The Education of an Idealist

In 1983, when more than three hundred African-American families signed up to send their children to Lakeside, the school district turned most of them down. The district’s rationale—backed by vocal, impassioned white parents—was that Lakeside needed to maintain its student/teacher ratio of 26 to 1. To our newly arrived family, however, it seemed clear that the opponents wanted to prevent Lakeside from being more racially integrated.

Several hundred white parents mobilized to create a group they called Parents Demand Quality, which supported the district’s decision to turn away a substantial number of the African-American transfers to Lakeside. In turn, their parents filed a motion with the district court, claiming that blocking their children from transferring was “based on race, not space.” The DeKalb NAACP raised the case with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which agreed to investigate. In the end, the African-American parents won their appeal; my class, Lakeside High School’s class of 1988, became the first in the school’s history in which black students outnumbered whites.

While Lakeside offered my African-American classmates more experienced teachers and better-maintained facilities, getting to know the students in the M-to-M program offered a lesson in the denial and assertion of dignity. I had heard priests talk about dignity at Mass: the Catechism insisted that the “dignity of the human person is rooted in his or her creation in the image and likeness of God.” And my years in Ireland, complemented by Eddie’s history lessons, had taught me plenty about British occupiers’ attempts to trample Irish dignity.

While the M-to-M program gave my black classmates great opportunities, it also placed heavy burdens on their dignity. By the time I arrived at school in the morning, rolling out of bed around 7:30 a.m. and taking a quick ten-minute walk to school, most of my black peers had been up for several hours—first waiting for a neighborhood bus that would take them to a transit hub, then catching a second bus that brought them to Lakeside. I played on the school basketball team and ran cross-country and track. Due to afternoon practice, I started on homework “late”—after six p.m., when I would arrive home. The African-American students on my teams, however, had to wait around for an “activity bus” that did not even leave Lakeside until seven p.m., ensuring that they were rarely home and able to start studying before nine p.m. Crazily, students who sought out extra help from a teacher or stayed after school to use the library weren’t even permitted to ride the activity bus and had to find their own way home, which meant navigating a complex Atlanta public transportation system that would have daunted most teenagers.

To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program.

During the eighth grade, when the dramatic shift in Lakeside’s demographics occurred, I occasionally heard my white classmates complain about “grease” they claimed to have found on their desks—a dig at African-American students who wore Jheri curls. A friend of mine overheard a group of teachers crudely joking that the English department should begin teaching Ebonics, “so that we can properly communicate in their language.”

As the school’s black population expanded, the court ordered more black teachers to be hired, a decision that prompted a number of white parents to complain that they did not want their kids taught by African Americans. Others went so far as to pull their children out of Lakeside entirely, transferring them to the private, largely white Catholic schools in the area. Some members of the faculty embraced the changes; those entrenched in their views did not budge. One defiant white teacher, who had been open about her opposition to the large number of African-American transfers, was overheard in the faculty lounge saying that it was impossible to get through to her black students. “They say prejudice is learned,” she griped to her colleagues. “Well, trying to teach blacks here, I have certainly learned it.”

Mum and Eddie saw similar bigotry at Emory University, where they had taken up their jobs as nephrologists. When Eddie attempted to recruit a talented Haitian-American doctor who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, one of his colleagues expressed his opposition, telling Eddie, “Down here, they park cars.” At the kidney dialysis unit, the same senior physician replaced a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., with that of a Ku Klux Klan leader. My brother became friends with an African-American boy named Dorian who often came over to our home after school. On one occasion, a neighbor called my mother at work to warn her that she had seen a “darky” at our house. Both Mum and Eddie made clear to Stephen and me how horrified they were by the prejudice they encountered, and they encouraged us to speak up when we heard such racist barbs.

