5 June 2006 - quarter to five o'clock pm

I was reading this article at Gothic Charm School, when I remembered my own days in high school. A little bit of background: I was one of few white students attending an inner-city school. As is typical of a larval spooky kid with no social skills, I was a target for teasing and harrassment. Furthermore, I was a member of an ethnic group maligned for generations of oppression and slavery. Nevermind that neither I nor my ancestors had ever participated in those atrocities of history (the only member of my family who did not arrive on American shores after the Civil War was my great-great-grandfather, a Homesteader from the North married to a Native American woman) nor had they ever been inflicted on my classmates, I was too easy a target not to receive punishment by proxy. After all, I had no friends and no back-up. The other white students were considered too high-risk for our inter-generational agents of justice to visit their vengeance upon.

Incorporating more and more black clothing into my wardrobe was sufficient to warn off the less dedicated vigilantes, until all I got were occasional snarky comments which were easily ignored. The one exception was a font of shit-talk whose company I had the displeasure of sharing during the last class of each afternoon. Her greatest pleasure was to conjecture about what a racist I surely was, and what kind of hateful practices I must have engaged in when I reached home. (I wasn't old enough to appreciate the humor in this pathetic display of hypocrisy.) She enjoyed offering the satisfaction of combat with admonitions that of course the disparity between our races alone was enough to ensure the inevitability of my defeat, and that in the unlikely event I should triumph, it would be only to render her the innocent victim of white cruelty in the eyes of our classmates. Our teacher, like all the faculty at our high school, was deaf to these proceedings.

It finally occurred to me that in order to quell her perpetual prodding, I had to give her what she wanted, a prima donna white bitch to hate properly. So one afternoon, I ended our daily interview with something more than my usual silence and stony glare. The question she asked me has been obscured by the mists of time, but I do remember assuming an air of bored arrogance and answering, "If you like," before stalking off. She was impressed. I could hear her repeating to herself, "if I like..?" behind me in the classroom. So satisfied was she by what I can only guess to be the whiteness of my reply that she never troubled herself to speak to me again.