Free White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son by Tim Wise Page B

contextualize it, and fashion it into a weapon. And the only way they could have known any of this is because they had either been told of its history and meaning, had been called it before, or had seen or heard a loved one called it before, none of which options were a lot better than the others.
    Even as the school system we shared was every day treating Bobby and Vince as that thing they now called me—disciplining them more harshly or placing them in remedial level groups no matter their abilities—on the playground they could turn it around and claim for themselves the power to define reality, my reality, and thereby gain a brief respite from what was happening in class. Yet the joke was on them in the end. Because once recess was over, and the ball was back in the hands of the teachers, there were none prepared to make me the nigger.
    It had been white privilege and black oppression that had made the joke funny in the first place, or even decipherable; and it would likewise be white privilege and black oppression that would make it irrelevant and even a bit pathetic. But folks take their victories where they can find them. And some of us find them more often than others.

    I WAS NEVER a very good student. No matter my reading level or general ability, I had a hard time applying myself to subject matter that I didn’t find interesting. In effect, I treated school like a set of noisecanceling headphones, letting in the sounds I was interested in hearing while shutting out the rest. By middle school I was struggling academically, finding myself bored and looking desperately for something else to occupy my time. Given the home in which I lived, it was hardly surprising that I would settle on theatre. Growing up in a home where my father was always on stage, even when he wasn’t, had provided me with a keen sense of timing, of delivery, of what was funny and what wasn’t, of how to move onstage, of how to “do nothing well,” as Lorelle Reeves, my theatre teacher in high school, would put it.
    I grew up memorizing lines to plays I would never perform, simply because my dad had saved all the scripts from shows he had done in the past. They were crammed into a small, brown-lacquered paperback book cabinet that hung in the living room of our apartment—one after another, with tattered and dog-eared pages, compliments of Samuel French, the company that owned distribution rights for most of the stage play scripts in the United States. I would pick them up and read them out loud in my room, creating different voices for different characters. The plays dealt with adult themes, many of which I didn’t understand, but which I pretended to, just in case anyone ever needed a ten-year-old to play the part of Paul Bratter in Barefoot in the Park .
    At Stokes School, in fifth grade, I would finally have the chance to take a theatre class as an elective. The teacher, Susan Moore, was among the most eccentric persons I’ve ever met. Had I been older, I may well have appreciated her eccentricity; but at the age of ten, eccentric is just another word for weird, and weird is how we students viewed her. All we knew was that she was an odd, fat lady (we weren’t too sensitive on issues of body type, as I’m sure won’t surprise you) with a dozen cats, whose clothes always smelled like cat litter and whose car smelled worse. One of my friends, Bobby Bell, who was not in the drama club but once got a ride from Ms. Moore, dubbed her wheels the “douche ’n’ push,” which we all thought was hilarious, even though I doubt any of us really knew what a douche was. In fact, once I learned the meaning of the word, calling her car a douche ’n’ push seemed less funny than gross.
    We didn’t study much in terms of theatre technique. For good or bad, Susan thought it best to just throw us into the process of doing theatre, learning as we went. So she would pick a play and we would work on it for the better part of a year: reading it,