I attended a Montessori school from 1st to 3rd grade, my best friend was a Eastern European boy – like me! Laszlo was from Hungary. We both wore sweater-vests to school. Things were better. I was speaking English fluently, or so I thought. Unbeknownst to me, I had not yet gotten rid of my Russian accent.
I started getting into a lot of fights at that school. Maybe it was because my parents were getting divorced or maybe it was because I was just a knucklehead. Today, I would be horrified if one of the boys behaved like that at my kids’ schools. I was average sized for my age, but I made up for that with a willingness to be viciously violent. I broke a boy’s arm during recess unintentionally: I pushed him to the ground, and he fell on a tree stump hidden in the tall grass. I had my first-ever crush on a girl named Toby and did not know how to process the unfamiliar feelings, so I choked her until she cried. The immature me thought it was funny and laughed hysterically. Later that day I was hit by a pang of guilt and shame at the realization of what I had done and never bothered her again. I was friends with a boy named Max. One day, while I was engaged in work, he repeatedly pestered me to play with him. So, I beat him up brutally with a series of punches. My last punch to the face lifted him off the ground and he landed on a metal trash can that gave him a large crimson-purple bruise across his abdomen.
The human brain is a pattern-construction machine. We are constantly looking for patterns and even when a pattern is not actually there, our brains will invent one. This phenomenon has extensive backing in empirical academic research and is variously known as Apophenia, the Gambler’s Fallacy, Patternicity, or the Clustering Illusion. In a typical study, participants are shown a series of random numbers, and most folks start to imagine a pattern in the numbers where none exists. Based on these types of studies and my personal experience, I believe that humans over time, if not appropriately counter-programmed are hard-wired to eventually become racist. Children, on the other hand, unless taught otherwise by adults, ascribe little or no significance to race, because their brains have not yet accumulated enough experience to construct race-based pattern-recognition narratives. While facial features and skin color are obvious and prominent physical features – they are just one of many. Other obvious physical features include height, weight, hair color, age and gender.
The son of Celtics hall of famer Dennis “DJ” Johnson was a classmate. DJ is a mixed African-American redhead with freckles all over his face. When I met DJ as an eight-year-old, I did not think about his race or skin color or his status as a celebrity basketball player. I just remember thinking “that is the ugliest man I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” He is objectively super-ugly. But he is a hall of famer and a champion. The whole school watched on TV as the Celtics won the 1986 NBA Finals, then valiantly lost the 1987 Finals, both times versus the Lakers.
At the start of 4th grade, my best friend was a little boy from Rwanda named Rugigana, with happily married, successful parents. We would take the bus home together every day. We had a couple free hours until our parents would come home, so we would wander around the neighborhoods near Central Square. The worst thing we did was shoplift once. We were terrified, but we didn’t get caught. It was so stressful, though, that we never did it again.
The school was too easy, so my mom transferred me to another school that was supposed to be for gifted kids. I knew nobody and had no friends. It was a scary place with big bullies. I watched one kid get viciously beaten in a fistfight. On an unseasonably cold day in Autumn, I stayed out late playing basketball, dripping sweat in my t-shirt and jeans in freezing temperatures. I got pneumonia and was bedridden for 6 weeks. By the time I was better, my mom had arranged to have me start at Agassiz School – my fourth school of the calendar year.
At Agassiz, it was easy to make lots of friends. Most of them were nice neighborhood Jewish boys raised by single mothers. My parents had gotten divorced and dad had moved away to further his career. In my circle, the other boys’ dads had passed away or divorced. Most lived thousands of miles away. R.F.’s dad was a trucker killed by a drunk driver. G.P.’s was an alcoholic living in New Mexico. C.S.’s had moved back to his native Sweden. D.C’s dad, a goy, was living in a church in Boston where he was a janitor and maintained and played the organ. Our fathers were not a significant part of our lives.
The Agassiz School was built in 1875. It was named after Professor Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), a Swiss-American naturalist, who came to America to take a professorship at Harvard. He was a complicated figure whose academic writings and intellectual musings were seized upon by racists to give a veneer of science to their views. Agassiz believed that the different human races developed separately from different ancestors, not from a common line. This type of theory was used to support American pro-slavery and Nazi eugenic ubermensch ideology. Agassiz was also a polymath, who published research in other areas. In his personal political and religious views, he explicitly rejected racism. He believed in spiritual human unity, did not support slavery and believed that all men were equal before god. While he did a lot of damage and inspired many racists, including the Nazis who slaughtered many of my own family, in my opinion he is agathokakological (yes this is a real word – it means composed of both good and evil). In 2002, the school was renamed after the 2nd Principal of the school, Maria Baldwin. Mrs. Baldwin was a brave, hard-working and talented woman, who deserves all her posthumous honors. She broke barriers as the first African American principal of a mixed-race school in New England. The Agassiz school name is the familiar and comfortable one that I grew up with, while the Baldwin school name is like a stranger I never met. But, if the Agassiz name is a source of pain to some, and the Baldwin name instills unequivocal pride, then I unconditionally accept and support the Baldwin School.
At the Maria Baldwin Elementary School (formerly Agassiz Elementary School) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mrs. Hughes was my favorite teacher through the rest of 4th and 5th grade. She was a small woman was past her youth, with salt-and-pepper hair, a few wrinkles and good posture. Not yet grandmotherly, she was the supportive, likeable older aunt, who listened attentively, always in a good mood. She challenged us to be better versions of ourselves, so she never had to raise her voice and we children behaved because we enjoyed her company.