What would "Shorty" do?

1958 Gustavus grad Bill "Shorty" Patterson was the first black basketball player in school history. He was drafted by the Minneapolis Lakers in the 10th round, making him one of six former Gusties to get drafted.

I got two complaints for this post in less than 24 hours. Did I overstate things after my two examples? Was I too callous with my delivery? Since something as controversial as race tends to be a little tricky to navigate — especially when it's hard to convey tone in text — let me try to lay out what I was referring to in a little more detail.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor once said that she became "truly aware of my Latina identity" when she attended Princeton, a predominantly white university. Michelle Obama's senior thesis conveyed the exact same thing in regards to her "blackness" at the Ivy League school. If you think those same ideas don't translate to Gustavus, you're kidding yourself.

My freshman floor had exactly one minority on it, and he may have been the only one in the entire building. That same person, Alaskan track star Jerry Washington, was then the only person of color on my floor as a sophomore — unless you count the life-sized cardboard cutout of himself he had propped up in his room. Talk about being on an island.

Jerry also happened to be my CF (or RA, as most schools call them). However, he lost his CF responsibilities when he attended a track meet without finding a sub to cover his floor one weekend late in the year. Campus housing held an emergency meeting to breathlessly inform us that Jerry's departure was not racially motivated. It was the most absurd thing I've ever been a part of — no one had even whispered such a idea — but the dynamics demanded the extra attention.

(For what it's worth, my floor was 100% WASPs as a junior...with one crazy Euro who made his own techno music.)

I can recall five minorities on campus during my four years at Gustavus — Washington (football/track), Ryan Hoag (football/track/celebrity), Stephen Stock (football/military), Fru Ngwa (soccer) and a Carlton something-or-other who got cut from the basketball team. That's it. Were there more? Absolutely...but these days you can match, or beat, what I remember just by meeting the basketball cheerleaders. That rise in minority numbers is a good thing, unequivocally, and it's a change the school seems to have actively pursued. Making standardized testing optional has only helped their cause in that respect.

The problems with courting a more diverse student population shouldn't be any big surprise: opportunity, money and ambition. It's no secret that many (all?) inner-city high schools present challenges different than their suburban, mostly-white counterparts. My sister and a former roommate have taught in such conditions; drugs, gang relations and pregnancies are more pressing concerns than the Pythagorean theorem or learning the capitol of all 50 states.

Like the Fresh Prince song, I grew up on the sketchy side of Rochester. The house was small, the nearby park was the hub of high school drug traffic and I wasn't allowed to cross the "busy" street in the other direction for many years. Yet we were the affluent member of the area to many.

In elementary school, I was the lone caucasian allowed to play in a schoolyard game of basketball with the Asian crew (shoutout to Chanou See and Eric Bountai!); hooping to a boombox blaring Naughty By Nature's "O.P.P." was interesting, to say the least. It was also during this time that I was introduced to Julius Young, Oeun Iem, Carlton Fogan and the Redd twins, Raymond and Richard. Since my dad always coached my basketball teams growing up, we often packed our van and learned their quirks on road trips. Julius was our loquacious Lil Penny, a distant relative of Anfernee Hardaway. Oeun would buy comic books before every road trip and sketch in silence the whole ride, until he got the giggles. The Redds were funny, passionate people...and Raymond was unstoppable in 1v1 on an 8-foot hoop.

One has since passed in a drunk driving accident (Julius), while another is happily married with a couple kids (Oeun). The other three have been in and out of jail for the past few years. Fogan has been brought up on numerous weapons charges in the last few years, including an incident where he was shot in the leg in 2008. Money was always tight for these guys and the family situation has been less than stable; I can recall being uneasy going to the Redd's front door, hearing their mom screaming at the boys through an open window. None of them were involved in athletics by their senior year of high school. The thought of them paying for a standardized test or scrounging up a cool 40k to attend a private college is especially ludicrous.

Then again, why would they want to? The thought of living in a bubble on a hill — which is essentially what Gustavus is — is not appealing to everyone. When that insulated setting includes only a handful of people who look like you, it becomes a rather curious decision. Yet many make it work, and the eye test tells me that number continues to rise. I applaud those students for their perseverance. I expect Bill "Shorty" Patterson, the first black basketball player in Gustavus history, would join me in that salute.