“Black Ice” (1992) by Lorene Cary is a story about growing up black in America. It tells of her two years at St Paul’s, a prep school in New Hampshire that had been just for rich white boys up until the 1960s. She went there in the early 1970s, being one of the first blacks to go. (Michel Martin of NPR went there too at about the same time.)
At first she thought her experience was too strange to matter to anyone: a black nerd going to a white prep school. After all, how many blacks go to white prep schools? Yet every black person in America has to somehow live in a country run by white people. And, in fact, some of those white people came from places like St Paul’s.
She felt out of place there. But it began to change her so that she felt out of place at home too, back in her black middle-class neighbourhood just outside of West Philly. She was caught between two worlds.
It couldn’t be just that I was to become like them or hang onto what I’d been. It couldn’t be that lonely and pointless.
She felt alone even among the other blacks there. She did not see how her “special aloneness united me with my peers more utterly than the wary, competitive fraternity I tried to create in my own heart”.
She felt like a poor scholarship girl, hat in hand. In time she understood that she was “a sojourner bearing gifts, which were mine to give or withhold.” That St Paul’s was hers too. And so too was America.
Whites told her they do not mind if she was green or purple – “it’s the person that counts”. Why did that feel like such a put-down? All she could say was, “I’m not purple.” They told her it was not fair that they should be blamed for their forefathers owning slaves. Fair? They are talking about fair?
She had no idea what to say to stuff like that. She grew angry. She grew tired of “trying to wrench some honesty out of this most disingenuous of God’s people.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald she found the words for her fearful suspicions of her white schoolmates.
Few whites understood: most were incapable of being honest enough about race. They put up a hard wall.
Public figures would come to the school from time to time. One day she met Vernon Jordan. He understood. He had fought in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He said the old Jim Crow racism was pretty much dead, but a new subtle racism was taking its place, a racism that no one knew how to fight. So the only advice he could give her was to stay in school and be ready. That is just what her mother had told her. It is just what the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had told her (she wrote and asked).
But be ready for what?
See also:
This sounds like a classic case of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness”, except more edgy.
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I really wanna read this now
Thanks =)
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