An Experiment in Inequality

After sixteen years of attending Catholic schools serving almost no non-white students, I applied for grad school to Howard University, one of the nation’s oldest historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). When friends asked, “Why’d you apply there?” I answered, “It’s time for me to experience a nonreligious school.”  One inquisitive friend pressed, “What you really mean is, you want to experience firsthand being unequal?”

The truth is, I’d been having the time of my life substitute teaching at schools abutting the Howard campus.  I strolled across the campus at lunchtime or after dismissal.  I felt comfortable, welcomed. I applied, perhaps on a lark. After spending the summer working in Harlem, I started grad school.   

My first impression of Howard was about dress.  My undergrad college had abandoned its suits-and-ties dress code, but most Howard students and younger black faculty still dressed to the nines, with faculty wearing richer threads.  Older faculty dressed as if preparing for a board meeting.  Younger white faculty looked like L.L. Bean catalog models.  

For the first time I attended a school that didn’t have a crucifix on the front wall of every classroom.  Howard was non-sectarian but, to my surprise, decidedly religious.  Religion and church played a far greater role in day-to-day conversation than at the Catholic college where I’d completed undergrad.  I often felt like I’d joined a congregation.

I knew that Stokely Carmichael, a 1964 Howard grad, spoke out vehemently against the Vietnam War, and popularized the chant, “Hell No, We Won’t Go!”   I knew Howard had been rocked by student protests and boycotts a few years before I arrived.   But I didn’t see or hear about any demonstrations, protests or rallies at Howard related to the war or civil rights.  If Howard still had a chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which Stokely joined as a Howard student, I didn’t find it and it certainly didn’t find me.  Perhaps it held sub rosa meetings, off campus, to avoid adverse attention.   But wasn’t attention essential in becoming visible?  I believe Howard undergrads regarded campus as a safety zone buffered from the civil rights and anti-war battles being carried on somewhere else by someone else.  

Older faculty rarely talked about race except as a demographic dimension in research.  Younger faculty voiced keen awareness of race.  A fist-clenching, black female professor, dressed like a Black Panther, once chewed out a black male student: “You infuriate me because you represent the epitome of the stereotype of the black male that I’ve spent my entire career trying to prove has no validity.” She seemed perpetually angry at something undefined.  

Another professor tasked me with facilitating discussion on the theories of Berkeley professor Arthur Jensen, whose research on heredity and intelligence led him to assert that blacks are genetically inferior intellectually.  I was the only white student in a twelve-person seminar.  Five minutes into class, she threw a wrench into the works by asking, “Why would anyone, under any circumstances, ever attempt to prove the inferiority of any racial or ethnic group?”  Her question re-directed the conversation, so I aborted my presentation.  Class over. I felt set-up.  What transpired was exactly what she planned.  Apologetically, she said, “I can’t give you a grade, not for that,” so she assigned me another topic for the following week.  

I became close with two male faculty in their late twenties who were “sort of white.”  My advisor was of Eastern European Jewish descent, his parents having narrowly escaped Europe after Hitler invaded Austria.  Darker-skinned than many black faculty and students, he became embroiled in occasional battles with people who insisted he denied his “blackness” to pass as white.  “If I were really black, I’d be crazy as a Howard professor to try to hide that,” he said, “and even though I’m not black, based on my family history I can tell you lots about oppression and racial hatred.”  The other young faculty member lived in a commune and wore his long hair in a ponytail.  After being denied tenure, he re-discovered his Native American ancestry.

Stokely returned to Howard during his brief marriage to South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba. By then he was going by Kwame Ture.  I wanted to see him, but I was well aware of his antipathy toward whites.  He’d broken with the Panthers because they believed white activists could help the movement, but he insisted whites should get their act together first by focusing on their own communities.  I told a black student I was concerned about being the only white face in the audience.  He said, “You have darker skin than lots of the students who claim African ancestry.” My adrenaline raced like a runaway horse.  When Ture talked about “us,” I felt included.  I asked no questions and didn’t approach him afterwards to talk about Vietnam.  

