It's 1992. Your hair is gelled up, you're sporting high-tops and maybe still listening to Run DMC on cassette.
That's the setting for Sam Graham-Felsen's Green, a new coming-of-age novel that's also a look at race in America. It follows a friendship between two adolescent boys in Boston — one black and one white.
"The narrator is a 12-year-old boy named Dave Greenfeld," Graham-Felsen says. "... He's one of only three white kids in his entire middle school, and the last thing he wants is to also stand out for being Jewish. So he sort of gives himself a nickname, Green."
Interview Highlights
On the thing Green describes as "the force"
So the first time Dave sort of comes up with this concept, he's watching the news on the day of — or one of the days — of the LA riots, and there's a particular moment during the LA riots where a guy named Reginald Denny, who was a trucker, was stopped at an intersection where there was a lot of rioting going on. He was pulled out of his truck and beaten, and he was a white guy and presumably targeted because of that. And Dave sees this on TV and he finds himself — even though he grew up in a very progressive household — he finds himself sort of rooting for this white trucker. And he feels kind of ashamed and embarrassed of it. And he says that what comes over him is something called "the force."
The force is kind of this amorphous thing that intrudes on various aspects of life, and Dave is slowly starting to wake up and realize that the origins of the force are some pretty serious things, like institutional racism.
On being the chief blogger for Obama's 2008 campaign and how it informed the book
I was helping to further the message of hope and change, and I really felt hopeful that an Obama victory would signal a sea change in America and would bring about real racial progress. I never thought we would turn into a post-racial country overnight, but when I saw the, sort of, enormity and swiftness of the backlash against Obama from the Tea Party, it really gave me pause.
I had the kind of idea [for the book] in my head as I was working on the Obama campaign, and then after the campaign I sort of felt more of a sense of urgency. I wanted to explore, you know, why is racism such an intractable problem in this country? And I realized, hey, you know, I have this fairly unique experience as a white kid who went to mostly black schools growing up, and maybe if I dive as deep as possible into my own past, I can kind of understand what happened to me better, and maybe a little bit better about what happened to my city, and even my country.
On political similarities between the 1990s and today
This book is set in 1992, and I felt like the early '90s in some ways feel so similar to our current moment. There was the explosive incident of the LA riots, which followed the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King brutally on videotape. And you know, we're seeing echoes of incidents like that all the time right now. There was a presidential election that was very racialized, where Bill Clinton famously threw rappers, including Sister Souljah, under the bus in order to appeal to the white working class. And obviously we had a highly racialized presidential election this time around as well. So I mean in some ways it was disheartening to deep dive into the '90s and to see kind of how much things have stayed the same, but there's also a lot of sort of cultural fusion going on, you know, through hip-hop, through the comedy scene. And that kind of cultural mixing gives me hope that the country just very, very slowly is trying to figure out how we can actually not just live together, but thrive together.
Sophia Schmidt and Ed McNulty produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Sydnee Monday and Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.
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