Privilege and entitlement. We assume it only applies to people in positions of power or influence. Or that it’s something that rich folks, famous people, professional athletes, musicians, artists, writers, or actors exercise. But from years of observation, I’ve come to understand this. That in a nation as imperial as ours, as rich as ours, as powerful and power hungry as ours, that privilege permeates everything. It’s why our social safety network is so deeply flawed. It’s why universal health is greeting by many as if Armageddon is just around the corner, while the cruelty of American Idol and The Bachelor might as well be manna from heaven. It’s why the allegedly richest nation in the world has mediocre public education, even in its wealthiest school districts. It’s why we can’t walk down the street without being smacked in the face by privilege.

Yes, even walking down the street. Most people in this country don’t even have the decency to say “excuse me” or to move slightly to the side whenever other people approach. Couples act as if there couple-ness gives them the absolute right to take up an entire sidewalk, as if it’s alright for other people to step in mud or out in the street. Groups of folks who think that their numbers give them the right to be oblivious to the rest of the world, forgetting that a public sidewalk is just that. It’s as if others have to beg for the right to exist in order to walk a block in a standard American downtown.

I used to think that this was a racial issue, and it very well may be. But privilege exercised in this manner does cross racial, socioeconomic, even regional barriers. And not just on sidewalks. In getting off elevators or trains, in which people refuse to step to the side and expect you to say “Excuse me” to them in order to get off before they get on. In meetings, where people will cut you out of a conversation if at all possible, as if manners don’t matter at all. From cashiers giving you bills, change and receipt all at once, as if you’re five years old, don’t own a wallet or purse, and are supposed to shuffle off at warp speed so that they can serve the next customer. To people constantly cutting you off in traffic without using turn signals or even hand signs.

So many have written about civility and etiquette as if they only went out the window because the very nature of American culture changed in the good old ’60s, because dissent and rebellion became a common part of it. As a Black male who has been called the N-word in public before, and for all of the other persons of color who’ve experienced far worse, the culture isn’t that much difference in terms of language than it was fifty years ago. What’s different now is that there’s virtually no pretense of manners. This isn’t due to dissent or rebellion. It’s because of privilege. It’s privilege that enables people to lack the simple social skills of politeness, to not say “Excuse me” when they blatantly step on your foot or cut in line.

If this were caused by dissent or rebellion, there’s no way our government could’ve gotten away with the Patriot Act, with the two Gulf Wars, with Iran-Contra or Supply Side Economics, with “mend-it-don’t-end-it” welfare reform or not ratifying the Kyoto Agreement. We’d be more like France or Germany with workers shutting down the country in order to force our government to change. No, the attitudes that most of us exhibit in public are ones of complacency, of the need to get away from as many people as possible. We’d rather drive our cars and talk on the phone than put some music on, watch out for pedestrians and think of the fellow drivers around us. Or walk and window shop in a mall like an oblivious fool as if we’ve phased out of our world and into a parallel one. Or better still, act as if others don’t matter at all.

The sense that the public sphere belongs to them, and them alone, is so common that we only seethe when we actually pick up on these everyday sorts of slights. I’m convinced that the last six decades of American dominance in the world has left us at home with the feeling that no one else’s feelings, ideas, beliefs, theories, and lives matter. It’s why we can be all right with the deaths of 1.7 million Vietnamese in a war of little meaning, but only be heartbroken by the loss of 59,000 Americans. It’s why we can be ho-hum about three million homeless Americans (and growing certainly within the past year) and upset that a stimulus package will keep several hundred thousand Americans from joining them on the streets. It’s why we can avoid a “dangerous neighborhood” with a wink of glee in our eyes and fall apart when one violent crime occurs in a middle class or affluent community, often saying “I never thought that it could happen here.”

I’ve always wondered how Americans (and, for that matter, other Westerners) could be the way that they are in an increasingly interdependent, global, cooperative world. The answer’s been here the whole time. With the end of the Second World War, America was literally half of the world’s economic engine, had the atomic bomb, the world’s second largest army and the largest navy. We were, as they say these days, the shit, and we’ve let the world know if for the past six decades. Like an aging beauty queen, even with the cracks and wrinkles, we act as if we’re still in our prime. We’ve borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia to botox our forehead, to have collagen injected into our lips and cheeks, had liposuction on our midsections and otherwise to keep up appearances. Like every empire of the past, we’ve entered a dangerous phase, a make-or-break period in which our decisions to exercise privilege or to see beyond ourselves could make the difference between a well-fed and good-looking corpse or a nation that understands that the world is not ours, it’s everyone’s.

