Member-only story
My Five Minutes as a White Supremacist (and Other Educational Tales)
“Anthony, come here, dear.”
It was Ms. Johnson’s voice, summoning me to the front of the class. She had a bubbly voice more appropriate for kindergarten. This, however, was a seventh-grade social studies class, and endowed with the sum of human knowledge, like all seventh graders, I was wary of her motives.
That, and a few days earlier, she took away my Transformers I had smuggled into school.
Despite being the Megatron to my Optimus Prime, I liked her. She didn’t yell, didn’t give busy work. Looking back from the vantage of someone who has discovered girls, she was pretty.
Still, little good comes from the teacher calling you to stand before your peers.
I slid out of my desk. Walked up beside her.
“Anthony and I are white,” she began. We were studying South Africa, and to illustrate apartheid — which still existed in 1985 — she and I were to be the white ruling class. The other students would be black, and subject to our whims.
Just how subject? Ms. Johnson scanned the room. Her eyes alighted on a boy with a burgundy Members Only jacket, the height of 1980s youth fashion.
“Do you like that jacket?” she asked. I nodded. Walking toward the boy, she held…
