“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.