Pet peeves and the benevolent slave owner

Banned Histories of Race in America

Normally, this is the space where I write exclusively about the banned histories of race in America, but his week I decided to tweak things just a little. This week the subjects are one small personal pet peeve and one big historical trend, both involving the condemnation to repeat those histories of which we are ignorant.

So, first, the pet peeve.

I think I was eleven years old when I took the Presidential Physical Fitness Test. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and his particular brand of masculinity was something my gym teacher adored. And so, when I—a skinny band geek who looked barely strong enough to carry his trombone—somehow set the class pull-up record with nine, he didn’t know what to do. He looked like he was trying to figure out how I cheated.

He clearly couldn’t see that no one was more surprised than me! I thought for sure that I was going to just hang there on that bar in front of my class and grunt and groan and maybe even squeak just long enough for my fingers to give out and maybe inspire my classmates to give me a new mean nickname.