That June, I graduate from college. The last paper I write is for John Manley’s class, The American Dream. Manley is a Marxist. He isn’t the first professor to assign me The Autobiography of Malcolm X, but he is the first to force me to confront my own role in my alienation from both America and Black America. I title my paper “Buying into the American Dream—Is It Worth the Price?” It begins:
I sit here at my desk, a soon-to-be-graduating senior at Stanford University, trying to reduce the pile of clutter that covers my desktop in hopes that this will somehow help unclutter my mind. Most of the correspondence can be chucked into a throwaway pile, or can be neatly filed away. But not this particular letter. When I first received it, it angered and frustrated me, and now its presence fills me with remorse as I’m forced to examine the truth about my upbringing. The letter? An invitation to the Black Baccalaureate Ceremony for graduating seniors. The problem? A lifetime of standing on the outskirts of the Black community has taught me that I’m not Black enough to attend.
Rereading this college paper today at close to fifty years of age, holding in my hands the words of my twenty-one-year-old self articulating a concern I’d spend the next twenty years trying to unwind, leaves me breathless. At first it feels like my younger self has made a trip through time to remind me what was clear even then amid what felt like muddy terrain inside me.
I did not attend that Black Baccalaureate Ceremony in 1989. While I had been somewhat politically active as a student, and had met Black student leaders through those efforts, I hadn’t attended parties thrown by Black students and had all but exiled myself from Ujamaa. I could not fathom bringing my light brown, white-sounding self to the graduation gathering, not to mention my white mother, whose existence vis-à-vis me and the Black community was becoming an embarrassment to me.
When my parents arrive for graduation, Mom sees the Black Baccalaureate listed in the schedule of weekend activities and asks in a hopeful tone if we’ll be going, and I answer her with an angry look. I blame her for my exile, blame her for creating a child who has no sense of belonging to the only people who might possibly claim her as theirs.