It was in the notorious Carlyle essay, also a work that could never have been assigned in a Walden class, that Harrison first encountered the stereotype of the lazy, shirking, watermelonsated “Black persons,” whose liberation or continued enslavement was—at the time of its writing—under debate in the parliaments and parlors of the United Kingdom. Talk about offensive!
Sitting yonder, with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder and incisor teeth ready for every new work, and the pumpkins cheap as grass in those rich climates; while the sugar crops rot round them …
After this noxious debut, the “pumpkin”—sometimes “punkin,” and ultimately recast as Citrullus lanatus, or common watermelon—would spend the ensuing century and a half infiltrating folklore, art, story, song, film, and, notably, advertising as a food powerfully suggestive of uncleanness, laziness, and ignorance. Harrison was no expert, of course, but this was kind of a duh when it came to your nastier breed of symbolism, something on the order of painting your white face black or using a certain word that began with N. No, he might have told his former classmates, it was not very smart, and would also not be at all funny, to leave greased watermelons in the office of their Black class dean, a humorless man at the best of times.
How profoundly had you failed your students when institutional myopia prevented them from learning things that might actually support their already indoctrinated opinions?
Profoundly.
And that was just not all right with him. He had too much to learn to waste time coloring inside the lines, and he fully believed that—demented losers like McVeigh aside—people with different ideas from one’s own were not the enemy; they were simply people with different ideas. Hearing them out carried, he supposed, some small potential for having one’s mind changed, but it was far more likely to strengthen the opinion you already had, so why all the fear? The point, he informed his Hayek audience, was and had always been to learn, and then to form an opinion, which should not have been considered so very radical, and should not have required such personal tenacity on his own part, but it was and it did, and it had been worth it, because learning things was the whole point of being alive.
He himself had not—full disclosure!—“forgotten” to bring in his fruit that morning. He had made a very conscious decision to ignore the instruction, and to remain at home to prepare for an oral exam in his French class （pointless in itself, as Walden would give him the identical “Pass” grade whether his work was just good enough or outright spectacular）。 By the time he’d arrived at school later that morning the test, along with every other Walden activity, academic and nonacademic, had been suspended for the all-school gathering, and there Walden was decried from every corner as irreparably racist, sexist, and homophobic. One by one, students rose and approached the microphone with fresh new stories of cultural insensitivity that they themselves had suffered. A Black sophomore, six feet tall, had been invited to try out for the basketball team: she’d been stereotyped! A Korean American boy was always sought out to help other students with calculus: he’d also been stereotyped! A girl with very large breasts had to put up with the staring of classmates, male and female, whenever she chose not to wear a bra: that was triggering! A certain teacher continued to use the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” in her classroom, and for one young person who said they weren’t either, this environment was so hostile, and caused so much distress! Was this a class at the supposedly most progressive school in the city or a seminar at Liberty University, taught by Jerry Falwell himself?
Naturally, lunch was canceled that day, and as the afternoon wore on, Harrison had begun to eye those watermelons （which had been carried—carefully!—into the Commons to serve as a backdrop for all this guilty prostration） with sincere hunger. He had always liked watermelon. He still liked watermelon.
Of course the shameful tale would spread, and not just through the Walden community but out into the broader circles of private-school New York, including some highly critical media accounts （“Walden School Roiled by Racist Student Attack”; “42K Tuition School’s Toxic Atmosphere for Black Students and Faculty”）。 But there was one piece of information that never, somehow, emerged.