one theme of all these stories is that berkeley high's educational model was largely "fuck around and find out." as a comfortably middle-class white kid, i typically "found out" about power relationships by being on the right side of them - by learning that the person putatively in charge of you was not, and that there was a whole universe of agency that i could learn to exercise.

most of the school's black kids had a very, very different experience.

i can't write personally about the black experience, and i'm not going to try. what i can write is that all those impressive, self-directed courses i took - like advanced placement chemistry and an elective model congress and fucking latin - were lily white, with the sole exception of a single black guy so unusual himself that he's a feature in two of my stories. the black academic experience, in contrast, so was so segregated and dismal that articles and books and even a whole frontline thing have been written about it. my younger sister, substantially less of a dork than i, took mostly "unaccelerated" courses, and her reports of warehousing by morons were grim. for me, joe martin was an anomalous clown, but for most of the student body he was the status quo.

but since all this happened in the same buildings, the same hallways, you couldn't help but notice it. it was obvious that the racial composition of our fancy advanced classes didn't match the racial composition of the school as a whole, and it was obvious that black kids and white kids were subject to different rules. i don't think any amount of formal race studies education is as instructional as casually strolling through the halls and waving to security guards right before they stop some of your black peers to demand a hall pass. your black peers, walking in the exact same place, at the exact same time, as you.

white kids at berkeley high spent four years learning that rules weren't real - for us. the whole expression matters.