The oblivious, sheep-like sense of entitlement that we exercise in our everyday interactions is directly tied to how we operate as a nation. We can’t expect one to change without the other changing as well. If we want a government that’s responsive, efficient, and truly bipartisan, then we need to insist on living our lives in a less privileged manner. Otherwise — to quote the artist Sting — for those of us who at least recognize the dangers of privilege, we might as well be “singing in the wind or writing on the surface of a lake” for all our words might matter.

I’ve learned so much over the years about mediocrity, authority and leadership that I should be about as jaded as a Buddhist statue. Yet I sometimes still find myself shocked when I encounter people in leadership positions who may be incompetent, but who are definitely jaded and borderline sadistic. Among those who’ve disappointed me the most are educational administrators — deans and department chairs, advisers and guidance counselors. No one, though, was more shocking to listen to than my high school principal, Richard Capozzola.

My first day of high school was one that introduced me to the reality of self-fulfilling prophecies and the damage that low expectations can do. On a day in which we were beginning Humanities at the high school level, our principal announced over the PA system that the freshman class was to assemble in the auditorium. It was third period, the first of two study hall periods for me, so I saw this as an opportunity to learn more about MVHS. Our principal, Mr. Richard Capozzola, was welcoming our incoming class to high school. He was an old-looking man in his late-forties, I guessed, balding but doing the comb-over thing to cover his hairless middle. This was before he went the toupée route. He was short, like most of the Italian administrators, wore a bushy mustache and generally acted as if he were a warden instead of the chief administrator for an educational institution. After welcoming us, Capozzola said, “There are 1,075 of you here today. Four years from now, only half of you will graduate” from MVHS.

My mouth fell open, and not just because of what he said. I couldn’t believe that someone whose job it was to make sure as many students received the best possible education would assume that only half of his students were capable of finishing high school. For a moment I thought what Capozzola said was for effect. But the look on his face and the words that followed said it all. Capozzola talked about “discipline” and “behavior,” “detention,” “suspension” and “expulsion” throughout the rest of his speech. Nothing about grades or test scores, Regents exams or graduation. The only message he was trying to send was that he’d prefer if the students who didn’t plan on graduating dropped out by the end of the day. If I’d been a student who had struggled academically and socially before high school, that’s the message I would’ve taken with me out of the auditorium that day. Instead I was pissed with Capozzola and anyone who thought that this was the way to make students feel at home. It felt racist, considering the school was about three-quarters Black, Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic by then.

I also had two run-ins with my Capozzola in April ’87, a couple of months before I graduated from MVHS. It was a day in which I managed to escape my AP Physics class and was awarded a small college scholarship. I was about to find out how quickly life can turn full circle.

That morning, I already had survived one confrontation with “Capo.” I was standing outside the school waiting for the doors to open to start the day, like I had for the past four years. I had my Walkman on as usual, when Capozzola walked up to me and demanded that I turn it off and take it off.

“No, I don’t have to do that,” I said.

“What did you say?,” the balding, rug-wearing runt said to me in response.

“I’m well within my rights. I have headphones, which is all that sign requires,” I said, pointing at the various “No”s sign of what MVHS prohibited on its grounds. A Walkman with headphones wasn’t on the list. I continued.

“The first bell hasn’t rung, and I’m outside of the school building, and you have no right to tell me to turn my Walkman off.”

“You and me better not cross paths anytime soon,” Capozzola said, slightly flustered by my barrage and turning pinker by the second, before walking through the front doors and then to his office.

“Capo” and his crack security team made every effort to punish us for any misdeed. By ’86-’87, this included tardiness for getting from one class to another. We had five minutes to get from one class to another on a twenty-three acre, two-story building and campus. Because students would take more than five minutes to arrive to class, Capozzola, Carappella and company created a random “sweeps” policy. At random times each day, the security staff would lock down various parts of the school, temporarily trapping students who hadn’t made it to their next class on time. The guards would then “sweep” up the miscreants, who’d either end up in detention or, depending on their frequency of being caught by the guards, suspended from school.

