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4

Identity
This screenshot from the comedy
series Ted Lasso shows the quasi-
sanctified moment when Isaac gives
Sam a haircut in preparation for a
big date.
How do the lighting and the men’s
Copyright (c) 2023 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Uncorrected proofs have been used for this sample chapter.
body language convey the
significance of this event? How
does this depiction of a haircut
compare with how Morris depicts
the significance of facial hair?
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.
being liked. But goodness as a personal policy is one another from drowning. Lots of us had gone
strange for a child to have. It’s for grown-ups; to integrated schools. We could swim. I swam.
not for kids. Teachers like good kids; some But there’s a way that, for certain nonwhite
teachers prefer them. The kind of goodness I’m people (especially if you’re poor), life at a liberal
talking about is suspicious to other kids. Kids arts college (especially a so-called elite one) can
don’t want to catch you abstaining from trouble feel like the reward for all of that being good.
or raising your hand or staying behind after Maybe you’ve beaten some odds to get there,
school to help out or, worse, to hang. I went to and your prize for all of the effort and, let’s face
the same small, mostly Black private school it, all of the luck is, yes, a premium education
from third grade until graduation. That kind of but also living among white people. But
goodness sometimes got classified as “white.” It first — ha, ha — first you must exemplify your
wasn’t pejorative, exactly. Kids liked me. But we people, be a diplomat for them and an ambassa-
all seemed to realize that now I had a genre. . . . dor to the white people to whom your ways
might seem foreign.
• • •
No one ever puts it that way. The structure
I went to Yale, which, until recently, offered an does the talking. No Black first-year student
orientation camp for several dozen nonwhite I knew at Yale had a Black roommate. If a pro-
students to bond. It was a week of sitting around, fessor put James Baldwin or Toni Morrison or
exploiting the pretext of food and talent shows to Ntozake Shange or August Wilson on a syllabus,
luxuriate in the personalities and tastes and lives you, as the section’s sole Black person, would
of potential new friends. It was exciting, finding be gazed at until you got the discussion started,
these kindred souls. Every once in a while, one of expected to approve your sectionmates’
us would pause our little paradise to laugh at the analysis and withstand their insinuations.
absurdity of it all (the program’s acronym was There were several ways to receive such a posi-
PROP) and ponder the looming menace: Were tion: aghast, aggrieved, in acquiescence, with
we being warned? The program was a rather authority.
stunning admission on the college’s part: This is I eventually owned the situation. But it cre-
a white place; you all are going to need to keep ated delusions. I, at least, went through a brief,
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DIFFERENTIATION
Connections to Text
The original essay, available on the New York
Times website, contains a long section after
paragraph 15 which includes, among other
topics, a discussion of Morris’s childhood
appreciation of the sitcom The Fresh Prince
of Bel-Air and his identification with the char-
acter Carlton. You might look at that section
and see if your students would value reading
it, or you could choose to share with them an
excerpt of the TV show and ask if they see
correspondences. You might also ask them
to consider why the editors of the textbook
chose to edit the section (for one thing: it’s a
long essay!).

248 chapter 4 / Identity

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