79.
The Game
BUT, THIRTY-SIX years after those white conservative kids in Reardan unanimously elected me freshman-class president, I wonder how many of them voted for the racist, sexist, homophobic, and immoral Donald Trump to be United States president. How many of their parents and siblings voted for Trump? How many of my former teachers voted for Trump?
Reardan High School is located in Lincoln County, the whitest and most conservative county in Washington. Trump won 72 percent of the Lincoln County vote, so I assume that percentage holds true among my former Reardan classmates and their families who still live in the area. Based on my anonymous looks at their social-media postings, I also assume that percentage holds true, or close to true, for those people who moved away from Reardan to Spokane, Seattle, Alaska, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, New York, and various other places.
Of the dozens of Reardan folks I still know, I am aware of only five who are vocal and active Democrats.
How do I make sense of this? How is it possible that I, the lifelong indigenous liberal, became so popular—so loved and loving—in that conservative community? How did I become captain of the basketball team, prom royalty, and president of the Future Farmers of America?
Was it because I had a killer jump shot and spin move on the basketball court?
Was it because I was once handsome and slender enough to be called pretty despite all my real and perceived scars?
Was it because I could publicly speak my mind with quick wit and honesty?
Was it because I was so book-smart?
Was it because I was mostly kind and egalitarian and made friends with stoners, jocks, musicians, geeks, brainiacs, and all other manner of kids? Was it because many of those kids, like me, were athletic and geeky and academically ambitious all at the same time?
My senior year, the varsity basketball team had an average GPA of 3.76. Out of the twelve guys on that team, eleven of us went on to get bachelor’s degrees. The women’s basketball team had that same level of academic accomplishment. This kind of scholarly achievement might be standard for an urban private school, but it seems improbable for a farm-town public high school of a hundred and fifty kids in a community of fifteen hundred people.
So perhaps I was the beneficiary of a white small town’s honest meritocracy. I was good at everything that a Reardan kid was supposed to be good at—I could have simultaneously been portrayed as the nerd hero and compassionate jock in a 1980s teen movie—so maybe that made my indigenous and liberal identities of secondary importance to those white kids and their parents. But I wonder if my race would have been more of an issue if I’d been a nonathlete. If I’d been only an average student. If I’d been plain or overweight or socially awkward. Or if I hadn’t been such a natural diplomat.
I was the best, or among the best, in the school at nearly every academic and extracurricular activity (though I never did repair that small engine in shop class and yes, yes, I twice set myself on fire while arc welding), so it was demonstrably impossible for anybody in Reardan to think of me as inferior to any of those white kids.
I think I overwhelmed most overt or latent racism with the sheer force and size of my abilities.
But was I also accepted because it’s difficult to be actively racist, sexist, or homophobic on a one-to-one basis? It’s hard to be anti-Indian when an Indian is sitting next to you in a classroom. Though I did learn it’s pretty easy for a white conservative father and mother to be vocally anti-Indian when their daughter is dating a rez boy like me.
But, damn, after high school and college, and a decade into my very public and leftist artistic career, the town of Reardan asked me to be the grand marshal for their Community Day parade. I said yes, of course, and proudly rode on a mule-driven wagon through town while waving at so many of my old friends and teachers. How did that happen? How did all of those future Trump voters—all of those folks willing to validate and empower that rich man’s bigotry—come to celebrate the poor brown boy who grew up in their white town?
I know the answer has a lot to do with basic human decency, and also with the seductive nature of fame, but I think the answer has most to do with compartmentalism. It’s easy for a white racist to fall in love with and accept one member of a minority—one Indian—and their real and perceived talents and flaws. But it’s much tougher for a racist to accept a dozen Indians. And impossible for a white racist to accept the entire race of Indians—or an entire race of any nonwhite people.
I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly every racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism—in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.
I have lost track of the number of times a white person, hilariously thinking they were being complimentary, has said to me, “But, Sherman, I don’t think of you as an Indian.”
Throughout my rural and urban life, among white conservatives and white liberals, I’ve heard many other variations on that same basic sentiment.
“Sherman, you’re not like other Indians.”
“Sherman, you’re a credit to your race.”
“Sherman, you barely seem Indian.”
“Sherman, I don’t think of you as being Indian. I think of you as being a person.”
“Sherman, you’re not just a Native writer. You’re a writer.”
“Sherman, I don’t see color. I see the person inside.”
All of these statements mean the same thing: “Sherman, in order to fit you and your indigenous identity into my worldview, I have to think of you as being like me—as being white like me.”
I suspect that some of my white friends, if they are reading this, don’t recognize themselves as a person who has said racist things directly to me—who cannot even recognize the racism present in such statements.