High School Science Class

In high school there were a lot of fun people, a lot of weird people, a lot of interesting people, and a lot of popular people (I was not one of the popular people).  However, there was a special category that I reserved for those that were spectacularly stupid.  This is a story about one such person.

In high school science classes, we were assigned lab partners.  I think that the teachers wanted to pair up the smart kids with the less intelligent or less motivated students to ensure everyone passed the class.  That way the teachers wouldn’t be stuck with all of the special little morons for another year.

I always knew that I would be paired with someone who had little or no motivation.  This year, however, I got a not-so-pleasant surprise.  Not only was my lab partner a flaming pile of fecal matter, he self-identified as a member of the Aryan Nations.  Seriously.  He actually tried to explain to me how “white power is just the way the world works.” 

To be fair to my teacher, I’m 99% certain that he had no idea that the one minority student in the class was paired with the guy who couldn’t wait to move to Idaho to be a white supremacist anarchist. Actually, I’m not convinced that my partner even knew what an anarchist is let alone correctly identified himself as one.

Anyhow, my partner’s racial/ethnic preferences were made blindingly clear to me on the day that he explained that he understood that I didn’t choose to be born to a mixed race family.  In fact, he didn’t hold it against me at all (thanks?) and was totally okay with being my lab partner for the year. However, he did ask that I simply take the time and make an effort to “truly embrace your white half.”

I’m serious.  You have no idea how much I wish that I were making this up. 

Rather than becoming offended, however, I wondered what he meant by that.  Was I only supposed to use the right half of my body?  Was I not allowed to use my legs?  Did I have to focus on making sure that my eyes looked extra wide all of the time?  Was I supposed to wear makeup to hide the darker pigment of my skin?  I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what he meant by his request.

Further evidence that I was an idiot in high school: I didn’t report this to the teacher or school and I stayed his lab partner for the rest of the semester. I continued to be confused by him as he said at one point that he “don’t really like minorities, but I’ll make an exception for you,” and “You’re one of the only non-white people that I like.”  I once again highlight that I was one of literally less than a dozen minority students at my high school. I highly doubt that this guy knew more than one or two other people that weren’t white.

To this day, I occasionally recall this guy from high school and always laugh.  I wonder if things like this are still prevalent opinions and beliefs back in my hometown.  Friends that still live in the area have told me that there has been a lot of development since I moved away seven or eight years ago, but I’d like to point out that the overall voting trend has stayed the same and, in some instances, has become more conservative, if anything.

Maybe I’ll figure out what on earth this poor idiot was telling me some day.  Maybe I won’t ever know what the ignorant teenage white supremacist meant (I just realized that such a description is redundant in oh-so-many ways). In any case, at least I can laugh at it now and I’ve done what I can to not only embrace “my white half” but also to embrace my “non-white half” and as many other aspects of “me” that I can.