An American Story (39 page)

“DID YOU HEAR THAT?! NO REGGAE! DID YOU HEAR THAT! CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT! NO BLACK MUSIC!”

Several of us tried to quiet her (screaming was unprofessional, to say the least) but she wouldn't be soothed. She marched back over to the (black) DJ and demanded to know who'd put reggae off-limits. He told her and she stormed back, lynch ropes and branding irons in her eyes. She bore down on the unsuspecting Hallie, the summer associate coordinator. Though Hallie phrased it diplomatically, it was obvious that she'd outlawed reggae because she thought it low class and foreign; easily two thirds of the music blaring for the past few hours was black, downright hip-hop. But the summer associate only became more outraged. Still screeching, still looking to fire us up to join her in taking a stand.

My five fellow S&S scholars (with one exception, who was the other racial hysteric and also the only scholar failing at the firm) happened to be at one table with a few scattered whites (why not? All-white tables aren't suspect). We were a pragmatic bunch, working diligently at the firm and enjoying the perks; perhaps our Ivy League schools, scholarships, guaranteed summer jobs,
and
guaranteed postgraduation jobs—none of which the reggae militant had—made us complacent. Maybe we had been bought off, like Hazel Dukes, with a little stroking. It was easier for us to stay calm, explain away insults. Maybe we really were fat, dumb, and happy. Or perhaps this was just stupid. Most of the music we'd been hearing all night was black; I dislike reggae too and was glad not to be hearing it. In any event, she was looking to us for backup, so sincere in her outrage her shoulders shook. When we tried to mediate, reminding her that Hallie had treated us like nieces and nephews throughout the year, far beyond the call of her job, and that perhaps we should hear her out, she stormed off to handle the situation alone.

I couldn't help it. I cracked up. One by one, we all did.

“Reggae?” we kept sputtering. “Reggae?”

Millions, literally millions invested in an attempt to lure blacks to the firm and it all comes down to reggae at the company picnic. For this Martin died on a filthy balcony? For this, four little girls died at Sunday school? It was so ridiculous, all we could do was smother our snickers and hope not to attract attention. This was one “black thing” I didn't want to have to explain.

Without our support, she marched off in disgust to John Greenblatt, the partner who was the heart and soul of the S&S scholars program (it was his Cape Cod house we summered in). Struggling with his recalcitrant toddler, he looked up long enough to express confusion and mumble, “You want reggae? Tell the guy to play some reggae.”

Fired with righteousness, she marched back to the DJ like Fannie Lou Hamer marching into the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Head high, she demanded a reggae song.

Everyone but those of us who'd stood idly by during Shearman & Sterling's own March to the Selma Country Club stumbled, drunken and oblivious, onto the dance floor for reggae songs most were too high to even be aware of.

I started singing just loud enough for our table to hear. “Nobody knows de trouble . . .”

We lost it. Finally, the blacks broke up their segregated group as we scattered so no one would know we were all laughing at the same thing and wonder what it was.

——

I was finding that the better off some blacks become, the harder we look for reasons to remain discontented. Survivor's guilt and bourgeois self-involvement, I think. Like in the stand at the country club, blacks at Harvard squeal and squeal about less and less from their ivory tower when the gold-plated faucets get the least bit clogged.

My second and third years, I was a resident tutor at Currier House. In exchange for room and board, I lived in an undergraduate dorm and advised prelaw students. That decision was the final element that made my HLS years warm and homey, two descriptions most Harvardians will find incomprehensible. The first element was having invested in a study group that evolved into lifelong friendships. The second was my
Record
column, which was well received enough that HLS admin staff, professors, and fellow students often sought me out to pay compliments (even hugs) or stuffed my Hark box with laudatory notes. (My enemies wrote the
Record
but they never personally confronted me.) Finally, of course, I had discovered writing itself, a passion so fulfilling that by second year I knew that was my true calling. I may be the only alum in history to have experienced the famously chilly, cutthroat Harvard University as a warm place.

