The caste system in our society starts pretty early—in my case, in elementary school. Amongst the Jewish parents in the ass-end, blue-collar section of Brooklyn where I was spawned, education was seen as the way Out—"out" being defined as becoming a college-educated professional and fleeing to the suburbs to die a slow death of wife, kids, mortgage, and two-hour daily commutes to Manhattan. As soon as I was old enough to talk, I was trained to answer "a doctor," in response to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and, to the question, "And who do you want to marry?": "A white, Jewish girl." Eugenics is best accomplished at as early an age as possible.

In response to the local parents' demands that their booster rockets to genetic immortality have the best of everything, the local elementary school instituted what was referred to as the "gifted and special" program for all the kids who had tested above a certain level on the most sophisticated IQ test you can give five-year-olds—or whose parents had the connections to get them in. Since my father, out of excessive concern for my future, had become a member of the local school board (a fact that doomed my social life before it even began), this last group included me. As a result, I, a kid who had barely learned to wipe his own ass by second grade, got to participate in the "enriched" program, where we did special projects on dinosaurs and had Mrs. Batz come in Tuesdays to teach us creative writing, and got one Friday a month off while our teachers went to the district office to be trained in how not to screw up all the budding young geniuses. Needless to say, all the kids in the "gifted and special" program where white—that is, until the end of fifth grade.

There's an excellent history of school integration in my neighborhood written by a guy named Jonathan Rieder and titled, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism. Basically, it's a case history of what George Carlin called the NIMBY principle: A few years before I was born, all the good Roosevelt Democrats in my community had turned into Klansmen when the NYC school system suggested putting switchblade-carrying, marijuana-smoking, premarital-sex-having Negroes in with THEIR KIDS at the local high school. In fact, they resented it so much that there were near-riots over the issue. I didn't know this past history at the time, though. All I knew was that there were two new kids in my class. The thing that was strange to me wasn't that they were black, though—kids can be trained in racism, but it takes a while to take hold. No, the weird thing was that they were wearing suits and ties.

In retrospect, Johnny and Dale deserved to be in the "gifted and special program" far, far more than about seventy-five percent of my classmates. For starters, they were actually intelligent. Knowing as I do know about Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Pride movements, it's now apparent that their parents had gone through hell and high water to get them their well-deserved places with the rest of us Gifted and Special Children—and here I was, the bucked-toothed little retard who wandered around the schoolyard alone at lunchtime pretending to be a secret agent, and who had apparently gotten in by sheer force of my father's political connections. Their dislike for me was immediate, obvious, and well-merited. This wasn't anything unusual: Nobody really liked me, and I got beat up on a pretty regular basis, usually by kids who weren't "gifted and special." I just thought it was unusual that their dislike was so vehement.

Because we were so damn gifted and special, the school administration decided that they would try an experiment on us in sixth grade. In emulation of the junior high school we would be attending next year, we would be splitting our day between the rooms of two teachers. The first teacher was Mrs. Leiber, who did her best to get us away from the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy and instill us with her love of classical music (which resulted in the fact that I now can not stand anything orchestral later than Beethoven, with the possible exceptions of Gershwin, Copland, and Menotti). The second was Mr. Osterweil, an elegant homosexual gentleman who had taken it as his personal mission to introduce us Canarsie savages to art, culture, and East Coast liberalism as espoused by the New York Times. On the last day of fifth grade, we were called into the gym, where the new plan was explained to us, along with our new responsibilities. I didn't have any questions during their little talk, but I did approach Mr. Osterweil with one concern afterwards.

"Just don't sit me with them. I don't get along with those guys," I informed him, pointing at Johnny and Dale. I felt entirely justified at the time—after all, in my 10-year-old mind, THEY had started it. To Mr. Osterweil (who was entirely cognizant of the early-'70s desegregation issue, even if I wasn't), the message was clear: The school board member's son didn't want to sit with the niggers.

Kids aren't naturally racist—they pick it up from their environment. In my case, it was from a young lifetime of my friends' parents' jokes that began, "black guy walks into a bar. . ." and my great-grandmother's admonitions to "watch out for the shvartzes on the bus." No one told me about the Civil Rights movement, and the only people I knew had been slaves were the Jews, who, I was told every Passover, had worked for Pharaoh in Egypt until set free to go to Israel and thence to Russia, where they were oppressed by Cossacks. It was only later that I was able to put my childhood experiences in context. With cognizance of the difference between good and evil, however, also came shame. While my early bigotry was innocent, it haunts me to this day.

Ironically, despite several firebombs and threats made against real-estate agents, Canarsie itself is now entirely West Indian: When I was in college, a few hard-working, upwardly-mobile families from the Islands made incursions into the neighborhood. Real estate prices promptly plummeted, prompting all the Jews and Italians to move to The Island. (For a real estate agent to take advantage of the phenomenon, buying houses cheap off white people to sell them dearly to black people, is called "blockbusting," and, even though it epitomizes the Free Market that our dear President Bush so advocates, it is quite illegal—but, oddly, no one was prosecuted for it in Canarsie.)

I have no idea what happened to Johnny and Dale after we graduated from elementary school. They didn't go to junior high with us, and, frankly, I don't blame them, considering what the environment was like. Hopefully, they got into a good private school and went to Princeton to do graduate work with Cornel West, or maybe became lawyers and work for the ACLU. I can only wish them the best, and hope that if they ever come across the essay, that they know that they have my gratitude. After all, even if they didn't mean to, they provided me with my first encounter with endemic racism. Unfortunately, it was my own.

But I do thank them for it. It's only with self-knowledge that change is possible.