Need to know a little book about who you are. Im sure people do but just in case lets talk about that. You might want to talk about how you think about your own life. Lets start with you up in new jersey. And you grew up how did your parents get to new jersey . Who were the . Guest im the son of a black man from the segregated south. My father is 82 years old. He was born in 1937 in longview texas and raised in galveston under segregation, under jim crow. He moved to the west as soon as he could and was running war on poverty programs under Lyndon JohnsonsGreat Society initiative. He met my mother who is nine years his junior in san diego where he was heading up poverty programs and she was fresh out of college. She is the daughter of evangelical christians. Her father was a minister and he was very much a part of this Mainstream American Society that was certainly opposed interracial marriage in the laidback and 60s, early 1970s, you didnt use the word white about anybody. [laughing] tragic my mother is white. He was really unhappy when my parents got together and so they eventually moved up to oregon and Washington State and then denver took my file this job kept taking them east, and until 1981 when i was born in new jersey. Host so the java new jersey, what was he doing . Guest by the time i was born my father was running s. A. T. Preparation, he was tutoring students that, to the house to study privately with him for the s. A. T. , gre, the lsat within subjects, math and science, and he was, thats a he was supporting the family. My brother and i became captive living students in this house that was just very small, very modest onestory ranch that it was packed from walltowall with books. About 15,000 books. We studied with him on the weekends and in the evenings and through our summer break. Thats basically what made up for the kind of mediocre in a parochial Catholic Schools that we host why did you go to Catholic Schools . Guest for a variety of reasons. My father played the discipline would be better there although it really wasnt. He wanted to get us out of our neighborhood. We lived in a kind of informally segregated part of new jersey where theres a white site account and a black side of town. I grew up in sand would new jersey so as a kind of sign a protest against the realtors attempts to steer us to the black pocket we lived on the white site of ten. That came with in the 1980s and 90s that came with some racial dynamics my father want to get us out of so we went to a Catholic School a couple towns over. Host but not in order to become catholics . Guest not at all. In fact, my father is an atheist and my mother is a protestant. When a school would go to mass my brother and i would sit back and read our books. That was an early experience of standing apart. Host you mentioned that in your book. Was it just you to . Was it a significant difference from all the others . Guest just as to you, know what else, not a single other person abstain from going to mass. Host is that because they were mostly from catholic families . Guest most were. I wasnt even aware of meeting children of other faith outside of christianity before got to georgetown in 1999. Host say which a Catholic College treasure i ended up going to a jesuit school, yes. Host how did it go . You said it wasnt a sounds as though you think you got the best part of your education at home. Its one to be talking race, whats the composition of the School Population . Guest my mother is technically a white anglosaxon white person but not what people think of when you think of that connoting some type of social elite. Her face is protestant and she is derived from anglosaxon stock thats about as far as that goes. That was mikes. With that kind of whiteness and i grew up in new jersey about what my parents would refer to as ethnic whites. Polish kids, italian kids, irh kids, greek kids. That was my experience with whiteness, even portuguese and spanish kids. They tended to be catholic. Attended one second to college i realized attended not to be at all this kind of elite white. Host they were not collegebound. Guest many of them were not. Turn these of the kids in your neighborhood and also the kids in your school. Guest thats right. Host what percentage of kids in your school were black . Guest up until high school i was one of a handful of a black students and was really aware that i was kind of, i could interpret my racial identity as a wanted to because there wasnt much basis of judging. By the atomic at high school and there was a deliberate choice i chose to go to school that was much more black and latino, about half. Host you were offered a choice. Guest i couldve gone to a pretty good all boys Catholic School that wouldve been pretty white and had a good Basketball Team and i was a success at basketball but i very much wanted to be in a social airy with black girls to date so chose to go to to a school that was inferior in terms of academics and in terms of basketball but but i believe id enough at the hospital to make up for that i knew my father was going to be making the study with a no matter what side didnt worry about my s. A. T. Prep. I ended up going to school that was heavily black and latino as well as ethnic white. Host and not catholic . Guest it was catholic. Host all the options was catholic trejo all options were catholic. Host how serious were you about your guest i was pretty serious edge of the was conflict potential leaving the school in leading my High School Program guide to go play somewhere else. I was serious enough i tried it a few times with Saint Anthonys in jersey city and the tryouts went well and he invited me i couldve transferred schools and tried my luck it being on the team when i was 15, 16. But at the last moment i decided i couldnt, i didnt have the desire to leave this girl i was madly in love with, the kind of enormously influential in my racial self conception as well as my kind of host tell us about what that means because in a way your experience with blackness household is that say eccentric, unusual but she was your kind of access to what you might call normal blackness. Guest part of what i realize my father