“It’s perhaps an American trait,” said Eli, in conclusion, “that when we want something, we want it now. Separation from England? Dump the tea in the harbor. Somebody turns up a nugget of gold in California? Everybody head west. It’s understandable that freed slaves should want the whole menu of rights and opportunities before the ink on the Emancipation Proclamation was dry. But Booker T. Washington played what we might call today a multilevel game of chess, always aware that he had opponents on all sides of the board, including the one that was nominally his own. Now, could his vision for Black progress have held? If those generations had risen through education to the professions, and then to politics and wealth and influence, would American society at the rim of the twenty-first century truly be equal, colorblind, and meritocratic? How can we know, because we went another way. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the goal is further away now, in 2001, than it was in 1895.
“But still!” Eli said, gathering his pages. “We beat on, don’t we? Because we believe in the green light, this American utopia where we’re judged by the content of our character and our work ethic and our God-given abilities. You know, I’m frequently asked if I’m trying to be some kind of example to ‘my people.’ This is a serious question, so I want to be very precise when I answer. I ask them: Do you mean the people of western Virginia?”
The two men behind Harrison chuckled.
“Do you mean people born under my astrological sign, Aquarius?”
Applause and laughter. Harrison sat up in his chair. His neighbor, none other than the lauded Princeton historian, was thumping his hand down on Harrison’s forearm, unable to contain his own mirth.
“Or perhaps you mean my people, the left-handed. A sinistra? Or we of the tribe who delude ourselves into thinking the Orioles will one day win the World Series! Or those of us born in 1982, the Chinese Year of the Dog. So I’m confused. Because all I want is what Booker T. Washington wanted. I want an America in which it wouldn’t occur to anyone to suggest that my accomplishments are anything but fully my own. No lower standard. No … affirmative action. You want to know who my people are? People who work hard, and innovate, and take pride in their accomplishments, those are my people.”
“Yes!” someone to Harrison’s left shouted. The Princeton professor had removed his thumping hand from Harrison’s forearm. He was standing, clapping loudly.
“Told you,” said a voice, somewhere on his other side.
“Fuck, yes,” someone else responded. Harrison turned to see who’d spoken, but they were all on their feet, banging their hands together, and no one seemed to be talking.
They broke for more drinks, more coffee, the audience drifting away to the bar. Harrison stayed in his chair. He told them that he wanted to go over his talk one more time, but in fact he couldn’t even bear to look at what he’d written about American Jews and their political shape-shifting. It wasn’t that he took no pride in what he’d pulled together, just that now he couldn’t remember why he’d settled on this topic. There was a reason he was here, and surely it wasn’t to explain how socialism was relinquishing its grip on American Jews. They probably knew that already, and if they didn’t there were any number of scholars, far better credentialed than himself, to tell them. No. He wanted to tell them something he was better equipped to tell than anyone else in the room.
He left his pages behind in his chair when he went to the podium, and over the clinking of new ice cubes in replenished drinks, he explained that he wanted to tell them a story about watermelon. “Not just because it’s a ridiculous story, and you’re going to be entertained, but because it demonstrates so much about what’s wrong with the education I had, until a year ago.”
The Walden School, he told them, had been his alma mater all the way back to kindergarten, and represented, in his hometown of New York City, the bright shining lie of progressive education. At Walden, they’d been taught about the European genocide against Native Americans, about the enslavement of Africans, about eugenics and lynch mobs and the unmitigated evil of the Republican Party, all while fanning the flame of their own goodness. They’d been taught to genuflect before the notion of free speech while shunning anyone who didn’t agree with them. They’d been encouraged to trample traditional values, denigrate the Western Canon, and generally amplify the non-white and non-male and non-heterosexual and non-traditionally gendered, informing those of European descent and Caucasian ethnicity and normative sexuality that their opinions were not required.