At Tokay High School, in the California Central Valley town of Lodi, I belonged to a well-meaning club with an unfortunate acronym: the Communications Improvement Association. Advised by one of the school’s best teachers, who taught government, the CIA by the time I participated mostly conducted civics projects: political forums, college nights, canned food drives.
In its formative years of the mid-1970s, when my older siblings participated, the club was created to do what its name suggested: support open conversation among the school’s variety of cliques, circles, and sub-groups, kids who sat at different cafeteria tables and looked on each other with distrust, distaste. The goal: create a unified student body.
One reason for division: Tokay High was new, including not only students from Lodi but those from northern portions of Stockton, a larger, more diverse city to its south. The Lodi kids, who’d gone to Senior Elementary Middle School, felt bad they didn’t get to graduate from the old Lodi High; their resentment spilled over onto kids from Morada Middle School, in North Stockton.
My elder sister recalls a CIA meeting in which students listed on a chalkboard names they used for groups of “others”: Jocks, or Lettermen; Nerds; Farmers, boys whose jeans had back pockets outlined with the white circles of chewing tobacco tins; Marlboro Country, users of the school’s smoking area; Stoners, the drug-using subset of smokers. Girls, my sister recalls, were subsumed in these names, so cheerleaders were also “Lettermen.”
She doesn’t remember the CIA listing different racial types. In the Central Valley of the 1970s kids didn’t hesitate to use racial slurs; an honest list would have included them. I recall having a queasy relationship to slurs: we knew they were hurtful; my family thought less of those who used them; but we heard them routinely. That included popular media: every televised comedy roast featured slurs; for a hipper version, look up the Chevy Chase-Richard Prior “word association” sketch from the first year of Saturday Night Live.
Lodi and North Stockton had plenty of Latinos, including lots of migrant farmworkers, whose children came to school seasonally as their families followed crops up and down the West Coast. If we’d listed names for those groups, they’d have included “bean eaters” and “spicks.”
Morada had a sizable minority of Asian-American families, mostly Chinese; I recall them being treated more as “model minorities” than being routinely slurred. (If I could track some of my former Morada neighbors, I’d ask.)
Later, North Stockton became home to many Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian families, refugees from the Vietnam War. In my high school years I often heard those students, most impoverished, referred to as “dog eaters,” after rumors of local dogs supposedly disappearing.
Lodi and Morada had a vanishingly small number of Black families. My family moved to Morada from Hayward, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in a neighborhood my parents had selected in part because it was integrated — half Black, half White. My elder sister, who’d always attended integrated schools (both Catholic and public), was in fifth grade when we moved. Our elementary school of about 350 students had one Black family.
“One day, at Davis Elementary, I saw an African-American boy walking home,” my sister says. “I did a knock-me-over-with-a-feather thing: ‘Holy smokes, there’s a Black kid here.’ I hadn’t seen one in weeks. I went home and asked Mom: ‘I don’t understand — where are all the Black kids?’ I’d sort of assumed that America was like Hayward. And Mom explained that less than 20 percent of the American population was Black, and in this neighborhood it was a lot less than that. I was stunned.”
In my elementary classrooms, which had no Black students, hearing the N-word wasn’t routine, but it wasn’t unusual.
My sister has another memory. Our family was active in the AFS program, which created cross-cultural experiences for students. As part of a short-term program our family hosted a Black student my sister’s age, for a week or so.
“I didn’t walk around Lodi very much — I usually caught the bus after school and went home,” she says. “But for some reason the two of us went into a grocery store in Lodi to buy candy or something — a good-sized store, not a convenience store. We stood in line to buy our things; she was ahead of me. And the cashier ran her items, told her how much she owed, put the things in a bag, folded it twice, stapled the bag across the top, then stapled the receipt to the bag. And when I went through, the cashier tossed my candy bar in the bag, threw in the receipt, and handed it to me — she didn’t fold it once. It was so obvious. I was floored. I apologized: ‘I can’t believe she did that!’ And the girl just shrugged, like it was normal. She was with us only for a week, but I heard kids say all kinds of horrible things — not the N word, but comments about her hair, her nose, her skin color.”
All of this is to provide context for a social media post by a Black man who attended Lodi schools in the 1970s, a few years ahead of me. He is now a university professor.
