The kid in the Javelin was more circumspect than many of the other students I knew that the school. He doubted the existence of a loving God, for instance, and eschewed membership in any of the rigid cliques among the students. I looked up to him, as he seemed so free compared to me and many of my classmates.
Leave a CommentAuthor: Patrick Dobson
Dr. Patrick Dobson is a work in progress until his termination. In the meantime, He is a writer, scholar, postman, and college professor living in Kansas City, MO.
The University of Nebraska Press published his travel memoirs, Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer in 2015 and Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains in 2009. Canoeing the Great Plains won the 2016 High Plains Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. His essays and poems have been published in New Letters, daCunha, Kansas City Star, Garo, Wood Coin, and JONAHmagazine, and others.
Dobson earned a doctorate in American History and Literature at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2013. He has edited books, taught journalism, and been a union ironworker. He now teaches American History, Modern Latin American History, and Western Civilization at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS.
He looks forward to hearing from you soon.
Having been a sensitive, empathetic boy, I was prone to all sorts of daydreams and flights of mind and spirit. At grade school and high school, I was clumsy, half-hearted in athletic pursuit, and didn’t have a great deal of rapport with the other kids in my neighborhood, who could be cruel and vindictive.
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Around the time of the Cub Scout incident in Blenheim Park, a boy by the name of Raymond began to attend my grade school. As I remember him, Raymond was a tall, stout kid whose bubbly personality endeared him to teachers and students alike. He carried an afro pick in his back pocket.
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As I deliver mail day to day, I think about American active and structural racism. It’s hard not to, given my past in the soup pot. My route runs through a suburban neighborhood activated and motivated by race. Except for one Black American woman and an African immigrant married to a white man, there are no Blacks or Black Americans on my daily rounds.
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Race dominates the American mind. Even when we aren’t thinking about it, we are living every day in a steeply racialized nation. Not to think about race in America is the privilege of someone who lives and moves in the majority. I argue that, in this way, we are thinking about it even when we are not.
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