Power Forward : My Presidential Education (9781476763361) by Love Reggie

Author:Love, Reggie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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ANGER MANAGEMENT

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For much of my young adult life, I struggled with the fear that I was a cliché, seen by my peers as the black guy who acted white. Racism exists not only between races, but within races. And I wrestled with both sorts, wanting nothing so much as to be appreciated for who I was, not who either demographic expected me to be.

Everyone, no matter what age or class, craves acceptance. And people are typically drawn to things and to people that are similar and familiar to themselves. This dynamic makes it hard for us to stretch or reach for things that don’t gracefully fit into our typical cultural box.

In high school, I was one of the only black kids on my AAU team who didn’t go to public high school. So the guys I played ball with always gave me grief. I also often felt like an outsider among the other students at my private school. Not only because I was of a different race, but because what was familiar to me at that point in my life was so different from their experiences.

In truth, I didn’t belong anywhere. I was a party of one. Or at least that’s how I felt when I was a young black man stumbling toward adulthood in the Deep South. At Providence Day I was surrounded predominantly by affluent Caucasian kids. Closer to home, my friends played for their public school teams, which were comprised overwhelmingly, if not entirely, of African-Americans. The difference was stark and obvious, and it seemed like the only people comfortable talking about it were my friends, who used the fact to needle me whenever we played.

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It was three days after the Black & Brown Forum and the Heartland Forum when we attended the NPR debate in Des Moines. And it was there, on December 1, 2007, that I managed to ruffle the feathers of not only a caucus-goer, but also several members of my own crew, including the candidate.

The debate was held in the Historical Building of Iowa, inside of which was an exhibit explaining the history and the process of the Iowa Caucus. I took the tour, and as I walked through the whole thing, I noticed that there weren’t any black people depicted in the entire exhibit. There was possibly one mixed-race, handicapped, Republican veteran. But that was it as far as a depiction of the black caucus-goer went.

I wasn’t trying to make trouble with the curator, but I couldn’t keep myself from commenting on the obvious racial inequity. When I asked where the black folks were, the curator stiffened. She argued that there were plenty of African-Americans in the exhibit. Which there were not. Unless you included brown people—two Asians and one Native American.

Again, I wasn’t trying to be a jerk. But the reality was, if you are going to go through the trouble of staging a display of one of the most critical

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