For those who love their country, a
group that I believe includes the majority of my compatriots, we have fallen
upon hard times. The naively patriotic
celebration of the Fourth of July characteristic of my years in elementary
school is a thing of the barely memorable past; but most of us nonetheless have
a benign awareness of a holiday that arrives with the really hot weather and
legitimates if it doesn’t actually require firing up the backyard grill. This year, however, the associations most
likely to stay in the mind are those of racial tension, racial violence, and an
endless outpouring of hasty opinion, ludicrously referred to as a
“conversation”, that coheres only in the utter certainty of each contributor concerning
the correctness of the views expressed.
Is the nation doomed to endless
racial discord? If your perspective is
that of hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week, it might well seem so. But education, and education’s important
enabler, advancing age, might suggest something more hopeful. Among the more politically incorrect
attitudes one can express on an American college campus is that in the long run
things have improved dramatically and are continuing to improve even now. The thing is, which are you going to believe:
“studies” by politically partisan sociologists or your own lying eyes? If you elect to go with your own eyes you are
of course going to be dependent on the “anecdotal” evidence of your personal
experience, a social-scientific no-no.
Even so, as Galileo once remarked, anecdotally, eppur si muove. My anecdote
will concern my fiftieth high school reunion, which took place quite a while
ago, in 2004.
My years of
public primary and secondary education were disrupted by my father’s
peripatetic work, which took him for relatively short stays over wide swaths of
the South and West. In my junior year (1952-3)
the family relocated, briefly, to a small oil refinery town in East Texas. That is where I graduated from high school,
though my family had already moved on again, and I was boarded with
friends. This town had a sizable black
minority, with which I had practically no contact whatsoever. The schools were racially segregated, and the
black high school, separate and palpably unequal, was out of mind as well as
out of sight. Otherwise the place was
pretty much like the “Anarene” of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, though a bit larger. I hated it, and I loved it.
I graduated in the late spring of
1954. The date that the Supreme Court
ruled in the case of “Brown vs Board
of Education” was May 17, 1954, three days before my eighteenth birthday. The issue was hotly debated among my peers,
and the decision approved of by but a few.
I went off to college in Tennessee, an act already culturally
transgressive. Within months I had
fallen out of correspondence with my two or three closest high-school
companions, people I would have thought would remain bosom friends for life,
and who under less remorseless geographical circumstances almost certainly
would have. Every “now” has its “fierce
urgency,” and never more so than in the years of youth, so crowded with
novelty, challenge, and opportunity, and so bereft of steadying perspective. One thing led to another. I went abroad for further study. I married a foreigner. I began a family and a career “in the
East”—like Jay Gatsby! I never returned
to Texas, except much later, to give lectures in urban academic settings. But the long reach of the Class of ’54
Planning Committee tracked me down, and I had no hesitation in signing up for
the Fiftieth Reunion. I flew to Dallas
and rented a car.
I had a ball, but I want to keep
the focus on the racial theme. The town
had probably doubled in size. There was
a big new high school. I could not even
find my old house or church. I
remembered many, perhaps even most of the classmates who showed up; and I was
forced to contemplate the unequal ways in which age ravages men and women. There were a couple of professionally
impressive classmates. One had been the
head of the Texas Wildlife Commission.
Another was married to the former lieutenant governor of the state! But we were as lily-white a group as we had
been when we stumbled across the stage in 1954, only maybe now calla lily gray.
Public secondary education in Texas
is, generally speaking, an extension of the football team. Naturally the reunion was built around the
Homecoming game, and attendance at it was naturally de rigueur. The Reunion
Class had special seating, and we were repeatedly mentioned by the announcer on
the loudspeaker. I personally was
singled out as “the only Rhodes Scholar to come out of Titus County”. The stands went wild. I’d be being disingenuous if I denied being
tickled pink.
But I want to tell you about what
was happening on the field. What was
happening on the field was the home team’s largely black backfield running,
passing, and punting to the enthusiastic applause of a seriously interracial
crowd. Then there was the half-time
“show”: a really challenged wind section and about three dozen high-stepping
majorettes in satin and sequins, though mainly leg. I could not fail to note that many of them
seemed to be Latinas. I don’t remember
much of a Hispanic population in this place fifty years ago. That seemed to have changed. Fifty years earlier the ne plus ultra of social success and “popularity” for high-school
males was prowess on the gridiron. For
high school females it was being in the cheerleaders’ peep show. I saw no evidence that that had changed, but a lot else had.
