Class Reunions and Race

by Harold Bridgeman

"The layering of advantage onto raw intelligence can also
be said to result in a kind of manufactured intelligence."

I recently received notice of my upcoming high school class
reunion. I should state at the outset
that I have been out of high school longer than anyone would probably care to
discuss. If, however, someone should
wonder just how long, I would be obliged to remind that someone that there is a
very thin line between the curiosity of the enlightened truth seeker and the
clandestine voyeurism of the noisy. On
second thought, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure any such line exists. But I digress.

My class reunion notice has brought back memories that
prompt nostalgia, amusement and a kind lingering diffuse anger. There are bittersweet memories of classmates
whose faces I can still see but whose names I have forgotten. There is remembrance of mundane school
events that stretch back to kindergarten that still tickle. There are memories of ah ha moments when
things were first learned and the current sad realization of how little, if
anything, one really knows.

I grew up in an industrial town in the Midwest that has
long since succumbed to the fate of post-industrial America beginning it's
inexorable decline before such terms as outsourcing or offshoring were part of
the mainstream lexicon. This was also
before the realization that global capital had the magical ability to defy the
laws of matter by indeed making the earth flat and asserting, as did that long
ago monarch, if the peasants have no bread, " let them eat cake." The motivating visions of the industrialists
that fueled the early development of my hometown have reached their culmination
in the schemes of the creators and purveyors of esoteric commercial paper and
the hegemonic aspirations of the global resource and allied corporations and
their client governments.

"Variations
on the sundown town, restrictive covenant and redlining themes kept our group
on the other side of the tracks."

In every industrial town in America there is or use to be a
set of railroad tracks. On the other
side of those tracks in the least desirable section of town resided a certain
racial group. Guess which one. Variations on the sundown town, restrictive
covenant and redlining themes kept this group in that particular section of
town or other designated areas informed by those imperatives. As might have been surmised, our family
lived on the other side of the tracks.

My hometown use to have a rather large eastern European
immigrant population many of whom, I came to understand, were refugees from
post World War Two Europe. Many of my
classmates were the children of these immigrants. There are hardly any there now as over the years they fell into a
kind of socio-culturally induced somnambulance dreaming the American dream and
waking up on a sunny morning in the suburbs.
By contrast, the socio-culturally induced slumber of my racial cohorts
has tended to be fitful and restless punctuated by recurring nightmares that
have an odd economic sameness about them.
Even those who have stumbled into the bliss of the American dream are
prone to night terrors unless they can learn to embrace a pernicious amnesia of
history and a contemporary socio-cultural fiction.

Because of alphabetical seating, from first grade until I
graduated from high school I sat next to a Polish boy who became my dear
friend. Since his house was on my way
to school we often walked to school together.
On many occasions I'd wait for him in front of his house before
beginning our pleasant walk to school. What always troubled me and haunts me to
this day is he seemed to have a rather strained relationship with his
mother. His mother always appeared
angry with him as she was often yelling at him in Polish as he emerged from his
house with a tense scowl on his face completely ignoring her angry yells. The farther we got from his house the more
relaxed and happy he became. Because of
my inability to understand Polish, I may have been reading more into the
situation than was warranted but I was always frightened of his mother and felt
home life was difficult for him which saddened me.

"A three by five card read, ‘The Black Marauder strikes
again.'"

Every class has events that are always fondly remembered as
high comedy. The time one of our math
teachers slammed the toilet seat down on Winslow's head as he was trying to
peek through a small opening from the boys' into the girls' toilet ranks as
number one. Thus the quintessential
compulsion of male adolescence was transformed into the major comedic episode
of the entire school year. Shortly
after this event lockers that were inadvertently left unlocked started having
books stolen from them. In place of the
stolen book was a note written on a three by five card that read," The Black
Marauder strikes again." Everyone including some of our teachers knew Winslow was the Black
Marauder but he was never caught and no evidence connecting him to the scene of
the crimes was ever adduced.

What angers and anguishes all these years later is the roll
call students with high raw intelligence from our side of the tracks who never
made it to graduation day and some who just barely made it into adulthood
before making a troubled early exit.
I'm sure in their heart of hearts some must have hoped that somewhere,
sometime and somehow someone would figure out how to prevent short lifetimes
filled with single, double and triple crosses.

