God's Gym Read Online Free PDF

scholarship, and here's one difference already, Jack's vita more predictable than Jill's in a way, more a classic pulling himself up by his bootstraps from the slough of the ghetto black Horatio Alger thing, a jock who could read and ace exams and submit without too much fuss to microscopic examination within the glass cage immuring him. Jack, the first of his penniless family, maybe his race, to achieve this or that, Jack who recalls the first
September of his matriculation at an Ivy university, dressed up and in the company of his new white basketball teammates, mostly poor boys themselves also on scholarship, gunfighters all with mile-wide chips on their shoulders
Don't Tread on Me
sauntering coolly into a mixer at College Hall. Turns out what was being
mixed
was Jack's brown body with approximately six hundred white bodies. No contest. He ducked out after three minutes. Belly-flopped on the bed in his dorm room, KOed by the avalanche of whiteness at the threshold of College Hall he had crossed only to save face, his black face he believed maybe his teammates hadn't noticed till that moment at the entrance—mixing.
    Ironically, since arriving on campus, he'd been praying to be seen for what he thought he was, just another frosh boll weevil looking for a home. Then all the boys and girls—My God, Jack, what happened to your hair—saw him for what they thought he was and the shit got worse after that.
    Enough of my story. Jill doubtless endured similar and more. And different too, she reminds me every chance she gets. It wasn't always about race, she says. Which to me means she meant she chose to participate in activities (some of which she may very well have enjoyed) that set her apart, but ideally, if the strategy worked, if she performed successfully in these activities, her choices would also ensconce her firmly in the larger life of the institution—read
white
life or
colorblind
life—the larger life in turn graced, integrated, equal-opportunitied by her presence. Race, then, in a way, would disappear. In my view this strategy also doomed her to hang with white boys. Giving in to any nasty boy, black or white, of course, would be breaking a rule, going against the grain of how Jill'd been raised to respect herself and carry herself and save herself, but wouldn't she be tempted to consider dalliance with a boy not black, if not entirely kosher, still, wouldn't it be a bit more like being different, like earning her wings as herself, an individual, being her own person, on her own terms, one more sign she was not who she
was spozed to be. Her choice of not-colored lovers a breaking away, breaking expectations, breaking new ground like long-distance swimming, excelling in calculus, etc. Mixing into the larger life. Race disappearing.
    Woe is me. Do you see why it's not them I'm angry with. We should know them by now. Haven't they inscribed their superior biology, their superior culture, their crimes on the record. Their record as indelible as our records they steal and play and play and play over and over again. We know what they think of us. We know what they are capable of doing to us when they psyche themselves into ignoring—for profit or pleasure—their Protestant or Catholic belief systems, their hard-won Judeo-Christian moral and ethical principles. We know how they work us, play us, smother us, integrate us, exhaust us, kill us. Know what they say about our bodies and hair.
    We know all this. So why fuss. Why feign surprise when they invite us in for a cup of tea and the rest happens. Why whine after we permit them to enter our heads, our beds. Whose race disappears. Who's the one who belonged to a race in the first place.
    What would it mean then, to know what I know and not act on it. Not do to them as they do to me and mine. Would my restraint, my turning another cheek, one of my big round butt cheeks, for instance, mean I'd transcended racism. Freed myself of its coils. The deep