Dis-Covering

And thus we begin the 650 teacher series. Teachers have a unique and interesting viewpoint on high school. While for many of us it is a distant memory, it also feels like we never left.

I've forgotten a lot of the particulars of my high school experience, but I do have a foggy sense of not knowing much about who I was, what I was doing, or why I was doing it. There were kids in my friend group who were notably confident -- and now, looking back, I think they were probably just acting confident -- but I always carried around a quiet sense of self-doubt. I wore it close, like a wetsuit or long underwear, something that clung to me closely and privately but I hoped was invisible to the rest of the world.

This is why high school has always fascinated me.  Everyone is confused.   I was confused.   Dr. Wilson -- who seems like the most self-aware person any of us can imagine -- even HE was confused. For this reason, the world of high school strikes me the richest and most fertile ground imaginable for the formation of human identity. As many of the 650 posts have pointed out, you change a lot once you leave high school. Still, though: you take a lot with you.

Dr. Rai Wilson is a social studies teacher at Francis Parker. He graduated from high school in 1994, after which he went to Princeton, wrote some for a newspaper, volunteered with local kids, sat the bench for the baseball team, and earned a degree in American and African-American Studies. After getting a JD/PhD in history at the University of Virginia, he found his way to San Diego in 2003.

Here, he writes about his high school experience, which he describes as both memorable and fun” but also “intensely lonely.” “My post,” he said, “is about navigating pitfalls that attend a desire to be loved and embraced.”

- C.H.

It’s the loneliest feeling in the world. It’s like walking down an empty street and listening to your own footsteps. But all you have to do is knock on any door and say, “If you let me in, I’ll live the way you want me to live, and I’ll think the way you want me to think,” and all the blinds’ll go up and all the windows will open, and you’ll never be lonely, ever again.
    - Henry Drummond, Inherit the Wind, 1955


In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a Black woman is pulled back through time and space to rescue an ancestor in the brutal American past. This essay is something similar (minus the genre-bending tremendousness of Butler). If I could go back in time for a few minutes and try to rescue myself from youth’s pitfalls, what would I say? In this thought exercise, I’ll cast myself not as a physical person (why should a 40-year-old rando be lurking in the halls of a middle and high school?) but rather a whisper of conscience, a chain rattle from the ghost of Wilson-Future.

Hey, psst. Little man. I see you. This South Jersey prep school is 10 hours from Toledo, Ohio, but may as well be on a different planet. Red brick walls and green places outside. People not walking around pretending to want to fight; birthed from a gentle world with more abstract and lasting forms of power than the physical, academics are all good here. It’s the Upside Down--had been only one or two non-black faces in class in Toledo. Now there’s one or two non-white faces. You desperately want to fit in.

Sports ain’t the ticket. Dang, you’re little. Basketball coach is wrong, by the way. You’re gonna be little ‘till 10th grade, and even then 5’10 is all you get. The only dunkin’ you’ll be doing involves a chocolate glazed and a cold glass of milk. Eventually you’ll be able to avoid embarrassment in baseball--that’ll give you a squad--but you won’t be a star. Nope, not sports.

And sometimes you’ll try the move you used back in Toledo, using your wit to demean others. This earned you a counterfeit of the respect denied you by size and swagger. Now, as the Roots say, you’re in a new spot trying to run an old game. Let me tell you something: those times when you pile on, undercut someone, you’ll carry those around with you, forever. You’ve got a good memory, and your moral failures will jut from the earth of recollection. They’ll be cold and unmovable as tombstones, marking the places where lie buried pieces of the person you should have been. And similarly, you will never regret a kindness. Those moments when you crouched down with someone who’s been kicked will be treasure that you’ll carry with you, take out and look at when you’re feeling low or worthless. So don’t be mean. Be kind.

I see what you’re doing. Even back in Toledo you were different: always had a book, did ok in school. Hung with mostly girls in school well before puberty. Liked that they seemed more able to be themselves, weren’t confined to talk of physical domination and conjured intimacies. This weird affinity earned you the scorn of the boys. “What’s wrong with you, man? You ain’t normal.” The hated: “you act white.”

That hurts. We don’t expect white people to be nice. When they’re chill, it’s like a winning McDonald’s monopoly piece: “huh, check that out. Nice.” White people are generally acting not in a particular way toward you, but toward the animated criminal puppet lodged in their minds. They do not know, to quote DMX, who we be. You don’t take it personal. A Black person who dismisses you, on the other hand, do know who we be, and has from this presumably informed position, decided that you aint we. That is its own special kind of hurt.

Should you go to the MLK club meeting? No, might get clowned. Better to walk for pizza with your white friends. Stop and chat at the Black bench? No--there’s a football game starting up on the Oval. And gradually your timidity will produce the thing it was designed to avoid--the jokes, the head shakes, the cold shoulder. Those people think you believe yourself too good for them, when really you think THEY’RE too good for YOU, and worse, you think that’s right. But you should give them a chance. One day you’ll have students (yeah, that corporate law thing is not your cup of tea. By the way, you like tea. And Indian food. And lumpia. Oh, forget it, I’m on the clock.) You will have students, and you’ll tell them: “gimme a chance to suck.” By this you’ll mean, don’t just grouse about unfairness, or privately drag me with your parents or friends. If something bothers you, talk to me and see if I care, if I’m responsive. If after that you still think I’m unfair and uncaring, roast away. So, yeah. You should give these people a chance to suck. They might surprise you. I think they will.

Fearing loneliness, you’ll bend over backward to be accepted by the mainstream, laughing at--even making--racial jokes not in the least funny. Self-flagellation. No--I’ll use an ugly term you’ll discover when, after a senior year Awakening sparked by leafing through your dad’s Cornel West left on the kitchen table, you decide to minor in African-American studies. Minstrelsy: particularly in 8th, 9th grade. That’s not all you’re doing, but it’s part of what you’re doing.

Cliches are cliches for a reason, and so lemme here whisper the rather obvious, aspirational: “be yourself, those who matter don’t care, those who care don't matter.” You’ll leave this place with a number of dear White friends, and you should be brave enough to trust them with your authentic self. Or brave enough to accept the consequences and walk away, if trust proves misplaced.

But I’m almost out of time. Indeed, I’m over time, having uttered substantially more than the 650 words magically granted me. The acceptance you want from others will always be elusive. Acceptance, for yourself, of yourself, from yourself, however, that will be an anchor. You don’t like your father’s heavy-handed attempts to give you Black t-shirts and posters, but he’s trying to give you this precious thing he has--Black culture. The history, the literature, the music, the comedy, the food. These things, when you discover them, will help the world make sense. You’ll see Medieval paintings in college history class where monks depict angels with glasses, so moved were they to be allowed to see correctly at last. It will be like that. Discover it now, and dis-cover from trying to be like everyone else. You’re not, thank God. Got to go: don’t forget your Walkman; taking notes isn’t, in fact, beneath you; and stop drinking so much Coke. Mix in some tea.