The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  Bob Henry, the Middle School teacher and former diversity director, told me that he had sent his oldest daughter to Lakeside for her freshman and sophomore years, but she had then asked to leave. “She still has painful memories of those days,” he said. “It was a time where, as she looks back on it, it was formative in that she became aware of this hierarchical structure of things and how it was set. I don’t know if girls are more sensitive than boys are, but she saw where the power was. She saw the whole thing lined up and she wanted to compete or to be in those roles, and she did all that she could, but in the end she didn’t particularly like herself as a result.”

  Henry said that kids who come from minority or nonwealthy backgrounds end up in a peculiar situation at Lakeside. Because they can’t participate in all the rituals that their classmates are—such as getting a new car when they turn sixteen or vacationing in Sun Valley—they often end up sharply observing everything around them. The role, Henry said, is “almost anthropological.”

  I contacted Blakely, who graduated in 2006, because I wanted to speak with some recent African-American Lakeside students. We meet in the summer of 2007, after he has just finished his freshman year at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he is planning to major in accounting before going to law school.

  The same week, I catch up with another African-American graduate of the class of 2006, David Changa-Moon, who is a student at Whitman College in Eastern Washington, where he is studying engineering. Changa-Moon had started at Lakeside in his freshman year. Though they had played together on the basketball team, Blakely and Changa-Moon are not close friends. I meet up with both at Starbucks—with Blakely at one in the Madison Park neighborhood, and Changa-Moon at one near a shopping mall south of Seattle.

  Both describe a series of challenges and choices that go unnoticed by the average Lakeside student—often in words almost identical to those of Eric Hampton, who attended the school fifteen years earlier. For example, most nonwealthy minorities in Seattle live in the South End, and Lakeside is at the very northern edge of the city. While many students with more money have stay-at-home moms who take them to and from school, a lot of minority kids come from families where both parents have to work. Coming from the South End, it’s about an hour and a half bus ride each way. Not only do you have to get up much earlier, but also, when you go to a school that assigns several hours of homework a night, that means you have much less time at home to get it all done. Besides that, you might be expected to cook dinner for your siblings or do other chores to keep the household functioning.

  Another complication, Blakely tells me, is that the school seems to have lower expectations for students of color. For example, he says, in Middle School most of the minority students were placed in a lower-level math class. When his parents complained, Blakely took a test and got bumped up. But for some students, it’s tempting to take the easier route. “It’s like, ‘If I don’t try enough, they’ll leave me alone, and then just let me coast along for a little bit,’ ” he says.

  Changa-Moon often breaks into laughter when he speaks about his time at Lakeside, shaking his head at various absurdities. “It’s so backward to how you’re used to living life,” he says. “I would sit there and eat this really good food and I would come home and have food from the food bank that the rest of my family’s eating. So it’s just that sort of reality, that sort of juxtaposition.”

  Changa-Moon continues, “You don’t hear of bad things happening in the Lakeside community, you don’t generally hear of deaths, things like that—it’s a rare occurrence, it’s surprising, it’s staggering, it’s a big deal. But when you come from a community in which a life where you’re struggling is just normal, you can identify with people because you understand everything isn’t easy, everything isn’t given to you. I understand that everyone has their own struggle, but when your struggle is to just eat and live and stay healthy, it’s a much different struggle.”

  A very basic issue is, of course, money. Not only does the average kid at Lakeside have a lot of stuff—a cell phone, an iPod, the desirable brand of laptop, computer games, a scooter, a car—but also access to money powers a student’s social life, making possible things like going to baseball games, movies, or restaurants. While kids from poorer backgrounds might just hang out and watch TV or play basketball at the local playground, Lakeside kids tend to do things that require cash. “It’s not like I can just go home and say, ‘All right, Mom, can I have twenty bucks? I want to go to the movie.’ That’s not going to happen,” Changa-Moon says. “When that’s just assumed, it’s like, ‘Why aren’t you doing this?’ When you’re young it’s hard to be like, ‘Well, my parents do not have money. I can’t afford this.’ ”

  Though Blakely’s parents resisted at first, they eventually broke down and got him the things he felt he needed to fit in—first a cell phone, and then a car a few months after he turned sixteen. At times he felt very involved with the Lakeside social scene, and at other points he pulled away from it to spend most of his time with friends he played with on a select basketball team outside of the school. Changa-Moon felt that his large family kept him grounded. “I was in the popular group, I guess, just because I played basketball and I’m a person of color, and that pretty much locks you in,” he says. “So I’d always get invited out to things, but I just didn’t really choose to do that.”

  For Blakely, one of the biggest differences between Lakeside and public school was the level of motivation in students. In public school, he says, most kids don’t really plan much into the future beyond what they’re going to eat that afternoon. Unlike Lakeside, which starts prepping kids for the SAT in eighth grade, a lot of public school students don’t even think about college until the second half of senior year, and then they’ll likely just head off to community college, if they go anywhere.