I did not discuss with my black friends the more entrenched symbols of racism around us. Some Lakeside students thought nothing of affixing Confederate flag bumper stickers to their cars. School field trips made their way to Stone Mountain, Georgia’s 1,600-foot-tall granite behemoth, into which the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson had been carved. Only decades later did I learn that the monument had been commissioned by segregationists and was the scene of numerous Klan gatherings over the years. Georgia’s history of lynching and violent racism was routinely ignored or minimized in our school history lessons.

For all of high school, I sat next to Preston Price in homeroom. Preston, who became a good friend, was black and gay, a rough combination in a staunchly conservative school in a white, suburban, evangelical neighborhood. By our junior year, my best friend, Sally Brooks, and another dear friend, Nathan Taylor, had also come out, meaning that three of my closest high school friends were gay. From today’s more progressive vantage point, it is hard to convey just how unusual these revelations seemed at the time—and how brave my friends were. I saw how each of them agonized as they tried to figure out how to tell their family members and classmates; and I saw the excitement and heartbreak of their crushes and romantic foibles as they lived them, just as they witnessed and coached me through my own.

These early exposures didn’t dim my wonderment at the United States, but they opened my eyes to my new country’s struggle to manage difference.

WHATEVER THE CLASHES OF IDENTITY going on around me, I generally did what my life had taught me to do up to that point: I rolled with events and did my best to adapt. I was a conscientious student, doing homework on time and performing reasonably well on tests. I knew that getting into a top-tier university would require high standardized test scores, so I threw myself into expanding my vocabulary, preparing flash cards with unfamiliar “SAT words,” and eventually getting a score high enough to give me a chance in selective admissions processes. Although I later developed into a strong student, my drive was then more evident when playing sports. Lakeside was an athletic powerhouse, sending prospects to Division I college teams and occasionally even to the pros. As the starting shooting guard on the basketball team, I spent entire afternoons and weekends shooting thousands of baskets.

I juggled my immersion in school and sports with part-time jobs, starting at the fast-food chain Del Taco, followed by stints at Sizzler and Frëshens yogurt. Lakeside also had an avid party scene. A few basketball teammates introduced me to 7-Eleven Big Gulps of Fanta soda spiked with vodka, which I consumed with enthusiasm, although I let nothing jeopardize my game-time performance.

Luckily, my high school antics never got me into any lasting trouble. Mum, however, incessantly reminded Stephen and me that alcoholism was “in our genes.” And although I never came close to developing a drinking problem, my dad’s excessive consumption had so warped my frame of reference that I viewed myself as a teetotaler by comparison.

What it meant to be an alcoholic was also no longer solely defined by my father’s destructive habit. Eddie, too, was afflicted with the “good man’s curse.” Back in Pittsburgh, my mother had tried to rationalize his drinking as being very different from my father’s. “He just has pathetically low tolerance,” she would say. While my dad had drunk far larger quantities, Eddie’s inebriation was more demonstrative. He loudly recited Irish poetry and sometimes passed out after just a couple glasses of wine (“Oh no,” my mother would mutter, “the head is going down!”). The worst smell of my childhood—which to this day I associate with the pungency of my disappointment at his relapses—was Eddie’s breath on nights when he tried to cover up the odor of spirits with Listerine.

My dad never really admitted he had a problem, but Eddie recognized his. He made repeated efforts to stop drinking. For years, he climbed on and off the proverbial wagon. After my dad’s death, and because of Eddie’s challenges in staying sober during those years, I became hawkishly vigilant for signs that “the drink” might be acquiring power over me too.

Although Stephen had spent only five years in Dublin, he had inherited many of our dad’s traits and habits. He was growing up to be strikingly handsome, with ocean-blue eyes, dark hair, a lanky, athletic build, and a wide—and selective—smile that melted hearts. In 1988, after I graduated from high school, Mum and Eddie moved with my brother to Brooklyn, where they had found new jobs. There, Stephen would occasionally get stopped on the street and asked whether he had considered modeling.