To be sure, HLS's general atmosphere was sullen and neurotic, but the tutorial staff at Currier was composed of grad students and tenured professors from every discipline. I had no choice but to set aside my legal focus and listen to heated discussions about German literature, ethnomusicology, or particle physics because the only other lawyer in the house was my partner law adviser. It was a lively intellectual and social community. Parties were frequent and table conversations ranged from the deadly serious to the latest
Simpsons
or
Star Trek
episode (which we watched en masse). I was amazed to eventually learn how enormously talented and credentialed some of my fellow tutors were because they wore it so lightly. Perhaps they swaggered in their departments but few did at home. Of the twelve houses in the Harvard College system, Currier House was the Brady Bunch House. People came down to Sunday waffle brunch in bunny slippers and fuzzy bathrobes. We stayed at the tables long after dinner was over talking and laughing. Once a month, we held the Senior Common Room, a cocktail party and dinner for dignitaries, scholars, and professors, with a few invited undergrads. This is where I interacted with Harvard's disgruntled black elite.

At my first Senior Common Room, I made a point of introducing myself to one of the few other blacks there, a middle-aged man who was a university administrator.

I said, “Hi. I'm Debra Dickerson, law student. I just moved here to Currier.”

Apropos of nothing more than the color of my skin, he spat out churlishly, “You need to understand what kind of place this is. The racism is unbelievable. UNBELIEVABLE. You have to watch your back constantly.”

The heat of his bitterness made me take a reflexive step back. I could feel the smile on my face shrivel up as he shrugged half the weight of four centuries of oppression into an even load between us.

It was like a French movie, strangers saying inexplicable things to each other. Downright pleadingly, so taken aback was I, I said, “Can't we go a minute without invoking white people? Can't we?”

“You think you're
in?
You think you're
Harvard?
That's what they want you to think. They'll get you if you let your guard down. Don't think you've
overcome
or anything like that just because you're at almighty Harvard. This place is awful, just awful.” He looked like he might throw up.

He'd been on staff nearly twenty years, however. “
Someone
has to fight these people,” he sighed bravely.

I turned away without another word. Oh, the self-pity of the pampered.

HLS quickly taught me two things: my lefty family was no more open-minded than my military one. Second, I wasn't nearly as far to the left as I'd thought, especially when it comes to the nature of activism. In the beginning, I wrote only satiric, often sophomoric
Record
pieces making fun of HLS. I didn't consciously eschew politics, I was just having so much fun being silly. Exploring my newly discovered zany side kept me pretty busy; I was like a baby who'd just discovered her toes. Also, I'd arrived at HLS just after the turmoil of the late eighties—the South Africa divestiture movement and, most contentious of all, the faculty diversity movement—and I was ambivalent about getting involved. Given the state of the nation, I was disgusted by the self-involvement of the privileged and could only care just so much whether a white elite or a black elite got to teach at HLS. I was writing because it was bringing me joy and I didn't want to become a mouthpiece for either side. The
Record
was replete with barely voting-age pseudopundits mouthing off from comfortable chairs and I was determined not to take sides as long as I was unprepared to do the investigative and analytic legwork required to make statements that any reasonable person ought to give weight to. My reverse snobbery notwithstanding, I believe in faculty diversity. Given that Dean Clark and the right-wingers had triumphed, in large part by painting themselves as the beleaguered defenders of impartial tradition, I decided that the best I could do from our position of defeat was to deny him coverage. My main focus in writing, though, was to enjoy myself. I've written a great deal since then, but I doubt that any writing I ever do will make me happier than my goofy
Record
column.