“To My Former Classmates in Lodi:
“There’s a reason that I don’t use this particular account very often. The Trump era has brought back a lot of unpleasant memories and unresolved anguish from my years as a kid going to school in Lodi.
“Don’t get me wrong: I had some great friends, some of whom remain in my life to this day.
“But there was the other side: the KKK flyers at my Senior Elementary, people touching my hair in class or asking if my color washed off when I took a bath, and so on. I was there to learn, not be a furry pet or satisfy white children’s curiosity about Black people. I wonder what I may have missed in terms of instruction while dealing with all that each and every day.
“And then there’s the fact that I was actually threatened by an adult man in a pickup truck on the street in front of the old high school, while one of my classmates (who would always yell something about ‘going coon hunting’) in the hallways sat there and laughed. This was the week when ‘Roots’ first premiered on TV.
“And I didn’t tell my parents. For the most part, I didn’t really tell anyone. I internalized much of it and figured I’d have to do just that much more to prove that I was different from the stereotypical images of Black people that were being laid on my shoulders.
“I was 12 when I was first bused to school in that town. One of four Black students.
“Today we call those daily insults, those thousands of little cuts, ‘microaggressions' (except for being threatened as a kid by an adult—nothing ‘micro’ about that). Always waiting for the other shoe to drop and someone would tell another ‘dead nigger’ joke or say ‘I’m not your nigger’ when someone asked them to do something. And ALWAYS all eyes would turn to see what my reaction would be. More times than not, these things happened in class. And even though they are little things, they add up over time and take a psychological as well as physical toll on the body. I’m exhausted.
“Remembering those days also brings back painful, shameful memories of things I did there to fit in. Middle school and high school are hard enough FOR EVERYONE, and many of us did stupid things we regret in hindsight. But in some ways I feel like I sold off some pieces of my very soul as one of a handful of Black kids just to fit in within a space where I never would. It was there I learned to ask myself ‘what’s wrong with me?’ It’s definitely where I adopted the ‘class clown’ posture as a way to cope. And that was also to my own detriment.
“Now with the experience of a man who is almost 60 years old, I have begun to forgive myself, that child who always felt outnumbered. Not good enough in sports to be respected as an athlete, an acceptable way to be a Black male; rejected by some Blacks in Stockton; because where of we lived, they’d say I must be a ‘Rich N.’
It was all very stressful.
"By the time I was a senior in high school I was severely depressed, even suicidal, although i didn’t have the words to name what was happening to me, and I didn’t think anyone would care or could help, so I stuffed it down and kept ‘clowning.’ A kid trying to cope.
“So, to conclude this very long post(!), let me say I have not written it to elicit anyone’s sympathy. And since this is MY story, it’s not open for debate or (dis-)agreement. I have not written it to portray myself as a helpless victim, still clinging to past hurts even though it does still hurt.
“I am a grown-ass man who has done very well for himself. But along with every else, what I also learned from my Lodi years is how to struggle and achieve and to build a life and deep friendships, based on respect and recognition of each other’s humanity—regardless of race, class, gender, or whatever.
“It was not all bad. But I refuse to remain silent any longer about those things that were painful because my children have experienced (and are still experiencing) some of the same things all these years later. So something has to change. Maybe this can help your children or grandchildren.
“I wrote this today for those who were there with me and didn’t even know what I was going through in ‘Livable, Lovable Lodi.' It wasn’t livable or lovable for everyone, and I suspect it’s still not.
“This is for anyone who really wants to better understand this current moment in our country’s history and in our local towns’ histories across America. Many of us have learned a lot over the years about how to accept and love people from different backgrounds, some of whom are now part of our own families.
“Hopefully what I’ve shared here today will help us—those who want to engage in a CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATION—to have a place to begin.
Signed, Your Former Classmate”
A classmate of mine, Classmate 1, reposted, without comment.
The first comment, a meme and accompanying screed, came from Classmate 2: “You know what it was OBAMA who divided this country and its brain dead liberals pouring gas on the fire .... you should sped more time listening to educated conservative black men instead of racebaiting idiots.”
Classmate 1 called him “a racist idiot.”
Things descended from there, ending another constructive conversation.
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