Chapter One - Where I'm Coming From
Cleveland, Ohio. Ever been there?
If not, you haven't missed much. The city boasts that it is the city of Rock and Roll, despite the fact that the radio is all corporately owned (with the ironic exception of the classical station my dad listens to on his way to work at Way-Too-Early o'clock) and that the biggest rock band out of the place in the last twenty years was Mushroomhead, whose crowning achievement was hosting MTV's "Headbanger's Ball" once. The title sounds grandiose, but it was a weekly show, nothing too big. Another figure the city maintains, while hardly boasting it, is the highest poverty rate in the United States of America.
It's kind of funny how that happened. About ten years before I was born, everything was normal for a city, especially in the public schools. All the poor blacks and Hispanics were clustered in the tough, inner city schools that did poorly whenever rated and had disturbingly high dropout and crime rates. Meanwhile, around the edges were the lily-white middle class schools where a loud argument in the cafeteria was something people would talk about for days as a "big fight."
Did that description sound a bit racist? Sadly, it's not; it's what was actually happening. However, it did look kinda racist on paper, and in violation of good ol' Brown vs Board of Education (that's the one that made "separate by equal" unconstitutional). So some judge decided that it was time to desegregate the schools by force, since they hadn't be desegregated by nature. Suddenly, middle class parents realized that, at the beginning of next year, their boring, quasi-suburban children would be sharing classrooms with kids who considered leaving the house unarmed a bit of a faux pas. At that point, everyone who couldn't afford a parochial school education for their kids moved out of the city (and by the way, hell predictably broke loose in the schools the next year. For the first time, the white kids got to see black and Hispanic kids as poverty-stricken brutes and the minority kids got to see white kids as arrogant, pansy-ass bastards. What a great way to defuse racial tensions, eh?). This one strikes a personal note for me--my aunt graduated from high school a year early to avoid the butchering of her high school. I've driven past my dad's old alma mater a few times; it's a graffiti-ravage mess now.
Which brings me back to high school. I lived out in the suburbs, where all the middle class people from Cleveland ran to. To say that my school was white was an understatement--"blinding" would probably be more accurate. We treated people of other races like most people treat animals in the zoo--we knew they exist, but if confronted by one on the street, we'd be utterly clueless as to how to react.
So it was hardly a surprise that I wound up in Allegheny College. It's so similar to my high school, it's kinda scary. It's small for a college (less than 2,500 undergraduates), overwhelmingly white (91% caucasian. I swear I'm not a racist, though), and located in one of the most boring parts of the United States of America (Pennsylvania).
So they put me in Ravine Hall. I forget the description listed on Allegheny's web site, but I know the word "nestled" fits in somewhere. What is should read is "Nestled FOUR FUCKING MILES from the rest of campus." Ravine makes up for it by having carpetting and rooms that are slightly larger than the usual three-foot cube called a "Double."
Yes, I had a roommate. And what an interesting fellow he was.
If not, you haven't missed much. The city boasts that it is the city of Rock and Roll, despite the fact that the radio is all corporately owned (with the ironic exception of the classical station my dad listens to on his way to work at Way-Too-Early o'clock) and that the biggest rock band out of the place in the last twenty years was Mushroomhead, whose crowning achievement was hosting MTV's "Headbanger's Ball" once. The title sounds grandiose, but it was a weekly show, nothing too big. Another figure the city maintains, while hardly boasting it, is the highest poverty rate in the United States of America.
It's kind of funny how that happened. About ten years before I was born, everything was normal for a city, especially in the public schools. All the poor blacks and Hispanics were clustered in the tough, inner city schools that did poorly whenever rated and had disturbingly high dropout and crime rates. Meanwhile, around the edges were the lily-white middle class schools where a loud argument in the cafeteria was something people would talk about for days as a "big fight."
Did that description sound a bit racist? Sadly, it's not; it's what was actually happening. However, it did look kinda racist on paper, and in violation of good ol' Brown vs Board of Education (that's the one that made "separate by equal" unconstitutional). So some judge decided that it was time to desegregate the schools by force, since they hadn't be desegregated by nature. Suddenly, middle class parents realized that, at the beginning of next year, their boring, quasi-suburban children would be sharing classrooms with kids who considered leaving the house unarmed a bit of a faux pas. At that point, everyone who couldn't afford a parochial school education for their kids moved out of the city (and by the way, hell predictably broke loose in the schools the next year. For the first time, the white kids got to see black and Hispanic kids as poverty-stricken brutes and the minority kids got to see white kids as arrogant, pansy-ass bastards. What a great way to defuse racial tensions, eh?). This one strikes a personal note for me--my aunt graduated from high school a year early to avoid the butchering of her high school. I've driven past my dad's old alma mater a few times; it's a graffiti-ravage mess now.
Which brings me back to high school. I lived out in the suburbs, where all the middle class people from Cleveland ran to. To say that my school was white was an understatement--"blinding" would probably be more accurate. We treated people of other races like most people treat animals in the zoo--we knew they exist, but if confronted by one on the street, we'd be utterly clueless as to how to react.
So it was hardly a surprise that I wound up in Allegheny College. It's so similar to my high school, it's kinda scary. It's small for a college (less than 2,500 undergraduates), overwhelmingly white (91% caucasian. I swear I'm not a racist, though), and located in one of the most boring parts of the United States of America (Pennsylvania).
So they put me in Ravine Hall. I forget the description listed on Allegheny's web site, but I know the word "nestled" fits in somewhere. What is should read is "Nestled FOUR FUCKING MILES from the rest of campus." Ravine makes up for it by having carpetting and rooms that are slightly larger than the usual three-foot cube called a "Double."
Yes, I had a roommate. And what an interesting fellow he was.
posted by Andrew Michael at 8:34 PM
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