Introduction

On October 16, 1995, Louis Farrakhan, leader of the politically controversial African American Muslim organization Nation of Islam, assembled the first Million Man March in Washington, DC, to focus attention on the problems facing African American men. Most of Ms. Stein’s African American students were absent, many in support of the march. The class’s daily journal assignment was to write about some aspect of race in their lives. “I always try to tie this in to Martin Luther King Day or Malcolm X’s birthday,” she told them, “or today, the Million Man March.” After the students had spent several minutes writing, Ms. Stein asked for volunteers to read or describe what they had written. In every class, European American teenagers took the topic of the day as an opportunity to talk about their racialized fear and resentment of their African American schoolmates. As the few black students present looked on, white youth voiced a litany of complaints about the problems they faced as European Americans.

In the fourth-period class, which had the largest number of white students, Finn raised his hand. A tall, solidly built European American boy with shoulder-length fluorescent pink hair, wearing heavy black Doc Marten work shoes and a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a local punk rock band, Finn seemed to me the least likely student in the class to express fear of African Americans, or of anyone else, but he did so. He reported that he avoided blacks based on personal experience: a group of “black guys” had beat up his friend because they said he looked like a “faggot.” “I look just like him,” Finn concluded by way of explanation for his fear. As was her practice, Ms. Stein did not comment on Finn’s report of his journal entry, but moved on to what another student volunteer had written.