When I attended East Junior-Senior High in 1974, there was a cookie-cutter feel to the place, although I didn't really notice that fact. I think that's what happens when you are surrounded by the same thing you've always known--in this case, white middle-class people. Somehow, you cease to recognize what you already know, at least until something or someone new comes along to provide some contrast.
Enter Chris and Charlie Black, the only black kids at East Junior-Senior High that year.
I'm not so forest-for-the-trees that I can't see the irony in their last name, as though we pasty whites needed a word to go along with what it was that made them different. Chris and I became fast friends, maybe, in part, because he was exotic and new. Mostly, though, because he was funny and liked the Pointer Sisters, too.
I cannot imagine how much courage it took for those two to show up at East each morning.
Even now, when East High is a much more diverse place--both racially and socio-economically--I often find myself looking lovingly at those students who cannot help but set themselves apart from everyone else, hoping that they have managed to stuff enough chutzpah into their backpacks to get them through another day.
East, however, cannot hold a candle to Lincoln High, at least in the category of diversity.
I think that this is one reason I really wanted Eric and Allison to go to Lincoln High. (Granted, another reason was so that I didn't have to drive them anywhere--not exactly something I would like to include on my "parent of the year" resume. . . . ).
At Lincoln High, it is statistically possible for Eric and Allison to be in the minority, to feel that awkwardness of not quite fitting in. Certainly, I don't want to make it a parental practice to push my kids into uncomfortable situations, but I do want them to "get" what it means to walk in another's shoes, preferably first-hand.
The richness of Allison's experience as a Link--being one of only a handful of whites on the volleyball team, befriending and working with students whose skin color, family life, first language, and food security differs from hers--will serve her well in her future.
And, frankly, it gives me great hope that this generation of teens--aside from the usual posse of small-minded idiots--seems to have moved so far beyond Life, Circa 1974, that they cannot fathom why old people are still freaking out about all the beautiful colors, contrasts and ways of living and loving that make up Life, Circa 2013.
Indeed, us old folk could learn a thing or two from those young whippersnappers.
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