That afternoon, I left AP Physics for Division E principal Dr. Zollicoffer’s office, one of the few Blacks in authority at MVHS. He was a very tall and big man, at least six-four, and well over two hundred and forty pounds. He apparently had been aware of my existence for the past four years. In his gravely, football-player-like voice, said, “The Afro-Caribbean Club has decided to honor your achievements with dinner and a $500 scholarship.” I sat there, completely shocked. I hadn’t heard of this club, barely knew who Zollicoffer was, and hadn’t been expecting anyone to give me a scholarship, at least not anyone from Mount Vernon. He spent the next few minutes chatting me up about how significant a person I was to the Black and Afro-Caribbean communities in Mount Vernon, my responsibility to “give back” to “my people,” about where I was going to college and what my major would be, and so on.

The period-ending bell had rung and students had been shuffling through the hallways by the time he gave me the chance to say “Thank you. Thank you very much!” and leave. I ran through the hallway and around the building to get my stuff from AP Physics, and proceeded to the gym on the other side of the school when the second bell rang. At that point, I was about eighty feet from the gym, and trapped between two gates.

The guards escorted me to Capozzola’s office, who immediately smirked at this turn of events. Even though this was my first offense, he wanted to make an example of me.

“I can make it so that you’re not only suspended, you won’t graduate with your class,” Capozzola said.

“I was in Dr. Zollicoffer’s office and on my way to gym when the sweep happened. You can ask him yourself,” I said.

Reluctantly, Capozzola picked up the phone and called his Division E principal, who I heard laughing on the other end of the phone at one point, as Zollicoffer explained that I’d been awarded a small scholarship.

“You can go, but I’ve got my eye on you now,” he said, almost with a sigh, after he hung up the phone. I was smart enough not to say anything else in return. But my sarcastic smile probably said it all.

The last time I saw Capozzola was little more than a year later. I was on one of my meandering walks lost in thought about what I needed to do to find a summer job, during my unemployed summer of ’88, when I bumped into my former principal at the corner of North Columbus and Euclid. The toupée was gone, as was his prison warden swagger. Capozzola recognized me immediately and stopped me to talk. He apparently had been forced to resign as principal. Of course, he said that he was burned out trying to save the school. I don’t remember much else. I was in college now, in between my freshman and sophomore year, and listening to an a-hole go on and on about his trials and tribulations. To say the least, I didn’t feel sorry for him.

But I have thought about that conversation in recent years, with all the work I’ve been a part of around K-16 education reform, about how teachers and principals experience burnout, often never to recover. At least most of them know that it’s time to go when that happens. Maybe Capozzola was a great principal or teacher once. Somehow I doubt that. What I do know is that thousands of students attending MVHS never had a chance to become decent students or graduate, thanks to his leadership. That’s the damnable part about having someone like Capo in a crucial leadership position.

Twenty-eight years to the day was the start of a six-year odyssey of torture, disillusionment and rebirth. It was in the midst of the worst of times, for me if for no one else. It was my first day of middle school, my first day in Humanities. My first day of realizing that some people saw me as inferior to them. My first day of six years of learning how to cope with the vast contrast between my time at school and my life at home.

This is not another “feel sorry for the author” story about my not-so-wonderful years in Mount Vernon, New York — although you can feel sorry for me if you choose. It’s more about what I learned in those first couple of years, those two years at the A.B. Davis Middle School that have served me well, particularly in graduate school and in the world of work. It’s funny to think that those years would serve me better than my high school or undergraduate experiences. Yet it’s not so funny to recognize that the folks with which I attended school were more diverse and less open to diversity that any other group I’d encounter until I became a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. And because of my kufi, as well as my idiotic mouth, I include myself in that category.

Perhaps it was because so many in Humanities had formed cliques long before I’d ever met them. So many of them were in the elementary version of it that I would’ve been at a significant social disadvantage even if I had grown up solidly middle class and with my current level of wisdom by the time I arrived in seventh grade. But the cliques that formed in the weeks after the start of seventh grade — in part a response to the pre-existing cliques — would be of interest to any sociologist, psychologist or sociocultural anthropologist. There was what I called the Italian Club (long before we actually had one as a class), the middle-class-Black-girl clique, the Afro-Caribbean clique, the Black male clique, the affluent Jewish/WASP girl clique, and so on.