whistling the segregated south in many ways, a texas upbringing that caused some pain, and my mother was fleeing a kind of stifling racism coming from her own father, and theyre searching to create their own family on their own terms. My brother and i were raised outside the context of extended family members on either are black or white side. Our house was really, we were a force them into ourselves and he did relies how different that was from all of my friends until it became apparent and i thought for example, how many cousins my children have and how important extended family is to them. The racial identity was always coming directly from my father but also from my my mother agreed. She agreed we were a black household solar brother brother and i grew up with the white man and a black dad but it wasnt that the couple could a question. We were black. The white kids we knew didnt think were white and the black kids were used to like its looking all kinds of ways. I had an uncarpeted sense of myself but i realize depending on how i behave, how address, have comported myself my blackness, others could perceive a more authentic or less authentic racial identity and so i kind of threw myself into the idea that the girl i was with kind of was also the fulcrum upon which i hoisted up my sense of myself. Shes a go of it for two as stacey and both of the members. She was a year younger than me. She was from a household that was pretty middleclass but she was in the neighboring black down which is a slightly less affluent town and she lived around more of an innercity expense even though she was not directly in that. She exuded a kind of intoxicating cool that, it was shocking to me. It was a girl that didnt ever take the s. A. T. Test, wasnt concerned about it. No one told her to. She cut school. She seemed extraordinarily free and just not host life plan, what was guest she didnt have one. She needed one but she didnt have one. There was a spell when i was a scene and she was a junior my father took her aside and tried to prepare her on his own for free. She was one of the first kids he ever work with where he couldnt reach her. She didnt care. I think she exuded what might be called she exemplified that. Host that was attractive. Guest choose completely outside the context i was growing up in in the film but s really leading a double life. I didnt share the kind of home life i had with come in my social context at school and on the Basketball Court. Host they didnt know you were studying on the weekends . Guest most of them didnt understand what is going on and it was a shock to many of my friends when senior year rolled around and then i had suddenly had invitation to go to some schools that i dont think the avenue i was preparing to go to. Host you said you didnt have the extended family that you might have had if there hadnt been good reasons for your father not to want to go to the segregated south and your mother not want to hang out with the family that wasnt super happy about her being married a black man. Guest my grandmother was really not at all a racist and she would visit us every year. She came to us but ive only in retrospect realized her husband couldve come but never did and never called. She made the effort so i knew her. Host you knew her at your place. Guest thats right. Not at her place. Host her other grandchildren, for example, you didnt know . Guest knew them from afar. Not in a way that impacted the sense of myself. Host your circle, all young people of the circle they find themselves in, so who apart from your girlfriend who the others . Guest i had a best friend i call charles in the book. His mother was a puerto rican and his father black american, and he was one of these kids that just extraordinarily smart, things came easy, goodlooking, popular and some a very early on he latched on to me and started coming home because i live much closer to school needed, started coming home with me in the afternoon. Saw my father, some of my father had access to through all of these books and saw there some type of life of my he had not seen elsewhere and said i want to participate. He was opposite of my High School Girlfriend and so we started coming over to the house every day. Help me, the two of us studied everyday freshman year to senior year for sats and get extra prep work outside of her classes. He ended up making a huge success of himself. He ended up, he did a little bit worse on the s. A. T. , which a slightly lesser college, study very hard, got straight as, study at oxford and then went to the Top Law School in the country and then worked at one of the Top Investment banks, you know, and he just made a smashing success out of himself and i think that his encounter with my father was transformative for him. So that was something, we were like brothers but he was also, he was extraordinarily cool. Host where you code switching . Guest i was trying my best. I felt like my social life depended on it. Host you had a sense that there was a way it just wasnt going to work . Guest it didnt translate into what i felt my peers would value your couple in retrospect i want to say perhaps i was projecting that on them and perhaps they could handle a lot more than i was willing to share with them and they really dont know. I felt like i had to hide that. Host and so did your friend, so is a shared judgment. Guest yes. Ive one memory of having done well on like the s. A. T. , a writing exam. I got a perfect score in the principal wanted johnny and i got so afraid that everyone was going to tease me and it would make me uncool and i went and did the thing that everyone in home and watched it. When he stepped out in the hallway i braced myself for the teasing but no one even acknowledged it one way or the other. It meant nothing to anybody and that hit me like a ton of bricks because had i i done something well on the Basketball Court or even just had a really good pair of new tennis shoes, that wouldve registered much more but it meant nothing, comedy people from the class went to college . Guest im aware of . It depends, there are two different definitions of college of course. Host how many of them stuck