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<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD><SPAN class=TopStory>Back to school</SPAN>
<SPAN class=Subheadline></SPAN></TD></TR><TR><TD>Patrick Wilmot
Saturday, October 07, 2006
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<P class=StoryText align=justify>[B]Returning to school after 40 years is challenging. How will the physical environment have changed? Would one recognise classmates after four decades of contrasting histories? The first question was answered easily by colossal, grey-green buildings that will probably last another few centuries. And classmates, after a few drinks and reminiscences, were brought back to life as on that first day in 1962 when we looked out at a dramatically challenging world.[B]<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=5 width=120 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD><SPAN class=Description>Patrick Wilmot </SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><P class=StoryText align=justify>I was never a typical "Yalie", what they called the denizens of these sacred halls. Probably the first Jamaican in the school, I was accompanied by four African Americans and one Nigerian in a class of 1,000. It would be impolite to call Yale a "racist" institution - it had a certain philosophy and coincidentally extremely rich, extremely powerful White Anglo-Saxon Protestant males best embodied this. Harvard was founded in 1655, and concerned parents started Yale in 1702 to prevent their precious little offspring from consorting with undesirables.<P class=StoryText align=justify>People think in terms of racism as whites expressing superiority over blacks. The old Yale was far superior to that - white people discriminated against other whites, those with funny, hyphenated American names. Most people think of the Kennedys as the First Family of America, but the Kennedy brothers all went to Harvard in their Massachusetts home state because Yale was concerned about their nouveau status, their gangster father Joe with his promiscuity, bootleg history and Mafia connections.<P class=StoryText align=justify>Jewish, Italian, Polish and other second-class Americans were considered slightly disreputable and limited in numbers by an informal quota. The question of blacks did not arise because it was understood that they could not really benefit from a Yale education, preserved in pristine form for descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers such as the Biddles, Bundys, Harrimans, Whitneys, Binghams.<P class=StoryText align=justify>Yale began thinking about entering the modern world in the 1960s when the university convinced itself that the old New England families no longer had the capacity to run the global empire. President Kingman Brewster, himself a Boston "Brahmin", decided to remove certain privileges of his own class, upsetting the less intellectual sector such as the Bush family with its spoilt, alcoholic offspring, the boy George Junior.<P class=StoryText align=justify>We blacks were guinea pigs and expected to be looked at and poked by brilliant WASP classmates who asked a good old Jamaican boy, "Where you learn to talk such good English, Patrick?" (The answer cannot be printed in a family newspaper.)<P class=StoryText align=justify>To be very frank, I never found a racist classmate except an alcoholic South African who explained that my IQ was double his because of my "white blood". Having been exposed to a black person who was not a servant, my classmates declared me equal to them. But I had to take them aside and explain that they got into Yale because their parents owned the country while a poor Jamaican boy like me got in on ability. I was not equal to them but superior.<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=5 width=200 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD><SPA
<SPAN class=Subheadline></SPAN></TD></TR><TR><TD>Patrick Wilmot
Saturday, October 07, 2006
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
<P class=StoryText align=justify>[B]Returning to school after 40 years is challenging. How will the physical environment have changed? Would one recognise classmates after four decades of contrasting histories? The first question was answered easily by colossal, grey-green buildings that will probably last another few centuries. And classmates, after a few drinks and reminiscences, were brought back to life as on that first day in 1962 when we looked out at a dramatically challenging world.[B]<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=5 width=120 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD><SPAN class=Description>Patrick Wilmot </SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><P class=StoryText align=justify>I was never a typical "Yalie", what they called the denizens of these sacred halls. Probably the first Jamaican in the school, I was accompanied by four African Americans and one Nigerian in a class of 1,000. It would be impolite to call Yale a "racist" institution - it had a certain philosophy and coincidentally extremely rich, extremely powerful White Anglo-Saxon Protestant males best embodied this. Harvard was founded in 1655, and concerned parents started Yale in 1702 to prevent their precious little offspring from consorting with undesirables.<P class=StoryText align=justify>People think in terms of racism as whites expressing superiority over blacks. The old Yale was far superior to that - white people discriminated against other whites, those with funny, hyphenated American names. Most people think of the Kennedys as the First Family of America, but the Kennedy brothers all went to Harvard in their Massachusetts home state because Yale was concerned about their nouveau status, their gangster father Joe with his promiscuity, bootleg history and Mafia connections.<P class=StoryText align=justify>Jewish, Italian, Polish and other second-class Americans were considered slightly disreputable and limited in numbers by an informal quota. The question of blacks did not arise because it was understood that they could not really benefit from a Yale education, preserved in pristine form for descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers such as the Biddles, Bundys, Harrimans, Whitneys, Binghams.<P class=StoryText align=justify>Yale began thinking about entering the modern world in the 1960s when the university convinced itself that the old New England families no longer had the capacity to run the global empire. President Kingman Brewster, himself a Boston "Brahmin", decided to remove certain privileges of his own class, upsetting the less intellectual sector such as the Bush family with its spoilt, alcoholic offspring, the boy George Junior.<P class=StoryText align=justify>We blacks were guinea pigs and expected to be looked at and poked by brilliant WASP classmates who asked a good old Jamaican boy, "Where you learn to talk such good English, Patrick?" (The answer cannot be printed in a family newspaper.)<P class=StoryText align=justify>To be very frank, I never found a racist classmate except an alcoholic South African who explained that my IQ was double his because of my "white blood". Having been exposed to a black person who was not a servant, my classmates declared me equal to them. But I had to take them aside and explain that they got into Yale because their parents owned the country while a poor Jamaican boy like me got in on ability. I was not equal to them but superior.<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=5 width=200 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD></TD></TR><TR><TD><SPA