Going to School in Black and White

by Cindy Waszak Geary

The competition was held at Durham High School—another sign that the evening would turn out exactly as I predicted. “Ladies and gentlemen,” began the white male emcee, “Welcome to the 1974 annual Durham Junior Miss Pageant.” We paraded out on the stage in our sports outfits to perform our first dance routine. I was confident and smiling. This was fun, and I was a good dancer.

  “Next up, individual talent selections.”

  Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’, sang Billy Preston. I twirled my body in my short sequined skirt, shook my hips in rhythm with the song…You gotta have somethin’ if you want to be with me…and threw my baton high into the air and caught it.

  Then we all paraded out in evening gowns to demonstrate our “ballroom finesse.”

  As the hour approached for the winner to be named, I got a strange feeling, and for the first time, I started to get a bit nervous. I had noticed the judges looking at me. I knew they would not bother doing that unless I was in contention. Could it be possible? Did I have a chance to win? At that moment, I started to care a little more as I imagined the impossible, that I might place, or that I might even win.

  As the buildup to the announcement of the winners began, I looked around at the other girls and wondered whom my competition might be. I looked over at Delores. One thing was sure, if they picked one of us, the other one would not be selected. I was not very savvy in racial politics at that time, but I had figured out that the novelty of having black contestants would have its limits. So we waited.

  Drum roll…

  The announcer spoke….“Ladies and Gentleman, I am holding the list of winners. And the second runner up is… LaHoma Smith!”

  Applause, applause, applause. I took my place in the winners’ circle, beaming because I was right. They had been looking at me, and now I would be the first black girl to win a place in the Durham Junior Miss Pageant.

  “And the first runner up is ...Susan Swindell...” Applause, applause, applause. Yes, Susan was a good choice. She would have been my first choice, with her beautiful brown eyes and long flowing hair. Susan and I had gotten along well in the pageant, even though she was a Durham High student. I was glad she was in the winners’ circle, but now I was puzzled as to who would win. Whom had I overlooked? Who was more beautiful and talented than Susan?

  We waited as the announcer again took the microphone. “And the winner of the Durham Junior Miss Pageant is… Delores Malloy!”

  I am sure I gasped—along with the rest of the crowd. Then dead quiet as we all absorbed the announcement. Finally, the applause began and Delores came forward to be crowned. My emotions raced from puzzlement to pride to puzzlement in a matter of seconds. Another black girl won! Another black girl won! The first year they had included black girls in the competition, and we were awarded two of the three top prizes! Delores was a worthy, gracious, and lovely recipient… but I still couldn’t get over it. The Durham community was spreading its wings, trying to show the world that it was becoming an inclusive place to live, work, and go to school. And I had to accept the first of many future unexpected outcomes based on skin color.

  LaHoma Smith (far right) in the Durham Junior Miss Pageant.

  9— From Black and White to White and Black

  Nine

  From Black and White to White and Black

  Cindy

  Such a relief to finally be leaving home and going to college! I was excited about my studies, but I was also excited about living my personal life. I was now able to make choices outside the strictures of my parents’ watchful eyes, and what seemed like the arbitrary rules I had grown up with in my Southern Baptist faith.

  My unfolding loss of faith meant the loss of a church community; this was scary but also a bit heady. I could not find reasons for prohibitions against drinking and sex (though drugs scared me), and I was ready to begin exploring my options. I still wanted to do well academically, though, so I proceeded cautiously, quickly discovering how complicated the notions of “right” and “wrong” can be.

  The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill was a mere 15-minute drive from my parents’ house in Durham, but I felt that I was in another new and different world.

  * * *

  At Hillside I had been a minority white face among a majority of black ones; this was not the case at UNC. Race was no longer a defining characteristic of my school environment, or at least that was my perspective as a white student at a predominantly white university. Within white spaces, which are most spaces in America, white privilege requires no recognition of our white selves as white, and race is not something we have to think about very much. At UNC I was back in my racial comfort zone.

  My experience at Hillside had altered my view of the world. Those years had given me a different perspective about the black experience and an increased empathy for those affected by racial prejudice that I would not have had in a mostly white school. But, I was still white, and because I was white, I always had a choice of whether to engage in issues related to racial justice.

  I had friends from Hillside at UNC—my neighbor and freshman roommate Judith and the boyfriend of one of our friends. We all lived in the older dorms on North Campus, close to most classes. Judith and I resided in the all-girls Cobb Dorm, an antebellum-style building with beautiful parlors on the first floor in which to entertain our beaus. Grand magnolia trees grew in our front yard and by the side doors, and, in Southern style, black maids kept the building clean for us. Only a few girls who lived in Cobb were not white. In the two years I lived there, I recognized the Old South plantation culture, and although I critiqued it, I was not sure what could be changed or how we might proceed to accomplish change.

