In high school I got too excited about Nat Turner during American history. I even acted more excited than I actually was, knowing that my glee at ole Nat’s night on the town beating up white folks with Southern Living at Home’s bluntest selections scared the shit out of the other kids at the table.

At a boarding school on a financial aid scholarship, for many classes I was guaranteed to be the only black student at that table. Sympathy for “Lost Cause” romances could easily be found among students and some regarded Reconstruction as a doomed experiment, given the underdeveloped state of the black condition. “Blacks just had to hold on. Couldn’t make citizens out of slaves in a few years’ time. They’d have to buckle down and take the SATs before they could do all that.”

A peer once asked me why he should suffer the injustices of affirmative action, seeing as his great-great-great-grandpappy acted so kindly to his slaves. You know, brought them out to T.G.I. Fridays in his stagecoach every weekend; got them milkshakes. White students often claimed the same sort of victimization that one would find in a Southern newspaper after the Civil War, with its contentions of white plight at the heel of a black oppressor.