When I started at Howard, I was accustomed to show up for meetings on time.  At Howard, however, I often wondered whether I’d gotten the time or place wrong.  Just as I was getting ready to leave, others would begin filing in.  “You’ve got to adjust to colored-people time,” I was advised by a black male grad student.   “Isn’t that racist?” I asked.  “If you say it, it’s racist,” answered the grad student.  “If I say it, it’s an inside joke.  And if you start doing it, you’re just plain late.” 

After I settled in, I often walked across campus to buy a bean pie for lunch.  There is something soulfully satisfying about bean pie.  One day, I wandered off campus toward Western Market, carrying my camera in a brown paper bag.  A police car whipped around the corner and two white cops jumped from the car. 

“What’ve you got in that bag?” one yelled.

“A camera,” I said.

“Likely story. Let’s see.”

I opened the bag, took out the camera, and held it up.

 “What’s inside the camera?” he asked.

“Film.” 

“Open it.”

“But that’ll expose the film.”

“Ask me if I care.”

“Okay.   D’you care?”

“Open the damn camera.”

 I opened the camera, thereby exposing the film. The cops tore the camera away and saw there was nothing else inside.

 “What’re you doing in this neighborhood?” the second cop asked.

 “I’m in grad school at Howard.”

“Does he look black to you?” the first cop asked the second cop.

“Prove it,” the second cop ordered.  

 I held up my Howard photo ID. 

The second cop said, “We don’t want to ever see your face again in this neighborhood.   D’you understand?”

Yes, I understand. 

One late October, A friend invited me to a Halloween party in Howard’s neighborhood sponsored by the Order of the Eastern Star. Warned it was a costume party, I wore a sleeved white leotard and tights and smeared whiteface on my hands, face, neck, and hair.  As we reached the venue, the Grand Matron gave me a toothy smile: “I can see you’re trying to win the prize.”   Asked who or what I was disguised as, I said, “A white man.”  A man in a scarlet suit confided, “You look just like a Caucasian.”  We danced all night and, of course, I won best male costume.  The best female costume winner was a black woman dressed as a harem dancer.   At the DJ’s direction, she and I paraded around the room, arm in arm.  As cameras flashed, the well-lubricated audience chanted, “Black and white, black and white.”  By going to Howard, I had the unique privilege of bathing in the River Jordan, figuratively speaking, of course.

Once I became a researcher and had to pursue competitive contracts, the Howard credential garnered subtle preference points. Except when the opposite happened.  Once, at a contract kick-off meeting, a new client said, “You don’t look black.” I promised I’d wear a dashiki to the next meeting.  Now and then, someone read my resume and said, “This is supposed to say Harvard, not Howard, right?”  The conservative father of a close friend once referred to Howard as my “alma mammy.”  However, another new client confided, “What initially interested me was your going to Howard.” 

Toward the end of my research career, I decided to walk north twelve miles from the National Mall to where I’d stashed my car in the suburbs.  It was a brilliantly sunny, crisp afternoon.  I walked up 7^th Street, which feeds into Georgia Avenue before it runs by the Howard campus.  It happened to be Homecoming Weekend.  Adherents of the Nation of Islam, dressed in their iconic tan suits and ties, were hawking their incomparable Supreme Bean Pies. 

“I got through four years at Howard on bean pies.  I crave a bean pie,” I said to a pie salesman.  After we completed the transaction, I said, “Peace out.”

In reply, the pie salesman said, “Peace . . . my brother.”  

Nearby, waiting to march in the homecoming parade, various Greek groups crowded the sidewalk.  “I graduated from Howard too—long, long ago,” I told a couple of antsy, ready-to-rock marchers.

Excited beyond belief, one said, “Is this your first homecoming?  Isn’t it great to feel like you’ve come home?  

”It sure is,” I answered, swallowing my first mouthful of bean pie.

“Well, welcome home!”