A Scholarship Out of the Barrio, a Ticket to Burn-Out

These musings are prompted by a story in the papers about a Mexican-American student at Harvard, evidently a dazzler, who was recently arrested as the suspect in a series of summertime ski-mask robberies. There have been other stories in the national press about black and brown college students in trouble. A headline leads us to imagine: the sound of tennis shoes on asphalt, the choked breath, the sweat, the panic. Something concealed, the change flopping up and down in a pocket, the keys, the revolver perhaps--the crack of a pistol--and then the slow spill of memory, drop by luminous drop, and the body stiffening into an inexplicable parable for the morning papers: “Scholarship Student Shot by Police.”

Trust them to have given us a name. Psychologists now call us sun children--a term new to me. Sun children are those students--black or brown--who excel beyond expectation, who move quickly from the unlucky shadows of the ghetto or the barrio or the working-class neighborhood. We are sent off to schools where we are rewarded. But it is not uncommon, the psychologists warn, for us to veer away from the optimistic light, to heap shame upon ourselves, burn out.

I was a scholarship boy, a lucky boy, my father said, when I entered college in the 1960s. By the time I had finished with several graduate schools, I had become a minority student.

For generations, lucky boys and girls have packed their parents’ honeymoon suitcase, put on brand-new clothes and set off alone and anxious for schools where they find that their classmates are at ease.

For generations, the university accepted scholarship students with the expectation that they would become different from their parents. Then, in the 1960s, political protests led to new bureaucratic policies and thus to changed conventions. In the ‘60s the university began accepting the minority student on the assumption that he was somehow still connected with his past. The university expected me to represent my working-class past; my presence would represent disadvantaged Latinos to the academic community. The logic of affirmative action made each minority student a beneficiary of the disadvantaged condition of others outside the campus. Their defeat justified my advantage and advancement. I was no longer the pride of my parents, the pride of my nuns, I was a government token dropped into the academy.

The minority student of the ‘60s was no longer expected to play goy on campus, as was the expectation in most of the Jewish novels of the ‘50s that I had prepped myself with. After the ‘60s, it was precisely on campus that the minority student was expected to be blackest or brownest, to stick out where he could. The rush, then, was for minority students to acquire a barrio manner, an inflection, a costume, and to proclaim a politics of solidarity with “the community,” by which was meant the nonwhite poor.

Most of the white students I knew didn’t seem to mind the charade too much. America was in a romantic phase. White American students liked the idea of fraternizing with minority students, deferring to them as if they were student princes.

Twenty years later, newspaper surveys indicate that the white student body has tired of romanticism. There is resentment of minority-student privilege. Speaking with three nonwhite students from Stanford recently, I asked them to tell me what they wanted from their school and from their fellow students. The three quickly settled on a single word. They said they wanted “respect.” And one girl spoke Shylock’s speech: Why is it so hard for students at Stanford to realize that I’m only a person?

A decade ago I was a member of the first generation of minority students. I remember asking my professors for advice. They gave none. Come on, why was I so troubled about being a minority student? Surely I was willing to act as role model for other minority students on their way up? Surely I would graduate into a leadership position and go on to help my people? (I would hang up my shingle--Litt. D.--in East Los Angeles?)

For the minority student, the turn of the year--the back-to-school ads in the paper--can herald psychic changes. I used to dread the renewed confrontations with bands of angry Chicano student revolutionaries who had no doubt about their own ties with the barrio but who, of course, easily questioned my authenticity.

Education moved me into middle-class America, and yet I was expected to remain the son of the barrio. I will tell you authentic stories. I remember a black man, a graduate of the Ivy League--dean’s list, jock star--a sun child if ever there was one, who one day started shivering at breakfast and shook until all ambition had fallen from him. He saw angels and he saw demons. We wrapped him up in a blanket and drove him home to his mother.

A black woman I know attended Bryn Mawr. She remembers coming home that first summer. She remembers getting off the Greyhound. She remembers struggling up the dusty road with her pink valise. She remembers her mother waiting behind the screen door. She remembers her mother’s words: “Girl, I don’t want you talkin’ white in here.”

I laid down my own academic career around 1976. I wrote a letter to my department chairman wherein I melodramatically divested myself of the label of minority student which I had come to detest, for it hurt me. It diminished my worth in my own eyes--and damn their eyes! I decided to refuse any teaching job so long as affirmative action was a factor in my hiring, as it inevitably was. My faculty adviser was incensed. He said I was self-destructive--like some other minority students he knew. We went along, he said, we accepted everything, he said, climbed to the highest rungs, and then we lost heart.

He was saying I was ungrateful.

He was right.

I didn’t want the benefit of being a minority student. I didn’t want the burden of having to pretend that there was no great distance separating the campus from the barrio.

Ten years later I remember my rides from college, rides toward home for summer vacation that represented to me the crossing of borders. Tell us about your books, the parents say after they have told their important news. Tell us all you are learning. . . . And so I remember the silence of summer dinners at home. The tinkle of iced tea.

And then, in winter, a professor would tell me that I was exaggerating the difficulty of being a minority student, that I had been reading--and here the clubby chuckle, the drawing of a moist brown pipe--too many novels about Welsh mining towns.

Ah well, then. But education belongs to the realm of the story. Education is personal and individual and eccentric. Education is not about minority students, the plural case, not about tokens, exemplars of an entire race or class. An education is the story of one, any one of us, who took the Greyhound from home a decade of burnt summers ago.