Hierarchal systems embodied by race, class and place, as a
general rule, tend to layer advantage onto groups at or near the top. In truth race, class and place are really
structural organizing components of a single power configuration just as
arithmetic, algebra and calculus are structural expressions of
mathematics. Groups at or near the
bottom of these hierarchies are often disadvantaged in many ways. These advantages and disadvantages are
cumulative, varied and tangible as well as intangible. The layering of advantage onto raw
intelligence can also be said to result in a kind of manufactured intelligence.

If as a preschooler there are many books in my house
(tangible) and my parents often read to me before bedtime (intangible), I may
grow up to hate reading but the chance of me liking it is significantly
higher. If I have a quiet pleasant
place to do my homework (tangible) and I am encouraged to do so by my parents
(intangible), I may never do any homework but the chances of me doing some is
also significantly higher. If my
neighborhood is attractive, safe and secure (tangible), I just might have a
sense of well being (intangible) that enhances learning rather than a sense of
desperation that interferes with learning when I arrive at school each
morning.

"The high raw intelligence of some of the brightest of my
classmates never reached fruition but was murdered, if you will, in its
infancy."

An almost inexhaustible list of tangible and in tangible
advantages could be constructed for race, class and place just as such a list
of disadvantages could be culled. The
point is the interface of these three factors compromised the potential of some
of the brightest of my classmates.
Their high raw intelligence never reached fruition but was murdered, if
you will, in its infancy. A kind of
gradually evolving specialized intellectual infanticide.

One such classmate, although I could cite others, provides a
textbook example. We called him Pooche
and he was in my class from kindergarten until about the tenth grade when the
converging negative forces of the troika (race, class and place) completed
their fateful task and he left school.
He is the yardstick by which I think of high raw intelligence.

As I recall, in kindergarten somewhere between song times,
play times, nap times or recess we were shown these pictures of individual
letters and numbers. To my utter
horror, near the end of the school year we were given these little books where
the letters were combined into words and the words into stories that our
teacher expected us to read. At the
time, I remember thinking what kind of derelict parents and out of control
teachers would subject an innocent kindergarten student of the recess and nap
time persuasion to such intense and uncalled for pressure? To my complete amazement, it seemed no pressure
at all for Pooche as he read almost immediately with ease and fluency. On the playground he told me it was really
very easy.

This, it must be remembered, was at a time when our parents
and many other people in our neighborhood were uneducated escapees from the
rural south fleeing the harshness of that feudal environment for what they
hoped was a more enlightened industrial north.
A place where, it was rumored; industriousness, civility, reason,
knowledge and merit determined one's fate and not the diabolical obsessions of
the religious devotees of unrestrained bigotry.

"Pooche's strategy was to do his work, usually in record
time and then put his head on his desk and go to sleep."

In third grade while everyone was feverishly working on the
multiplication tables and beginning division, Pooche had his head down on his
desk sleeping. When chastised by the
teacher for being a work avoiding laggard he presented her with a perfectly
completed paper which only seem to further anger this rather irascible teacher. In ninth grade as we were all struggling
with our initial algebra problems, Pooche again was confronted by the teacher
for sleeping in class. As was his
habit, a perfectly completed assignment was tendered. In gym class as he had done at recess in kindergarten, he
explained to me how very simple algebra really was.

Over the years he had learned the teachers became very angry
with students who were talking or fooling around in class when they were
supposed to be working on an assignment.
His strategy, therefore, was to do his work, usually in record time and
then put his head on his desk and go to sleep while everyone else was
completing their assignments. It often
got him into trouble for sleeping in class but the hostility of the teachers
was generally less severe.

For poor Black people from our side of the tracks when I was
in high school, the spaces for exercising high raw intelligence were narrow
indeed. If by temperament some refused
to operate within so constricted a space, their fates were inescapably sealed
or more accurately doubly sealed.

Variations on the accounts rendered above could be told by
legions of people currently reading their high school class reunion notices and
musing nostalgically about school events and classmates long since gone from
sight.

Harold Bridgeman lives in
St. Paul, Minnesota. He can be contacted at Hbridging@aol.com.

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