As I have mentioned here before, when I was in second grade, my friends and I invented a gang for ourselves. We had a name, insignia, military-style ranks and command structure — the works. It is the sort of thing little boys do. What we did not have, and desperately needed, was an enemy.
But ours was a pretty small neighborhood, and a friendly one. There was no enemy to be had. So we invented one, filling its leadership ranks with imaginatively devious personalities and giving it an elaborate backstory. We spent many hours tracking our enemy, and we were always (necessarily) just a step behind them. If we came across a broken bottle or a crushed soda can in the street, its significance would immediately be explored and expanded upon: Which one of our rivals drank Shasta Tiki Orange Mango?
In the third grade, things were a little different. This was the 1970s, not very long in real terms after the order came down to desegregate the public schools. Progressives then, like progressives now, were remarkably crude thinkers. There were not very many black residents in my West Texas town, and though my understanding is that the schools had not been legally segregated, some of them were effectively segregated, because the city was segregated de facto if not de jure. There were a couple of dozen public schools in the district, and five were either all-white or all-black.
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