Quickly, I interspersed many political columns among the comic ones, though I continued to refrain from commenting on HLS politics. HLS was already too self-absorbed and preen-prone. Toward the end of the semester, a radical, activist black student paid me a dubious compliment. She told me she'd been afraid I was going to write only funny columns and was glad to see me tackling serious issues. This was about politics—approval and disapproval—not the quality of my writing. The weight of the race was on my shoulders and it was selfish, nay, traitorous, of me to be making the white folks laugh. She came from a thoroughly FBI-filed radical family, took her studies seriously, and was never confused about why she was at HLS (far more students
claimed
they came to work for change than actually did so. The vast majority of both black and white students filed off to big law firms at the end of the day. Why they just couldn't admit to their true motivations, I'll never know). I liked her. Yet she typified leftist thinking: why was I required to tackle serious issues? What's wrong with humor? with mysteries? with westerns? What about the practical fact that a black woman was an important voice at HLS? Why must a black person be political every moment of every day?

Another black leftist friend from the same kind of radical, activist background was just as dismissive of my column when it wasn't serious even though we'd traded life stories and she could see how happy it made me. Further, she was completely dismissive of the blacks who were aiming at law firms—they were ipso facto sellouts. She was one of the women I suffered through BLSA meetings with and we frequently bemoaned BLSA's intolerance of dissenting viewpoints together, yet she was no less intolerant. I must have asked her a thousand times: Why can't the concept of the division of labor apply to black people? Somebody's got to show up for work every day while the rest of us are manning the barricades, don't they? For that matter, why can't the First Amendment apply among black people and leftists? I chose neither humor nor serious commentary from the goodness of my heart but from that which naturally motivated me, yet humor was a choice I wasn't allowed to make and for-profit law a profession no black was allowed to undertake. Had a white person placed such limits on us, we'd have burned HLS down.

I personally believe in the black tax, wherein those of us who have made it should render both attention and dollars to those who haven't, but I don't believe in forcing it on others. While I don't understand that lemming mind-set that drives our best and brightest into a fate they dread, I see the importance of having blacks represented in corporate America. They serve a vital function and I'm glad they're doing it so the rest of us don't have to. I think that any citizen who goes to work every day, obeys the law, pays his taxes, and keeps his dog on a leash is doing his part—everything beyond that is gravy.

Another argument which raged in my lefty feminist circles was the conventional wisdom that Barbara Bush was a closet abortion rights supporter. Instantly, she was denounced as a traitor for not speaking out. Her husband's the politician, I disagreed. She's a wife and mother in a very difficult situation. I think she gets to decide to put her marriage first and keep her thoughts to herself. Oh, the looks I got.

A white lefty made no attempt to disguise her disgust when I told her of my intention to foster black entrepreneurship. “Make sure they actually pay their workers,” she sneered. In her defense, she did public interest work defending Hispanic immigrant women doing domestic work who were routinely defrauded, and she offered this by way of explanation when I jumped on her. I didn't buy it, though; her disgust, her disapproval, was too palpable. Nothing is more tiresome than the leftist chestnut that all capitalism is evil. Unchecked, it certainly is, but it's also the only game in town. I believe in subverting the dominant paradigm from within: how revolutionary would it be if tens of millions of the poor and dispossessed got their hands on the means of production? Just thinking about it makes me giddy (although I suspect they would rapidly become everything they used to hate). This Choate, Harvard undergrad, and Harvard Law School–educated, world-traveled woman driving the late-model car her parents gave her while living with every capitalist convenience known to man, however, dismissed my plan out of hand. She also disapproved of bona fide radicals like Duncan Kennedy who were merely intellectuals, or even activists who were not working hands-on. They're sellouts. Multiply that by the goodly chunk of liberals who think this same way, and you see where disaffected liberals like me come from. Again, why no division of labor?

For that matter, why assume that just because you're hands-on you're doing something that matters or that you're doing it well? Once, she tried to volunteer at Greater Boston Legal Services but they blew her off. She concluded that they didn't really care about the poor. Maybe, I said. But maybe the problem is that volunteers eat up resources, especially those precious managerial ones, just like employees do. They can't just give you a key to the office and tune out again. Also, the sought-after, glitzy public interest organizations have their own sources for volunteers and you're trying to circumvent that—maybe they just don't know what to make of you (like Mark's DGA staff). “No. They just don't care,” she concluded grimly.