High Price

virtually all of your time. That week, it was his turn to host.
    At one point during the party, he took me aside and said he wanted to show me something. We walked upstairs to his bedroom, where he pulled out a big-ass .44 Magnum, with a long barrel. It was obvious that what he was really doing was trying to demonstrate dominance and masculinity. So I played along.
    I oohed and aahed as he described the technical features of the gun and some of his adventures shooting. I said, “Wow, that’s a cool-ass gun.”
    Then I added, deadpan: “But when you come to my place, I gotta show you my Uzi.”
    His jaw dropped. His neck turned bright red. He had no idea how to respond. He couldn’t tell that I was simply one-upping him: his ideas about blacks were such that he believed it perfectly plausible that I kept an Uzi in my grad school apartment. So I just said, “Yeah, man, remind me next time and I’ll show you my Uzi,” and went back to the party. He knew I’d trumped him. Because he wasn’t sure whether I actually was crazy enough to have an Uzi, he backed off in his antagonistic interactions with me since I’d shown him that I couldn’t easily be played.
    But that was just a taste of what I faced as I worked to complete my master’s degree in psychology in preparation for getting my PhD. And a racial incident on campus soon spurred me to my first experience with real activism.
    T he event that set things off wasn’t especially egregious. The campus newspaper, the Branding Iron , had run a naive, literally sophomoric essay claiming that affirmative action isn’t effective and that black students are given an unfair advantage, to the detriment of whites. Few would have objected to the mere publication of the piece: college is a place for people to explore ideas and make arguments and free speech means that some offensive and inappropriate material will invariably result. The real problem occurred because the paper, which usually ran counterpoint articles, did not do so in this case.
    A group of athletes and a few other black and Latino students came to me for advice about how best to respond. By this point, I was pretty well known among them at the university, since I spent time at the multicultural center, I attended as many athletic events as I could in support of the teams, and most of the black athletes had taken my Drugs and Behavior course. We ultimately agreed that what we wanted was the opportunity to publish a reply—and I figured that this would be easy to get and that would be that.
    But when I met the student editor of the paper, he flat out refused. Unexpectedly, the interaction became adversarial. He declared that it was his paper and no one could tell him what to print. At that point, I went to the university president and described the situation, asking him to reason with the newspaper editor. He met with us and then with the editor, who wouldn’t back down. In an attempt to mediate, the president offered us three hundred dollars to pay for a full-page ad on the back of the paper, where the students could place any statement they wanted to make.
    Although this solution did not provide an equivalent editorial reply, simply a convenient commercial one, I told him that we’d take the money. We ran an ad calling for a boycott of the paper and describing the entire series of events. In the ad, we also said we had the support of the university president and the psychology department, although we hadn’t actually gotten permission from the president or the department to state this in the ad.
    All of this got people’s attention, particularly in sleepy Wyoming. At the same time, we discovered that the Branding Iron ’s budget was supported by students’ fees, including ours. Yet there were no students of color on the paper’s staff. And when we said we were going to peacefully occupy the administration’s offices, the story got even bigger. Now the local papers, the local television stations, even National Public Radio picked up on it. Soon I was meeting with the governor, who was a Democrat, and being asked by Democratic Party leaders if I could represent the state at some meeting related to student leadership.
    Along the way, we also had the usual activist struggles over strategy and leadership, and when I began speaking out on race-related issues, my relationship with some of the white folks around me changed. This made me more suspicious and distrustful than usual. Jim Rose gave me one