Hate Your Friends

When do black boys find out that they're scary?
This provacative question, posed in Jonathan Lethem's "Fortress of Solitude," was never answered in the text. It was just laid out there like a giant pinata, ready for "pundits" of every stripe to take a whack at it.
Lethem grew up in the area now called Boerum Hill (though it is in fact a valley). With semi-hippy dippy parents, he and the other white kids would hide their lunch money from black bullies any place they could, like inside their socks and shoes.
Lethem nonetheless got "yolked." Being yolked involved getting your head put in a headlock and then asked whether you had any money. A quick "no" didn't seem to satisfy one's attackers. Meanwhile, the kids at the private schools in Brooklyn Heights, so close at hand, walked mostly without fear.
The public elementary I walked to was next to my town's small ghetto. As little kids we would visit their houses, but as they got older and into Middle School, a few of course turned menacing and tried to "get you" after school. As kids, we didn't understand. Why were they doing this? What did we do to them?
The most embarrassing thing to me was I was being tormented by a black nerd. "Yo, you gonna give me some money," he said. He was skinny and the black kids thought he was a gawky geek. Nonetheless, I was small and skinny until adolescence. The daily round of extortion was over when my younger brother heard about it and told my mother. I grew up in a medium-sized town, so when my mother heard about it she said she would call the boy's mother. I told the bully about it and that was the end of the lunch surcharge (social observers can now add something about black culture being matriarchal etc.)
I couldn't help thinking I wouldn't have to put up with this crap if I went to PDS, the biggest private school in the area.
Why don't the black kids take a bus there and threaten those kids, an easy target if there ever was one? Our parents were the one's with liberal values who kept us in public schools. Our parents were the good white people, who wanted to integrate us into a bi-racial society. The kids were the ones that were paying for their parents high ideals.
In DC it must have been even harder, though I remember going to the rich black kids parties off 16th Street, known as the Gold Coast. No problems there.
By HS the races had typically settled into an understood though unspoken pact. Tbe school let them have "the funk room" next to the cafeteria. Bi-racial friendships were by and large OK, especially if there was something uniting black and white students, like the football team.
So Lethem's question goes unanswered. All I can remember was facing the biggest black player on the team and blocking him as hard as I could, trying to prove he didn't scare me. It usually took him about a second more to shed me than otherwise.
As I wrote before, it was that racial quicksand of Middle School/Junior High that was much worse. The sense even among the tough white Italians ("Guido's")was that blacks didn't fight fair. They observed no limits. They wern't satisfied with kicking your ass, they wanted to send you to a hospital.
Believe it or not, what often makes blacks seem scary is their hair. Who are the whites that seem scariest? Skinheads. A lot of blacks are essentially skinheads in cutting their hair so closes. And when do they look most peaceful? When they grow dreadlocks. Ya mon.

later,
Tourguide