  At Lakeside, the payoffs were tangible. Kids who did well, first of all, got material rewards from their parents. Because the kids were already motivated, teachers could spend their time going through the lessons and engaging the students, which made classes more fun. Even if you didn’t like doing a lot schoolwork, you could still see college ahead, which would be paid for by your parents. You knew that if you made it through college, you were going to be well positioned for life. “There are a lot more foreseeable goals at Lakeside than in public school,” Blakely says. “I think that’s the underlying difference.”

  It has been harder for private schools like Lakeside to attract African-American faculty than students. For a minority student, there is the prospect of feeling isolated or out of place, but Lakeside offers the carrot of a good education and entry to a prestigious college. A teacher of color, on the other hand, doesn’t have that potential payoff and also may be in high demand at many other institutions.

  Beginning in 2003, with its new mission focus in place, Lakeside set out forcefully to change the racial composition of the faculty. The search was led by T. J. Vassar, who, in 1968, was one of the school’s first three African-American graduates. Vassar had returned to Lakeside in 1992 to direct the Lakeside Educational Enrichment Program, the summer course for minority students, and later became the schoolwide diversity director. At Noe’s urging, the school soon hired a slate of new teachers of various backgrounds, including two Latin Americans, one of East Indian origin, and three African-American teachers: Chance Sims, who began at the school in 2003; Kim Pollock, who started there in 2004; and Novella Coleman, who began in 2005.

  Sims, a history and humanities teacher in his early thirties, had been teaching at Tacoma Community College. Coleman, who hired on as a math teacher, had just graduated from Stanford University. Pollock, in her midforties, had been teaching English at Bellevue Community College, across Lake Washington from Seattle.

  A short woman with a hearty laugh and a forthright manner, Pollock had long focused on issues of race. She had started the ethnic and cultural studies curriculum while at Bellevue Community College and taught a class called “White
Culture in the United States.” When T. J. Vassar called out of the blue to ask her about taking a job at Lakeside, telling her about the school’s new mission focus, she was intrigued. “I was very committed to the idea that if I could reach the kids that were going to rule the world at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen that I could have a shot at actually making change,” Pollock says. “I was very much devoted to that idea and very much seduced by that idea.”

  One of Pollock’s focuses had been the theory of “white privilege,” which puts forward the idea that white people benefit from their skin color in countless ways of which they are often unaware. One widely distributed essay on the subject lists fifty examples, including:

  When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

  I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

  I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

  Pollock says she made her stance clear when she interviewed for the job at Lakeside. “I told them that antiracism is what I teach,” she says. “You can put whatever name on it you want, you can call this an English class, or a sociology class, or whatever, but I’m going to teach antiracism and I’m going to use all my tools to do that.” Sims, too, focused on “social justice,” teaching about things such as imperialism and colonialism in his world history courses.

  Pollock, as might be expected from her track record, immediately began to talk about racial issues in a more direct manner than the school was used to. As she recalls, things began to heat up at the start of her second semester, in January 2005, when the Upper School held its Martin Luther King Jr. Day assembly. A number of teachers, both white and black, participated in a panel discussion about their experiences during the 1960s. T. J. Vassar, the diversity director, spoke about being one of the first black students at the school in 1965. A white teacher spoke about not remembering there being many black people around when he was a kid. Pollock talked about her family being one of the first to integrate a white neighborhood in Chicago. “I said something very, very controversial at that point,” Pollock tells me. “I said that if someone grows up in America, I mean everybody, you cannot help but be racist, because our culture is racist, and boy, did that set off a firestorm.” The reaction was immediate, with students at the assembly yelling out in protest. What a lot of white students took away, David Changa-Moon tells me, was that Pollock had just called all white people at Lakeside racists.

  At another assembly, a few months later, one of Pollock’s students, a girl of East African origin, gave a PowerPoint presentation that quoted various comments that had been made to her during her time at the school. They ranged from fairly innocuous to the bluntly offensive, including,

  If I went down to the South End, would I get beat up by all the black people?

  Is it true that black guys have big packages?

  If people in Africa are starving and dying, then why don’t they just eat the dead to stay alive?

  We should put every AIDS-infected person on an island and burn them. That’s the only way of solving the AIDS epidemic.

  The next day, the school had an extended advisory period to talk about the presentation. Changa-Moon tells me, a bit wryly, that the main effect this had was keeping race front and center as a subject of discussion.

  In May, an African-American student in the freshman class sent a heartrending poem by e-mail to all faculty and staff that described his feelings of isolation at home and at the school. It began: “How does it feel? I see this boy every day. He goes to school where almost everyone is the opposite color. I don’t think it bothers him but I wonder how it feels. How does it feel to go to a place and know that everyone sees you as a failure?”

  Pollock responded with a letter—titled “Be Ware of the Damage a Good Heart Can Do”—e-mailed to the same group, in which she admitted to deeply conflicted feelings about the diversity push: “What becomes of the community, and what responsibility does Lakeside have to those communities as we harvest their ‘best and brightest’? Do other communities come and harvest the white children who are ‘able and willing’ to come to the top institutions which are not white and ask them to learn how to survive and function and be judged by standards that have nothing to do with their own identity?”