with high school . Guest i think quite a few. I dont really know the numbers but, for example, my girlfriend, she simply got pregnant and that was it. There were multiple students like that. Host so what did the school think about this . The school must have added you about here you were, you and your friend. Guest very proud. Some of them would ask my dad, why is thomas dating this girl and things like that. I would be very defensive about that and my father would delicately not trying to put too much pressure on me but he was concerned as well. Host so by the time you go to georgetown, you are separated from tragedy took a year after college and realized she got pregnant by guy who was selling drugs and she is going to move in with him. She kind of scolded me the first time. It was an awkward the first thomas back on breaking she said those white, have you bugging and tripping. Whats happened to you . I realized when they came home there was something that i realized i was able to express about myself and who i really was down in georgetown that i didnt want to conceal anymore. We split. It was painful but we split and a realized that was absolutely kind the best thing that could happen. Host youre at georgetown, you have a bunch of friends. Why they . Because you are arriving at georgetown as a young black student. Lots of High Schoolers and academic stuff. You were there because you are intellectually engaged, academically excited. Who are you for the people who meet you . Guest i was living on the floor that was pretty diverse. When the my best friends was from new jersey. Both of our roommates were white and we lived across the hall from each other we spent a lot of time together. At first i just didnt even like pay attention. Ive nothing against my white dorm mates or anything but i kind of mood to the world as though the reality didnt apply to my and mine didnt apply to them and i kind of preemptively cut myself off from having real intimacy with these other students and i dont know why. I really threw myself into the segregated tables in the cafeteria, College Cafeterias often break down along identity and also went over to howard with my black friends on weekends and stuff. Just thought this larger white reality was something i swam in but have nothing to do with me. One night i was really ill in the dormitory and i was having an asthma attack and it would to take a shower and a middle of the night and was one student on the floor who still awake and he was two doors down from i mined he invited me to have some tea. He was listening to jazz and use a jewish kid from brooklyn named matt. I realize that was the first time id ever talk to them. We lived together for about six months and is playing music i never paid attention to. My friends and i growing up we behaved as the black culture began in the 1970s with hiphop and is nothing that preceded it. None of us listen to jazz or even read many books. My dad basically didnt have music on inhouse except every now and then he would place in james brown. But i never really listened to jazz. Matt and i became friends over jazz and he started to introduce me to all these other musicians that i started to love. I realize he was the first jewish guy ive ever met. I had never been aware of knowing a jewish guy before. There were indian guys on the floor, people from all over. I gradually started realizing my friend group was much more diverse than ever allowed myself to have it in the past and i was giving all the richer for that. Host so your friend who is also from new jersey was also some of what mightve had a more complicated relation to race than some people because he was connected with an african identity and it was 100 rooted in guest thats right. He definitely in america was made black and his social reality would be legible to a lot of other black americans. But he had traditions. He put on traditional clothing from time to time and his family, his family was of modest means that sometimes they went back. They didnt have this kind of i think that he had a lot of selfesteem that came from being linked to this other culture. All of his brothers approached school with the kind of, not with the kind of cool culture but they approached it with the of tenacity of the immigrant and all of his brothers went on to become physicians and scientists in one generation really became successful. Host you talk what with a e of being rooted somewhere makes me want to step back a moment and ask what your parents, given that your parents took it for granted that you are black, what did they think you should know about lack history . Guest so much. Black history. My father did his best to get us involved, to read a letter from birmingham jail for Martin Luther king. To really understand the larger tradition but he also somewhat in the way you write about, he always believed my identity didnt begin or end with the social reality of my blackness. He can have his life saved i being a fatherless black point in texas without anyone in assam having an education but he stumbled upon plato is dialogue at some point in his childhood and he picked it up and he tried his best to read it. It did make sense to him at first but he was very early on aware that there was something out there that linked him with a towering great greek mind, and that if he could access it he could potentially access the wider world and he would read books by himself in his closet with a flashlight. His family would say what you doing . Youre going to get yourself in trouble. Dont read those books. Early on, aesop fables were huge for him. He always come he would give me, he always had a sense that you can see yourself in many different places and in many different figures, and so identity is not just being black. Host you have gone through a through a phase thinking blackness is about being the cool host guest and a very narrow understanding. But he was eccentric. Host that comes with you to college but then this experience of the more Diverse Community of guest in college it was the first time i met black students with socioeconomic backgrounds. Colleges where i met the children of doctors, black americans cannot just