  I knew a few black Hillside alumni who were at UNC. I saw them infrequently; I had not been close to them in high school and did not get to know them much better in college. We talked when we saw each other in class or on campus but most of them lived on South Campus in the high-rise dorms, and there wasn’t much mingling across the two sides of campus. I noted but didn’t question too seriously why almost all the black students lived on South Campus, in another kind of segregation.

  * * *

  One memory illustrates how the racial figure and ground had changed for me in my new environment. One spring afternoon when I was walking across campus with a black student I knew from Hillside, I became aware that I was a white girl walking with a black girl. I wondered if other people noticed and what they thought. One moment, I had just been talking to a high school friend, and in the next moment, I was making a statement that I was the kind of white person who knows black people well enough to be having a conversation with them. Such interactions were not that common in 1974, even at my liberal university.

  I was surprised that I had this thought. I was ashamed that I noticed and cared what other people thought. But I could not unthink it. I believed I was not supposed to “see race,” but I was seeing it—even after my three years in a desegregated high school.

  The Black Student Movement (BSM), a student organization at UNC, led the one protest on campus provoked by racial concerns that I remember from my college experience. The Carolina Forum invited David Duke of Louisiana, the founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, to speak on campus; student fees paid for his trip. A dorm friend, Susan, and I were walking across campus the night he was there. We had not planned to go to his speech, but we were drawn to Memorial Hall when we heard loud chants of “Go to hell Duke” from more than 200 protestors. (This was usually heard at Carolina basketball games when we played the Duke University Blue Devils.) People were crowded in doorways and hanging out of windows to see the spectacle, and we soon realized that this protest was working—that there would be no speech by Mr. Duke that night.

  The air around me was electric. I was not part of the protest, but I was there, elated and energized that others had kept David Duke from speaking. I understood the free speech argument for allowing him to speak, but I also felt there was great harm in letting him. I was liter
ally on the outside looking in at this demonstration—in my comfort zone—sympathetic, moved even, but not in the middle of the action.

  During my time at UNC, I never crossed over from concern and caring about racial issues to actual activism—I somehow was not able to pull myself out of my own life’s requirements—now academic ones—to become fully involved. I was afraid of what activism would require and what I would have to give up. Activism looked appealing—the community, comradery, and feelings of purpose it must have created—but it looked overwhelming as well. I played it safe.

  I took a course in race and politics in the South my second year, taught by a white professor who was an expert in Southern politics. He was liberal in his politics, which was comforting to me—I thought of myself as liberal also. I learned two new (to me) ideas from him. First, much of what was considered racism was actually classism, or at least it was complicated with classism. The second was that part of the reason there seemed to be less racism in the North was because fewer black people lived there and therefore white people had less reason to defend their territories.

  Though I thought these were enlightening ideas at the time—and let my South off the hook a bit—now, decades later, I believe both that these ideas are untrue and that they obscured my (and everyone else’s) understanding of structural, anti-black racism and the white supremacist culture in which we all participate. My professor was espousing a view that was considered progressive at the time, but the conversation about race was still about individual prejudice when I was taking his class.

  I was particularly interested in his second point; I always had felt somewhat defensive about the South’s reputation for racism vis-a-vis “The North.” Of course, I knew Southern culture was racist and Southern white people had done awful things to black people for centuries, but I also believed they—we—were not more racist than people in the North. At least a strain of Southern liberalism had never condoned Jim Crow laws or any of the other unfair treatment based on race. I thought Northerners were not treating black people any better than Southerners were.

  The citizens of Boston confirmed this for me when they were asked to desegregate their schools. I watched the protests against busing on television with my roommate Susan my senior year at UNC, thinking “those hypocrites.” I felt some moral superiority because I had been part of a peaceful desegregation process in Durham, though I knew I had little to do with its “success.”

  * * *

  The black people who were most visible in my daily life on campus were athletes. I was a big fan of UNC basketball, and though the team was not predominantly black, there were black first-string players such as Walter Davis and Phil Ford. (Michael Jordan joined the team shortly after I graduated.) For me, though, basketball players were beyond race. They were all minor gods. Race was less a part of their identity than their scoring average was.

  There were no black coaches then. The exploitation of black athletes has been the subject of much discussion over the years: that few are prepared to compete academically, that academics are made easy for them to ensure that they play, and that many lack credible reading and math skills and often do not graduate. I would like to think this was not as true for the basketball players while I was in school as it is now, but I do not know. Carolina’s famous basketball coach, Dean Smith, had been a civil rights activist in the 1960s, and I trusted that he treated all his athletes with respect and equity. It would be interesting to hear what the players then would say now.

  One black former Hillside classmate was a walk-on on the junior varsity basketball team at UNC. Being a walk-on on the JV team did not elevate him to minor god status in my eyes, however. I had known him since seventh grade, and I knew he had gotten into UNC on his academic qualifications. We were both taking a jazz-appreciation class during our sophomore year. A real jazz trumpet player, not an academic, taught the class, keeping us alert with his beat-era slang and stories about his brushes with the jazz greats.

