| 11 March 2011
Earlier this week, I posted my review of "The Hustle," a book that chronicles the lives and experiences of the members of an AAU team that mixed white players from Lakeside and black players from the inner city in the late 80's until present time.
What was a result of this experiment? Would the black kids have better opportunities? Would the white kids become better people as a result of seeing another side of life? The answers to these questions are found within the pages of "The Hustle." What follows is a conversation we had with the author. Check it out after the jump.
You dedicate the book to Tyrell Johnson; if there's one lesson you have learned after investigating and discussing his death, what is it?
He lived in my memory -- and still does -- as a beautiful human being. Very charismatic, charming, great basketball player. The manner in which he was killed led to all types of suppositions about why it was so brutal, mostly that that Tyrell had been into something heavy and there was some kind of message being sent.
The story I found was much more prosaic -- Tyrell wasn't an altar boy, but neither was I at age 19, nor several other guys from the team. The margin for error was much greater for one side of the team, much slimmer for the other -- JT, Myran and Damian have all told me at times that they feel lucky to be alive. Will Jr. made the point that he realized he could have been killed just by hanging out with one of his friends at the wrong place and wrong time.
So Tyrell to me represents the gap in life chances between the two groups on the team, and since he always remains 19 and beautiful, I can't help but look at his picture and see wasted potential.
Has anyone on the team read the book yet? If so, what's been the response?
Everyone. I gave them copies in November before publication. The response has been totally positive across the board, thankfully. I also hear that guys have gotten good feedback from people who've read the book. I'll be back later this spring and hopefully we'll be able to get together as a group, so interested to hear the response now that it's been out.
One of the more interesting passages in the book was when you wrote about Lakeside's attempt to "diversify." Though well-intentioned, do you believe it's possible for a predominately and traditionally white affluent school to ever reach their goal of being diverse?
One thing I took away from visiting Rainier Scholars is that there is a vast pool of talented kids in the Seattle area, from all races and wealth levels. If you founded a school that had the express mission of admitting kids from across this range of race and economic backgrounds, it could be amazing.
At a reading I did in the San Francisco area, one member of the audience said he'd been to a school like that and he felt it had been a great experience. I think it's much harder with older schools that have a tradition going back decades and an established constituency in a certain community.
In these cases, there are bound to be people get upset at change in the institution. At the same time, the U.S. is becoming demographically more diverse and the global economy ever-more interconnected. Lakeside certainly recognized that and took steps to adjust, but obviously the implementation has been difficult.
One way to answer your question is to say that it's hard to "diversify" when there is no real agreement on what that means -- is it simply admitting more students of color, or does it need to include somehow changing the curriculum and culture of the school to reflect their particular experiences? I think it has to include the latter, but definitely not everyone agrees with me, and that's where it gets tricky.
What do you believe Randy Finley's main motivations were for trying to get these socio-economically disadvantaged kids into private high schools?
I think he had many motivations, and they evolved as time went on. First, it shouldn't be forgotten that he's a competitive, driven guy who loves basketball, so there was definitely an interest in simply trying out something new and having a great basketball team. He is also very much someone who came of age in the 1960s and still carried a lot of idealism from that era, so he saw something intrinsically good in exposing these two groups to each other.
Before long, I think he also saw that the guys from the Central Area were great kids and was alarmed at their schooling and what he saw as a lack of opportunity for them, so given his personality he got involved to try and change the situation by getting them into private schools (an effort that extended to include a lot of other kids).
I think he also likes a challenge and enjoyed getting out into the community and also mixing it up with private school administrators. I think he eventually found that he couldn't do it by being a one-man band. There needs to be a lot more support and infrastructure.
I enjoyed this book because it really went into aspect of the history of Seattle that isn't always talked about clearly or directly. During your research and writing, what is one thing about this city within regards to race relations that probably makes it unique among other major cities in this country?
There's a few things I learned. Frontier Seattle, for African Americans, was actually fairly free. It's not that they were welcomed with open arms, but blacks back then weren't subject to racist laws as they were in most of the rest of the country, including the Oregon Territory. I think this is mainly because the numbers were so small that no one was threatened.
Native Americans and Chinese certainly suffered terrible discrimination. What surprised me was that after about 1910 how much Seattle fell in line with the rest of the country as far as black-white race relations, with black people pretty much limited to living in the CD and a few public housing projects outside. Having grown up in Seattle, I was used to thinking the city was a bit more advanced than the rest of the country, but it really wasn't.
A pretty unique aspect of race relations in Seattle is that it has an Asian American population around the same size -- now larger -- than the black population, which has added another element. Asian Americans definitely have their own troubled history in Seattle, from the violent expulsion of the Chinese in 1886 to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. I did a lot of research that unfortunately couldn't make it in the book, but there is a lot there to be explored, such as in the relations between African Americans and Asian Americans when both suffered discrimination.
Finally, I should say that one surprise that applied to me personally was that there used to be a large Italian American neighborhood called Garlic Gulch down in the Rainier Valley, which is where my grandfather grew up. When I spoke with him, he remembered being called slurs such as "dago" and "wop" as a kid. So obviously a lot has changed over time.
Bottom line, what would you like your readers to take away from your book when they're finished reading?
One very primary thing I wanted to do was to step back and let each guy have the chance to speak in his own voice and tell his own story. I tried to ease back during the those parts and then worked hard to fill in the context and history around everyone.
I hope that reading the book leads readers through the same process that I underwent while writing it, which was a deep engagement in thinking about the divisions that exist between people, why they are there, and how we can make efforts to cross them on a personal level. If I can help give people a foundation to think about that, then I've done what I intended to do.
