative feeling about black people in general, you can always go to that as a way to say, ‘Well, I have nothing against black people, see, I have this black friend.’ ”

  After Eric left Lakeside, he graduated from Franklin, a public high school in the South End. The following year, he enrolled at the University of Washington, where he eventually got a degree in finance (though financial aid problems caused him to drop out for a while—the time period during which he briefly played community college basketball with Damian). In general, he moved on with his life, falling out of touch with both classmates from Lakeside and most of the guys from Willie McClain’s CAYA team.

  Damian, who has kept in touch with Eric, calls him “the millionaire next door,” after the best-selling book, which describes an unassuming type of person who does his job, saves and invests his money, and retires rich even though no one around him would have thought he had done so well. I get that feeling, too, after Eric tells me he bought his first condo when he was twenty-two and still in college. To pay the mortgage, he found a roommate and worked full time while going to school, first driving a shuttle bus for a downtown garage and later working for Washington Mutual.

  One afternoon, I meet Eric downtown for lunch. We walk to the Columbia Center, the tallest building in Seattle, a seventy-six-story skyscraper with a reflective black-glass surface. The bottom three floors of the building are an atrium built around a central fountain, with escalators crisscrossing at forty-five-degree angles from floor to floor. A food court with stalls such as Moghul Express, Thai Rama, and Fiesta Fiesta lines the perimeter. I grab a sandwich with Eric, who wears charcoal-gray slacks and a royal blue dress shirt without a tie.

  Upon graduating from the University of Washington, Eric got a job doing internal accounting with a dotcom that aimed to create a system to place classified ads in newspapers around the country. Considering that Craigslist was in the process of killing off newspaper classified ads, it wasn’t a very good idea. Eric left shortly before the company went bankrupt. In 2002 he took a job setting up customer accounts for the multinational accounting and consulting company Deloitte & Touche. Two years later, he quit to start working for the city of Seattle as an auditor, checking the books of businesses that contract with the city. His municipal job, he tells me, is the first work environment in which he’s felt fairly comfortable being himself. “The culture’s just different,” he says. “It’s more—I’m not going to say blue collarish—but it’s just different.”

  At Deloitte & Touche, for example, Eric found it hard to adapt. In part, he says, it was just him. He’s a quiet, introverted guy, not really prone to gossiping and chatting around the office. He doesn’t like to drink or go out to the bar after work, which was a popular pastime with his colleagues. “That’s just not my thing, and maybe if it was my thing, I would fit in more,” Eric says. “I don’t want to make it all into a racial thing. It’s more a cultural thing, I guess. But I mean those two, a lot of times, go hand in hand. Not always, but a lot of times.”

  When confronted with the quiet black guy sitting at his desk, some coworkers would suddenly act as if they were tiptoeing on eggshells. “I would find a lot of people would want to talk to me about sports and that would be it. As if I couldn’t talk about anything other than sports. And so, if that’s our thing, then hey, whatever, you know?” Eric laughs.

  “I don’t want to make it seem like, ‘Oh, woe is me, because I’m black, I can’t …’ ” he says. “I don’t believe that. No, I think it has more to do with me and my personality and the way I am, not to say that if you’re black things aren’t difficult at times.”

  Even at the city job, Eric is still the only black male in his section. I ask him if sometimes he doesn’t wish that one of the kids he grew up with in the Central Area were working across the hall. “Yeah, it’s lonely. It can be lonely,” he says. “But I met other people. I have friends that I met in college, so I have a social network of people who are similar to me, have the same struggles, went to college, doing pretty well for themselves, but still …”

  He pauses and then continues, “There’s just not a lot of black people up here, anyway. And the black people that are up here, you know, especially black males, especially ones who are native, who are born and raised here, a lot of them just aren’t doing that well. You have a lot of people coming from other states who take jobs up here and they do OK, but I don’t know—everywhere I seem to go, I’m always the only black guy.”

  Eric wonders about his own responsibility to help African Americans who have not done as well as he has. He thinks about coaching a kids’ basketball team to provide a role model—a black male who has succeeded in mainstream society. “I know I can do more,” he says. “It’s just this kinda thing where it’s like you get so focused on trying to make a living, trying to get ahead, that that’s where all your energy is. The little free time you get, because work can stress you out, you want to relax and do something you want to do. I think that’s the issue for a lot of folks like myself.”

  Having grown up in the Central Area, he says, he feels an extra obligation. “If someone comes from the Eastside, it’s great that they’re trying to help, but a lot of times they can’t relate,” he tells me. “There is a kind of skepticism on the kids’ part, like, ‘What’s the deal, what’s really going on? Do you really care about me or are you doing this just to make yourself feel good?’ And again, it’s like, if you have that credibility and you come from that you’ll be wise to the kids and the type of games that they play.”

  I ask Eric if he would consider sending his kid to Lakeside. After hearing about his experiences at the school, I expect him to simply say he wouldn’t, so his answer takes me by surprise.

  “I might,” he says. “I struggle with that. I’m finally realizing, at thirtysomething, that the most important thing is education, that’s definitely the most important thing, especially in the society today. And it is more or less an equalizer. Granted, there’s still other issues, but if you can get a good educat
ion, it can open some doors for you.”

  Eric is aware that the choices he faces now as a soon-to-be parent are similar to the ones white parents faced in the late 1970s, when Seattle enacted its mandatory busing scheme. “I saw a lot of people who were all for improving the education of these inner-city kids, but they wouldn’t send their kids to the public schools,” he says. “You wanna make sure that your kids get the best. I can understand that. Everybody wants that.”

  It is, in essence, a choice between racial solidarity and the potential for class mobility. If you send your kids to a public school, you have to worry about them falling behind their peers in private schools. On the other hand, as a black parent, you worry that they will lose touch with other African Americans. “I know I want my kid to get the best possible education,” Eric says, “but at same time I hope it’s in a somewhat diverse setting so they can get to know other people as well. And I don’t want them to feel isolated, either.

  “That’s something I’m dealing with—if I would send them to Lakeside. I probably would send them to private school, but my wife thinks we probably should send them to public school and all that kind of stuff, because the fact is that what happens, most of the well-to-do, they take their kids out and all that is left is those who can’t take their kids out, and, unfortunately, you see how the schools are. It’s just a mess.”

  Eric, as he often does, bursts into a kind of rueful laughter as he finishes the sentence.