  My former Hillside classmate, now UNC classmate/walk-on basketball player, had a reputation for dating only white girls (as did many of the black athletes). He started sitting beside me in class and hanging around to talk to me afterward. I was uncomfortable, not wanting to be just another white girl he went out with, so I kept my distance. In my mind I was not avoiding him because he was black, it was more that I did not want him to be interested in me because I was white. In retrospect, perhaps this assumption was unfair. Maybe I should have asked him what he thought.

  * * *

  Though worries about academic achievement had driven some of my concern about school desegregation, for me, those fears had proved generally unfounded. I had done well on the SATs and had gotten into a good state university. My college grades were providing further evidence. English composition, however, was the one subject in which, once I got to college, I thought Hillside had failed me academically. I had to work hard in many college courses, but no matter how hard I tried in my freshman English class, I just was not “getting” it. Something was out of my control, and I didn’t know what it was.

  We read such authors as Walker Percy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I loved their writing, and I am grateful to have been introduced to them in that course, but I could not write successfully about them. My writing assignments were coming back with massive amounts of red ink and terrible grades. I blamed my English teachers in high school for giving me A’s but not teaching me how to write.

  To be fair, I also blamed my uptight, red-lipsticked, chain-smoking (in class, stomping out the butts on the classroom floor!) graduate student instructor, for not reaching out to save me. I never considered going to her and asking for help. I was shy, and her unsmiling demeanor was intimidating. I hated her strangled laugh when she was being ironic and her visible irritation when students did not have the answers she wanted. I was mortified with the C I squeaked out of that class and continued to think for years afterward that I was doomed to poor writing skills. I believed these skills were unrecoverable, having missed learning them during a critical development period in high school.

  * * *

  There were few black faculty members at UNC when I was there. Within my discipline, psychology, I remember two, both assistant professors in clinical psychology. One of these was the only black professor I ever had at UNC as an undergraduate; I took a course in abnormal psychology from him. The other, a woman, not only eventually earned tenure; she also went on to become a dean. The university hired both of them about the time I started college, along with several other younger professors who exemplified more gender and racial diversity than the tenured staff. Very few members of this diverse cohort received tenure, however.

  Race as related to mental wellbeing was not much studied in the psychology department at that time, although these two black faculty members did research on the effects of minority status. I was not uninterested in that. When I was in high school, I had read a lot of Robert Coles’ work on the effects of segregation on black children in the South and was fascinated with his methods and findings. (Yes, I was truly a nerd in high school.) Feminist issues, such as sexism and the effects of women’s changing roles, however, seemed more relevant to me while I was in college and during most of my research career.

  * * *

  Doing well academically was critical to my self-image, and a combination of fear of failure, introversion, and good study habits kept me psychologically centered during my years in school. Love and sex, however, were my other major preoccupations during college, my developing feminist ideology notwithstanding. Somehow I thought if I could just work out a relationship—had a boyfriend or a husband who agreed with my feminist ideals and principles—then I could redirect all the energy I spent worrying over not having a boyfriend toward my career. I would find out that this was fantasy—that none of us knew what experimenting with sex roles was going to mean. We didn’t see that this would be a lifelong journey in which we would be making daily choices—not always the right ones—about
how to integrate love, family, and career.

  My dreams of romance were largely unfulfilled my first two years at UNC. There were boys I thought I was in love with, but these feelings were unrequited. And I had occasional dates with men I was not so interested in either. I still felt inclined to include sex in relationships even when my partner did not share my romantic feelings. I kept these experiences mostly to myself because the sexual revolution was not fully realized in 1973 in the South, and for most of my female friends, mutual love was still a requirement for sex. Luckily, I had one friend who lived in my dorm whose world view was more like mine; she became my confidante and, later, became my roommate when we moved out of the dorm. Thus, I did not feel completely alone in trying to figure out what was right and wrong for me in this confusing human realm.

  My love life improved my senior year; I started dating the man I eventually married. He was the roommate of my roommate’s boyfriend. He was a bit older, having been in the Army until a few months before I met him. I thought he was beautiful. It was nice to have my feelings reciprocated, but there were a lot of ups and downs, and my hopes to have it all “settled” got a bit of a reality check.

  As I tried to imagine life after college, the conflicts that women face about love and work, family and career were real for me. I felt caught in a tangle of how to use my brain and what to do with my heart. In principle, I never thought that I should give up a family to have a career or give up a career to have a family, but I did not know any woman who had had both in a satisfying way. I struggled with this dilemma.

  * * *

  The last semester of my senior year, my boyfriend quit school and moved to Raleigh for a job. Raleigh was not that far away, but I was insecure and worried that I might lose him from that distance. That year I was doing a senior honors thesis on women’s sex-role conflicts. I was well aware of the irony of my anxiety about losing a romantic relationship while I was doing this research. Things worked out, though; my boyfriend and I got married the fall after I graduated.