  Pollock tells me that Noe told her to “slow down,” that she was pushing change too fast. She recalls meeting with Noe in his office, under the poster of Martin Luther King Jr. “I told him that’s what people said to Martin, they told him to slow down, they told him to wait, and here you are honoring him forty years later telling me the same thing,” she says, laughing. “He didn’t like that too much.”

  By the fall semester of 2005, when Bill Gates kicked off the fund-raising drive, the situation at the school had deteriorated. One of the newly hired Latina teachers let it be known that she planned on leaving. Novella Coleman, the African-American Stanford graduate in her first year of teaching, was having a horrible time in her math classes, getting questioned by kids about her qualifications and her competence. In class, one kid asked if she had gotten into Stanford on an athletic scholarship. Another asked if she was from Compton, the Los Angeles neighborhood known in rap songs as the home of the Crips and the Bloods. When she said she wasn’t, he pressed ahead with a series of questions about what the area was like. When Coleman was questioned by a female student about something she wrote on the whiteboard, another girl in the class turned to the student, wagged her head, snapped her fingers, and said “You told her!” in way that made Coleman think the girl was trying to imitate the stereotype of a sassy black woman. After a couple of months, Coleman announced that she would resign at the end of the year.

  “I felt like students were holding me under the microscope, I felt attacked by parents, and I felt marginalized by those who claimed to be addressing my concerns. I was miserable because while I have undergone a lot of personal growth to be in a place where I viewed my race and culture as an asset, I knew that at Lakeside my race and culture were liabilities,” she wrote right before she left the school. She had, she said, “been reduced to tears at the thought of returning to Lakeside or even spending another moment there.”

  In the meantime, a group of parents had begun to push back against all the diversity talk. Some wondered why they were spending more than $20,000 a year to have their kids take part in a social experiment. The parents also claimed that admitting more minority students to the school was lowering standards. Others objected to the political bent that teachers such as Pollock and Chance Sims were taking. Did diversity just mean left-wing political views? What about ideological diversity as well?

  In an effort to address those complaints, Noe—at the suggestion of a staff member—invited Dinesh D’Souza to speak at the school’s annual spring lecture, which comes with a $10,000 speaking fee. D’Souza, a former Reagan staffer who was then a fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institute at Stanford, has long been a conservative firebrand. His books cover subjects such as the evils of political correctness, the triumph of Ronald Reagan, the greatness of America, how the depravity of the cultural left resulted in the 9/11 attacks, and his latest, What’s So Great about Christianity. If Noe wanted to throw some red meat to conservative parents, D’Souza was certainly the guy to bring it.

  D’Souza was supposed to speak about the war in Iraq, but it was his views on African Americans that attracted attention. In 1995, D’Souza published The End of Racism, a polemic about race in America. In the book, he asserts that slavery was not a racist institution; that blacks do not achieve as high as whites because of “cultural deficiencies”; that black “cultural pathology” has contributed to a new form of discrimination, which he calls “rational discrimination”—because some blacks commit crimes, it is logical that there is prejudice against all of them; that segr
egation was a benevolent system put in place to protect blacks from whites who might harm them; and that inner-city streets “are irrigated with alcohol, urine and blood.” D’Souza comes to the conclusion that racism might still exist in some minor form, but it is liberals and blacks themselves who are the problem. His solution is to do away with affirmative action and the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Also, blacks should learn to “act white.” “If America as a nation owes blacks as a group reparations for slavery, what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?” D’Souza asks.

  In the book, D’Souza praises black conservatives Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson Jr. as part of a small group that consists of “the only people who are seriously confronting black cultural deficiencies and offering constructive proposals.” Both men held positions at the American Enterprise Institute along with D’Souza, who was a fellow at the think tank. After The End of Racism came out, both resigned in protest. Loury wrote, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in some influential quarters, when the object of discussion is the African-American community, basic principles of decency and of scholarly and journalistic integrity no longer apply. Blacks seem to be held in such contempt that we can be slandered, defamed and insulted without remorse or consequence.”

  In a faculty meeting during the first week of January 2006 called by Noe to discuss issues of race on campus, Chance Sims brought up Dinesh D’Souza and spoke about how offensive he found D’Souza’s views. When a white staff member took responsibility for recommending D’Souza to Noe, Sims told her, “Shame on you.” That prompted a white male teacher to stand up and tell Sims he had no right to speak that way. The meeting, which had been meant to soothe nerves, only heated up simmering tensions among the faculty.

  Noe tried to make the D’Souza appearance a “teaching moment.” Terrance Blakely tells me that students were given eighty-five pages of The End of Racism to read and then discuss with their teachers. Blakely was “disgusted” by the book and by the idea that the school would consider hosting a speaker whom Blakely felt wrote hate speech about African Americans. For Blakely, it stripped everything down to reveal the power differential at the school. “You have kids saying, ‘I feel offended and I feel threatened that you’re bringing this guy to the school,’ and they say, ‘Well, he’s not here to talk about that so he won’t really touch on that issue, so you’ll be OK.’ And then it’s just like, ‘Well, if I had a little bit more money behind me, or if I had a little bit more power, I bet this would be different.’ ”