The first thing I learned about my new White classmates at St. Bartholomew Catholic School was less a “new thing learned” and more a rejection of an old thing thought.
Months earlier (this was in the early ’90s), my parents decided to pull me out of Pittsburgh public schools and enroll me there to start sixth grade. If you’d asked Dad why they made that decision, he’d probably talk about “pre-AP courses” or “the benefits of didactic parochial instruction” — exactly what Black parents who ship their kids to predominantly White suburban schools are supposed to say. But if you knew my dad, and you asked that same question, he might tell you the truth: I was a talented basketball player, and their ball program was the best in western Pennsylvania. Getting me there was one step toward his (later successful) master plan of getting me a full ride to college.
Anyway, I assumed the White boys there would be soft. And it’s not like I was hard. But I was hood. And I thought that meant I was inherently tougher than anyone not from a place like where I was from. Especially suburban Catholic White boys. But my new classmates and teammates were the sons of plumbers and deli owners, school nurses and construction workers. They ripped and roasted and fought just as quickly — and just as well — as anyone from my neighborhood did. Months later, when we outfought the rest of the diocese to cap an undefeated hoop season, I never felt so good to be so wrong.
The second thing I learned about my new White classmates happened my third day there. It was recess, which meant each of the 50 sixth-graders finished whichever combination of carbs and veggies were served at lunch that day and then rushed to the rectory-adjacent parking lot for our 16 minutes of freedom before the fifth period bell rang. Most of the boys took part in a football-like substance where the football was a Koosh ball and we played “stop-grab” instead of two-hand touch.
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If you’ve ever witnessed a group of 11-year-old boys doing, well, anything, you know that discovering what they think are the newest ways to conjugate and weaponize the English language’s oldest four-letter words is their favorite pastime. Koosh ball was basically just an efficient delivery system for chaotic swearing. We sounded like the first 16 minutes of “Reservoir Dogs.” It was fun. Familiar. But then something unfamiliar happened.
One of the boys accidentally tripped and fell. Another one of the boys laughed and called him a clumsy d-word. (Rhymes with Lego.) Everyone laughed. He shot back, “Shut up, you stupid m-word.” (Rhymes with hick.) Everyone laughed again. By the end of the week, I also heard a w-word (rhymes with “pop”), a p-word (rhymes with “mole lock”), and … lamb chop (which just made me hungry).
At first, I thought I’d misheard them. But after getting to know everyone better — particularly, getting to know everyone’s last names — I learned that my ears were fine. I already knew, of course, of general slurs for White people. I didn’t know that White people had ethnically specific slurs for one another too. The Italian kids, the Irish kids, the Polish kids and the Greek kids communicated to each other on this secret-to-me low frequency, and it was fascinating. I was already a veteran user of the n-word. My first memories of it said in an easy and loving manner were from eavesdropping on Dad and his brothers and cousins telling lies on my great aunt’s porch in New Castle. And although it ain’t a perfect analogy — the differences, culturally and historically, between the n-word and those White slurs are vast — I saw some of that same familiarity with how my new classmates used their language too.
And that’s what it was: their language. I was at St. Barts for three years, and some of them White boys became my boys, too. We spent nights at each other’s houses. Changed in the same locker rooms. Crushed on the same cheerleaders. Cheated on the same Spanish tests. And not once did I believe that our closeness, or their frequent and casual use of those words, gave me permission to say them too. I never wanted it either. Why would I desire to wield something so complex, so thorny, so contextually specific — a weight I’d developed no muscle to carry — when I had my own special words?
That question is rhetorical. Just remember that I understood this. And that despite hearing the n-word in movies and in rap songs and on basketball courts and from me, they understood not to use, or ask to use, my special word either.
And we were 11 years old.
Damon Young is author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays.” He is a writer in Pittsburgh.
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