BY ABOUT SIXTH grade, a set of kids in the professional middle-class suburb where I grew up stopped doing homework, or really much work at all. They’d goof around in everything from math class to gym period. Getting average grades or being sent to the principal’s office for misbehavior didn’t seem to bother them that much. And their parents seemed to greet it all with a shrug.
It looked like good fun to me, so I figured I’d give this not-giving-a-damn thing a try. My parents greeted my Bart Simpson attitude with something stronger than a shrug.
I remember their fury after a school meeting where the teacher must have explained that my grades had fallen because I spent class time chatting with friends rather than focusing on worksheets. Right before the hammer came down, I attempted a weak protest: “But none of the other kids are doing work in class either,” and ticked off a set of names that my parents knew.
“You are not like them,” came the stern response.
This confused me. I thought I was like them. I played sports and video games, watched MTV and worshipped skateboarder Tony Hawk, just like all the other 12-year-old boys.
“If you are not head-and-shoulders above the next candidate in a hiring process,” my mother sternly said, “they will not give you the job.” She repeated: “You are not like them.”
My parents didn’t come right out and say it, but what they meant was, “You are not white.” Looking back now, I can put words to the fear in their eyes that night: Has being around lots of white people lulled their brown son into thinking that the white narrative applied to him?
Here is what I mean by “white narrative” (at least the late 20th century suburban middle-class version prevalent among the group of boys I describe above): Don’t drop out of high school, don’t commit a felony, try not to get a girl pregnant, and by age 26 things will work out for you. It worked out for your dad
What my parents were furiously trying to communicate was this: However friendly you might be with those boys, however much you might share by way of interests and activities, your family lacks the easy familiarity—the decades of backyard barbeques, the country club ties, the rounds and rounds of golf—that serves as the secret lubricant of “oh, sure, we’ll give your son a place at the company” success. In other words, we are not white.
Maybe because at the end of the day I’m a pretty dutiful son, or maybe because I (secretly) all along actually enjoyed school—whatever the reason, in seventh grade I turned it around and started to excel. Academic excellence became the foundation on which I’ve built my organization, Interfaith Youth Core and, frankly, my life.
Those kids who partied through their teenage years and thought they’d wake up at 26 with a hangover and a stable job, well, turns out the 21st century doesn’t work that way. They didn’t have much to say at the 10-year high school reunion. By the 20th, they had stopped showing up.
Average is over, as economists who study the labor market like to say. White privilege still exists, but the brown narrative—earned achievement trumps inherited status—is ascendant.
Who will tell the white kids?
Eboo Patel (@EbooPatel), founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, writes about social justice from his perspective as a Muslim American of Indian heritage.
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