Near the end of eighth grade Marcell learned firsthand how his skin color made some people unfairly perceive him as hostile. That happened when he was called into the office for throwing down a Ping-Pong paddle in a fit of anger over losing a match. The paddle popped up and accidentally hit a fellow classmate. Granted, Marcell did start to have a little temper around that time, but it was the product of adolescence and hormones, added to which was an undercurrent of hostility he was facing from his teachers and especially his peers, not some kind of academic or emotional deficiency. He had kids calling him the N-word, walking up to him and addressing him in Ebonics—“Yo, yo, yo, Marcell, what up!”—as if my son didn’t have a command over the English language, and even asking him, conspiratorially, if he ate fried chicken and drank grape Kool-Aid.
“What are you even talking about?” Marcell would snap. “My mother doesn’t cook fried chicken; it’s high in cholesterol and it’ll kill you. And I’ve never had Kool-Aid in my life.”
Unbeknownst to me, he was dealing with this day in and day out at that school, though I wouldn’t find out until years later. Only then did I understand that this kind of attitude was why he wanted to leave one particular school. When he was in the thick of it, however, he would simply tell me he didn’t like the school, which, to my ears, translated into “I don’t like school.”
“Boy, just focus and get your head in them books,” I would say, dismissing his complaints. “You can do this.” Frankly, I wanted the school to work; as an institution, it was academically sound, plus he had solid connections there, including a pair of Armenian brothers he really liked to hang out with, and Ian, the son of my fellow actress Regina King, whom he counted as a good friend. I thought he was doing just fine.
Then I got that phone call from the teacher that would make me understand just what kind of danger my son was in.
“He was a preemie, so that might have something to do with his abilities,” the teacher said nonchalantly one afternoon when I was called up to the school to talk about Marcell’s yearly assessment. She actually suggested that my son wouldn’t be able to test into a high-performing private high school and proposed that rather than let him graduate, I should approve leaving him back a year at her school. “If we keep him back a year, he can catch up.”
“Well, is he failing?” I asked, my forehead pulsing with anger. I knew the answer, and whatever she was going to say didn’t matter; I was too disgusted to bother hearing and digesting the words. I just wanted to see her fix her mouth to give me her reasoning for holding back a child who was passing all his classes. The very second sound came out of her mouth, I cut her off. “You know what? It doesn’t even matter what you say to me right now. I’ll be taking my son out of this school,” I said.
“Oh? What school do you have in mind for him, if you don’t mind my asking?”
I ticked off a list of considerations and mentioned a private school that was looking to up its diversity and had a new coach who was recruiting players for the school’s basketball team. One of my closest friends in the business, Lisa Vidal, who plays Kara on the hit BET show Being Mary Jane, had nothing but good things to say about the school. That’s where Marcell would go next—somewhere where he was wanted.
“Really,” she said smugly, more like a statement than a question. “Well, I don’t know if that would be a good fit. He might not be up to the rigorous academic standards they have there.” That’s when I gathered up my purse and my jacket and pushed back my chair. I needed to get out of there before I caught a case.
That incident and the school’s handling of it would be the dawn of my son’s racial awakening—when he would realize that skin color and the way society views it, particularly when it comes to black boys, is nuanced, layered, messy, and at times traumatic. I know figuring this out for myself was a devastating shock, particularly after growing up in a primarily black neighborhood and never having to experience this kind of in-your-face racism. Southeast DC had its issues, of course, but not the kind of racial intolerance that would have been immediately apparent to a sheltered African American girl surrounded by black people during the week and well-meaning white folk at my weekend extracurricular activities. I didn’t get a dose of blatant racism until freshman year at North Carolina A&T, when my friends and I got caught up in a massive riot during Greekfest on Labor Day weekend in Virginia Beach.
The incident made national news, with media accounts blaming the mostly black crowd of vacationing college students for the violence and property damage that rocked the small beach community during that fateful holiday weekend in 1989. But what the stories mostly ignored was the ill treatment we students faced from the moment we stepped foot on the Virginia Beach shores—how the hotels raised the rates and imposed minimum stays to discourage black students from staying at their establishments, how the city passed strict laws barring loud music, jaywalking, and other things students tend to do while on college break, how local retailers wouldn’t allow more than two or three black people at a time in their stores, out of fear that we’d steal something. Even the National Guard had been put on standby in anticipation of some mess going down, and state police were patrolling the streets on horses, armed with guns and attitudes. Plus, rumors that the Ku Klux Klan would work with them to “keep order” pulsed through the crowds, putting us all on edge. As far as we students were concerned, the Virginia Beach locals were doing everything they could to make us feel unwelcomed, even though we weren’t doing anything more egregious than that which white college students do when they’re ripping and running on the beaches at Daytona, Panama City, and Fort Lauderdale. And we all felt some kind of way about this.
None of this, of course, stopped us from having a good time. The annual Greekfest was always an incredible weekend of frivolity, fueled by music, partying, and camaraderie, cloaked in unapologetic blackness. Tens of thousands of college-age folks would show up each year for a long weekend’s worth of mingling, networking, and, yes, bacchanalia. When I arrived with my friends Pam and Lisa, Virginia Beach was practically vibrating; everywhere our eyes could see, there were cute guys rocking their fraternity colors and blasting music from their cars, and pretty girls in their bikinis and pum pum shorts, sipping their wine coolers, flirting with the frat boys, and dancing and laughing in the streets. It was just healthy, clean, red-blooded American fun among mostly college students and our college-age friends who didn’t necessarily go to school but were decent people and liked to have a good time.
Now, as we had our fun, we tried to ignore the poor treatment and excessive rules the city and its residents were imposing, but there was an undercurrent of anger waiting to explode as the police pushed everyone’s buttons. Where there was joy, there were, too, pockets of protest and anger, prodded by what we perceived to be police mistreatment. People were being slapped with $500 citations for walking across the street outside of the crosswalk, and cops were using their batons to tap intimidatingly on car windows and angrily ordering drivers to lower their music. The police officers on those horses, their hands on their guns, their eyes hidden behind big mirrored glasses, gave me chills. I could feel the danger in the air. Sure enough, all hell broke loose on Sunday afternoon, and Pam, Lisa, and I were right there when the powder keg exploded.