Although Stephen did not start drinking or using drugs until after I left for college, he began to withdraw from Mum and me while I was still at Lakeside. If I was a joiner, like my mother, embracing new challenges and people, Stephen had just two great passions: dogs, which he said were more reliable than people, and fishing, which he did for hours by himself. He had long ago declared to me, “I’m not like you,” and, despite his probing mind, never studied much in school. Despite this, he cheered me at my basketball games and never seemed to resent Mum’s and Eddie’s celebration of my academic successes.

After basketball practice one day during my senior year, I arrived home to find Stephen, then thirteen, beaming at our dining room table. He had laid out the half dozen response letters from the colleges to which I had applied. I could see in an instant that the letters from Stanford and Princeton were thin, but I was focused on the much thicker, ivory envelope with the navy “Y” and a New Haven return address. I had unexpectedly gotten into Yale University, a dream destination. “Congrats, sis!” Stephen said, grinning, as I jumped up and down and stole a rare, if awkward, hug.

Despite coming at a heavy cost, Mum’s decision to move to America had opened up a whole new world for me. I knew that attending Yale would do the same. But almost as soon as I ripped open the envelope and confirmed my acceptance, I began to imagine all that could go wrong. While I could adapt to any new environment, I did so with the latent conviction that nothing great could last.

5

TANK MAN

During the summer of 1989, I came home to Atlanta after my freshman year at Yale to intern in our local CBS affiliate’s sports department. After covering women’s basketball and volleyball for the college newspaper, I had decided to pursue a career as a sports journalist.

My print dispatches demonstrated little natural talent. My first published article in the Yale Daily News, appearing in September of 1988, had begun: “Volleyballs aren’t the only things high up in the air this week for the women’s volleyball team; so are expectations and spirits.” Another article had described how the campus a cappella group Something Extra had sung the national anthem before that weekend’s Yale–Cornell women’s basketball game. I then proceeded to observe that “the Blue were well aware that it would take ‘something extra,’ or rather, ‘something extra-ordinary’ for them to win.”

Broadcast journalism, I thought, might be a better fit. In the coming years I offered play-by-play and color commentary for the Yale men’s and women’s basketball teams and joined a rotating group of students on a nightly radio talk show called Sports Spotlight.

On June 3rd, I had been instructed by my supervisor at the Atlanta station, WAGA, to “shot-sheet”—or take notes on—a Braves baseball game against the San Francisco Giants. I had to mark down on my clipboard the precise time at which memorable events occurred—a home run, an error, an on-field brawl, a funny dance in the stands—in order to help assemble the sports highlights for the evening news. As I sat inside a glass booth, I was surrounded by other screens showing CBS video feeds from around the world.

On the feed from Beijing, where it was already the early morning of June 4th, I saw a startling scene playing out. Students in Tiananmen Square had been demonstrating for more than a month, urging the ruling Chinese Communist Party to make democratic reforms. The protesters had used Styrofoam and plaster to build a thirty-foot-high statue called the Goddess of Democracy, which bore a close resemblance to the Statue of Liberty. They had lined her up directly opposite the portrait of Mao Tse-tung, making it look as though she was staring down the founder of the repressive Chinese state. But the day I happened to be working in the video booth, the Chinese government was cracking down. I watched as the CBS camera crew on the ground filmed soldiers with assault rifles ripping apart the students’ sanctuaries. As tanks rolled toward Chinese protesters, young people used their bicycles to try to flee the scene and transport the wounded.

In the raw, unfiltered footage playing in front of me—much of which would not be broadcast—I could hear the CBS cameraperson arguing with the authorities as he was jostled. At a certain point, the monitor went black; the feed from China had been terminated. I sat in the booth, aghast at what I had seen. I found myself wondering what the US government would do in response, a question that had never before occurred to me.

That week, the front pages of all the major American newspapers printed a photograph of a man in Beijing who became known as “Tank Man.” The man wore a white shirt and dark pants, and carried a pair of plastic shopping bags. He was pictured standing in the middle of a ten-lane Chinese boulevard, stoically confronting the first tank in a column of dozens.