Few within our subset actually ventured outside of those cliques and formed lasting bonds during those two years. There were enough exceptions to prove the rule, though. Those exceptions occurred with those designated to have special gifts, talents, backgrounds that made their crossings of divides possible. Kind of like the way we see our current president and others like him today.

But I think that there was a bigger fear among us, one bigger even than race or class, religion or gender. It was even bigger than trying to be cool or not being able to fit in somewhere. It was the fear of competition, of giving anyone in Humanities an added advantage by coming to their defense. It was a fear, a worry, an anguish that was with many of us every day regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion or level of affluence. When combined with the unacknowledged diversity of Humanities, it led to a cliquishness that would define most of our in-school friendships and relationships until college.

Perhaps that was why some in our classes could get away with their brand of verbal harassment because the alternative meant sticking your neck out for someone you might prefer not to be in competition with in the future. If you were weak enough to knuckle under because one of the Italian students called you a “monkey” or a “brainiac” for a month, then you didn’t deserve to be in Humanities. A program where the ultimate show of strength was your grades. Not to mention your ability to negotiate the social terrain of the in-crowd, the folks from Grimes and Pennington who’d been taking courses together since at least second or fourth grade. If you failed in one, you had a chance to redeem yourself with the other. If you failed at both, you’d likely either drop out of Humanities or fade into the background.

Despite whatever I thought about my grades at the time, I knew deep-down that I was as good as the best and brightest in Humanities, and better than most of the Whites who were there. As for being a part of the in-crowd, I accepted that this was likely to happen only when there was peace in the Middle East and my stepfather Maurice was out of our lives. At least one out of two wouldn’t have been bad. My strategy from the end of seventh grade on was to at least be on the margins of what was considered “in” socially. If that opened more doors to social acceptance, that was fine. If it didn’t, that was fine, too. At least it beat being a total outcast or an ostracized nerd.

That’s the ultimate lesson I learned in those first couple of years in Humanities around race, class, gender, religion, and grades. That no matter my talents and abilities, my wittiness or lack thereof, that my race and religion brought with it automatic assumptions of weirdness and inferiority, at least for my Italian classmates. That and my mouth made me a Humanities outlier for folks who were in the front and center of the social circle. In climbing out of the social hole I had inadvertently dug for myself this time twenty-eight years ago, I learned so much about diversity and negotiating difference, all of which would help me after my Humanities years.

I’m back. I needed a week off to get ready for the fall stretch. Hope that no one missed me.

It’s been twenty-five years since I wore my kufi for the last time. It was a long hard road that I probably could’ve avoided traveling, three years and three months of constant stares, awkward moments and social isolation. By the end of the summer of ’83, I had stopped believing in the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing. I saw it as the reason for our family’s plunge into poverty, the reason that my idiot stepfather could justify abusing me and my mother and the barrier between me and every person who was a part of my life.

In the months before I became a Christian, I thought about the prospect of not wearing the kufi to school anymore. At least I wouldn’t get weird looks, have kids laughing at me, and draw unnecessary attention to myself. This was a cop-out, a cowardly way of solving a problem that was about more than a piece of clothing. Wearing the kufi every day was just as bad. Not so much because of others’ reactions. If I didn’t believe in the religion of my mother and stepfather anymore, that meant that I didn’t believe in anything else. If I turned away from their version of Yahweh, who would I turn to as The One? I’d been defined by what I wore on my head, what I ate for lunch, what holidays I celebrated, and what I looked like to others for almost two and a half years. Now I was questioning whether I believed in any God at all. If I gave up wearing my kufi now, I might as well have said that the last few years of my life were a waste of time, a denial of things and foods, peoples and cultures that I could’ve embraced all along. If I continued to wear it, I was a hypocrite, someone who’d rather go through the motions of a dead and bizarre religion than stand up for his spiritual well-being.