The stark image arrested my attention. That, I thought, was an assertion of dignity. The man was refusing to bow before the gargantuan power of the Chinese military. His quiet but powerful resistance reminded me of the images of the sanitation workers in Memphis whose strike Martin Luther King, Jr., had joined shortly before he was assassinated in 1968. They had carried signs that simply read “I AM A MAN.”

Although Tank Man’s subsequent actions received less attention, video footage showed him taking an even more remarkable risk: he climbed onto the tank’s turret and spoke with the soldiers inside. After he stepped down and the tank attempted to move past him, the man moved with it, daring the soldiers to run him over. A few minutes into this grim dance, men in civilian clothes dashed onto the road and hustled Tank Man away. The convoy barreled ahead; the man disappeared. He has never been identified. An untold number of Chinese students—likely thousands—were killed that summer in the government crackdown.

I did not respond to these events by suddenly proclaiming a newfound intention to learn Mandarin and become a human rights lawyer. But while I knew little about the protests before they started, or even about China itself, I could not shake my discomfort at having been contentedly taking notes on a Braves game while students my age were being mowed down by tanks.

For the first time, I reacted as though current events had something to do with me. I felt, in a way that I couldn’t have explained in the moment, that I had a stake in what happened to the lone man with his shopping bags.

Where did this reaction come from? Was it just the natural awakening of a political conscience—an inevitable progression after spending a year on a socially aware college campus? Maybe, but never before had I considered involving myself in the causes that consumed some of my classmates. If my political views were developing by osmosis, I had not been aware of the transformation.

My best friend from college, Miro Weinberger, happened to be visiting me in Atlanta that week. Since Mum and Eddie had moved to New York the previous fall and our Atlanta house was up for sale, I had rented a room in a shared apartment. Drinking beers on the stoop, I told my friend about the footage from China. Miro—who today is in his third term as mayor of Burlington, Vermont—was the son of anti–Vietnam War activists. Miro and I had bonded over our shared love of baseball, but unlike me, he had always been equally interested in the world around him. “What am I doing with my life?” I asked. When Miro looked puzzled, I explained, “It just feels like I should be doing something more useful than thinking about sports all the time.”

When I returned to Yale that fall, I became a history major, throwing myself into schoolwork and studying with far greater intensity than during my freshman year.

TWO MONTHS AFTER I RETURNED to campus, the Berlin Wall came down, ushering in the collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe. I had subscribed to USA Today, practicing what I called the “clip and shake” method—clipping the red sports section and shaking the rest of the paper into the recycling bin. Now I switched my subscription to the New York Times, eager to understand the monumental developments abroad.

The names, places, and events described in the Times were so obscure to me that I underlined key facts and figures, quizzing myself after I finished an article. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, commentators were reappraising the United Nations and wondering whether the dream of international cooperation might finally be realized. I took the train from New Haven to Manhattan for a guided group tour of UN Headquarters. I liked the concept: a single place where all the countries of the world sent representatives to try to resolve their differences without fighting.

Back at Yale, I still played sports more than I did anything else. After getting cut by the varsity basketball team, I tried my hand at every intramural sport known to humankind (from water polo and soccer to Ultimate Frisbee and touch football). Perhaps inspired by all the hours I had watched my mother play, I also picked up squash, eventually making the varsity squad. While other students received awards in a year-end ceremony, for being “Most Social” or “Most Likely to Succeed,” I was such a fierce competitor that my residential college classmates created a new category for me: “Most Likely to Come Back from the Intramural Fields with Bloody Knees.”

Nevertheless, reading the international news and taking political science and history classes had significantly broadened my interests by the time I finished my second year. Combining a gift from Mum and Eddie with money I had saved working in various restaurants, I was able to fund a summer-long trip to Europe.

John Schumann, whom I had started dating at the end of my freshman year, would be my traveling partner. Known as Schu, he had a mop of dark brown curly hair and an open and warm manner that made him a beloved figure on campus. A class above me, Schu had gone to high school in Cleveland and shared my preoccupation with sports. But unlike me, he was also a voracious reader of history, making him a ringer in Trivial Pursuit and a fascinating companion. We became so close that our identities seemed to merge into a single entity that our friends referred to as “Sam and Schu.”

The centerpiece of our trip would be newly democratic Eastern Europe, where mass protests and political transitions were capturing daily headlines in the United States. We loved the thought of exploring a part of the world that had not yet been overrun by Western tourists and where history was being made every day.

Before we departed, the always well-read Eddie thrust an article from a little-known publication called The National Interest into my hands. Authored by Francis Fukuyama, and titled “The End of History?,” the article argued that with fascism and communism soon destined to land in the dustbin of history, economic and political liberalism had won the ideological battle of the twentieth century. “The West,” Fukuyama concluded, had triumphed.

Although I vaguely recall my Irish hackles being raised by his tone toward small countries,[fn1] Fukuyama’s core claim that liberal democracy had proven the better model seemed convincing. The foreign policy commentators I had begun reading gave little hint that issues of tribe, class, religion, and race would storm back with a vengeance—starting in the Balkans, but decades later spreading to the heart of liberal democracies that had seemed largely immune.

In June of 1990, Schu and I set out to see firsthand the region where the demand for democratic accountability had helped bring an end to communist rule. But before venturing east, we traveled to Amsterdam, where we visited the Anne Frank House. I had read about the Holocaust in high school, but it was during my travels that summer that the horror of Hitler’s crimes hit me deeply. Just as observing Tank Man—a single protester—had helped me see the broader Chinese struggle for human rights, so too did visiting Anne Frank’s hiding place bring to life the enormity of the Nazi slaughter. I learned a lesson that stayed with me: concrete, lived experiences engraved themselves in my psyche far more than abstract historical events.

When I had read Anne Frank’s story the first time, I did not focus on the fact that she and her family had been deported on the last train from Holland to Auschwitz. Nor had I been aware of the stinginess of America’s refugee quotas, which prevented Anne’s father from getting the Frank family into the United States. Struck by these details in Amsterdam, I began keeping a list of the books I would read upon our return to the United States—specifically, books that focused on the question of what US officials knew about the Holocaust and what they could have done to save more Jews.

Next, Schu and I traveled to Germany, visiting the Dachau concentration camp, where Nazis had killed more than 28,000 Jews and political prisoners. The air around us felt heavy, as though the evil that had made mass murder possible still lurked nearby. Seeing the barracks, the crammed sleeping quarters, and the crematorium reduced us to silence for the first time in our relationship.

Although the museum exhibit at the camp made for an extremely bleak day of sightseeing, we lingered in the section that told the story of Dachau’s liberation by American troops in April of 1945. For all our criticisms of what the United States may have failed to do for European Jews, Schu and I wondered aloud how the modern world would look if President Roosevelt had not finally entered the war.

When we took the train to what was then Czechoslovakia, we happened to arrive just a few days before the country held its first free election. A college classmate connected us to a middle-aged woman named Tatjana who had joined the dissident movement in 1968, after Soviet-led forces crushed the Prague Spring. Tatjana invited us for tea and showed us the trove of opposition leaflets that she had circulated as a member of the underground. Then she brought us to accompany her to the neighborhood polling station. We watched as she asked her young daughter to place her first democratic ballot in the box. Tatjana choked up as she talked about the exhilaration she felt regarding her country’s political future. Again, I was struck by the importance of dignity as a historical force. “What was horrible about the communist rule,” Tatjana told us, “was that the man in front of you ordering you around was very stupid, and you had to listen to him.” Even amid jailings and torture, these smaller humiliations ground people down.