Darren, meanwhile, had decided that “the day of atonement” and all things Torah went against his digestive tract right from the beginning in ’81. I frequently watched him take his kufi off as he boarded his bus for school. I thought about doing the same thing, many times, in those years. But it wasn’t until after I became a Christian, after trying out for football in August ’84, that I took my kufi off in public for the first time.

On the first day of school, as I was about to walk out of the house with kufi on head, I got really pissed. I couldn’t live another day like this, pretending to be something I wasn’t. I took the symbol of my oppression off my head and threw it on top of the refrigerator by the front door and foyer. I knew that I’d have to answer to Maurice when I got home that day. But I didn’t care anymore. Maurice or not, I was going to live my life as a Christian, on my own terms.

My whole first day of school was spent hearing words like “Congratulations!” and “Wow, what happened?” and other exclamations of pleasant surprise. No one was happier for me than my eventual Crush #2. She gave me a brief hug. It was the second time in less than a year that my classmates had come out in force to support something I’d done. I felt euphoric, like I’d been on-stage performing at a concert in front of a sellout crowd, giving me a standing ovation in the process.

Most of my teachers had no idea why my presence in class had caused such commotion. I knew some people would be surprised by my religious coup d’etat. I even knew that a few folks might be happy for me. But almost to a classmate, it was as if I’d escaped the gulags and defected from the Soviet Union. Five years before the Berlin Wall fell, my Shalom Aleichem wall came tumbling down. If my idiotic mouth was a reason for some of my first problems with my classmates, my kufi and all that it represented must’ve created a permanent sense of separation between me and them. I felt overwhelmed, like I’d won a prize that I wasn’t expecting to get. I also felt ill-at-ease. They might’ve been a few months older, but weren’t these the same folks who hardly talked to me this time the year before?

When I arrived from school that afternoon, my mother was practically waiting for me at the front door.

“You forgot your kufi this morning,” she said, looking as if she knew what I was about to say.

“I didn’t forget. I’m not wearing it anymore. I’m a Christian now,” I said. My mother pleaded with me to wear my kufi when I left for my regular grocery run.

“You know what Judah’s gonna do when he’s see you left it?,” my mother said, almost begging me to put the kufi on again.

“I don’t care!” was what flew out of my mouth as I left for the store.

That evening was when I faced Maurice’s anger. Apparently someone in the neighborhood who went to MVHS told him about my transgression.

“Boy, where’s your kufi?”

“Where it belongs. Off my head.”

“Why didn’t you wear it to school today?”

“Because I didn’t want to. I’ve converted to Christianity.”

“Listen here. I’m gonna whup yo’ ass if you don’t wear it tomorrow.”

“You can kill me if you want to, but I’m not ever going to wear that thing again! I’m a Christian now, and if you kill me, at least I’ll go to heaven!”

At that point, my mother stepped in. “Leave the room,” she said as she got in between me and Maurice in the middle of the living room. I went into my old bedroom, which wasn’t my bedroom during our Makeda days. Even with the door closed and the TV on, I heard them.

“That boy’s defiant. I won’t tolerant it in my house!,” my stepfather half-yelled and half-whined.

“You lost, Judah. If someone’s leavin’ this house tonight, it’s that woman or you!”

About five minutes later, I went back in the living room. Maurice had left, presumably to get some kosher pork fried rice, one of his favorite after-dinner meals. My do-or-die stance had caught Maurice completely by surprise. I never heard about kufis or yarmulkes again.

That kufi was as much as symbol of oppression when it came to my stepfather and family as the N-word would’ve been if I wore that on my head. It symbolized a bizarre religion, our family’s stupidity, my own stubbornness and unwillingness to embrace other people’s ideas, cultures, emotions and intelligence. My teenage years were years to be amazed, but had begun as my years of shock. Maybe, just maybe, I could begin to be a teenager again, without the kufi.

I had planned to write about two poignant incidents that are typical for me and for so many others living in a nation in denial about how we treat each other every single day. About how we make others apologize for us putting them in difficult situations. About our refusal to look ourselves in the mirror — or to look within — in the process of assessing blame and striving for solutions. Then Ted Kennedy passed away the other day, another reminder that America’s greatest days have long passed. Yet millions of those who grew up during the years of Camelot — the good ol’ ’60s — still act as if that decade gives them the right to say and do anything at the expense of others’ thoughts and activities.