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consciousness. To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.

POWER
RACE: A power construct of collected or merged difference that lives socially.
    W E PULLED INTO the parking lot, looking for signs of life. But the daily life of the school had ended hours ago. It was pushing four o’clock on that warm April day in 1990, on Long Island, New York.
    The car was parked and I could see the unease in my parents’ faces as they freed themselves from their seatbelts. Maybe they were just trying to wrap their heads around making this thirty-minute drive out to Long Island twice a day, every weekday, year after year—on top of their hour-long job commutes to Manhattan. I sensed their discomfort and felt my own. Nerves about changing schools. Wishing P.S. 251 went past second grade. Feeling sick being so far from home in this foreign neighborhood. My seven-year-old feelings were roiling.
    Several public elementary schools resided within walking distance of my house in Queens Village. But Black New Yorkers with the wherewithal to do it were separating their children from poor Black children in poor Black neighborhoods, just likeWhite New Yorkers were separating their children from Black children. The dueling consciousness of White parents did not mind spending more money on housing in order to send their kids to White public schools—and keep them away from the purportedly bad schools and bad children. The dueling consciousness ofBlack parents did not mind paying for private Black schools to keep their children away from those same public schools and children.
    A Black woman greeted us at the front door of Grace Lutheran School. She had been waiting. She was the school’s third-grade teacher, and after a quick greeting, she took us down a corridor. Classrooms stood on both sides, but I fixated on the class photos outside the rooms: all those adult White faces and young Black faces looking back at us. We occasionally peeked inside nicely decorated classrooms. No sounds. No students. No teachers. Just footsteps.
    She took us to her third-grade classroom, a long throw from the entrance. We could see the materials laid out for a science project, the details of which she explained to us. I couldn’t care less about raising chicks. Then she took us over to a round table and asked if we had any questions. Sitting down, my mother asked a question about the curriculum. I did not care much about that, either. I started looking more intently around the classroom. A pause in the discussion caught my attention—Dad had just asked about the racial makeup of the student body. Majority Black. I took note. My mind drifted away again, this time wandering around the classroom and around the school, trying to imagine the students and teachers, remembering those pictures in the hallway. A pause caught my attention again. A question popped out of me.
    “Are you the only Black teacher?”
    “Yes, but—”
    I cut her off. “Why are you the only Black teacher?”
    Puzzled, she looked away at my parents. My parents exchanged curious looks. I kept staring at the teacher, wondering why she was looking at my parents. Ma ended the awkward silence. “He has been reading biographies of Black leaders.”
    Ma was talking about the critically acclaimed Junior Black Americans of Achievement series, promoted by Coretta Scott King. Dad had bought a stack of these biographies, towering over one hundred now. Martin Luther King Jr. Frederick Douglass. Mary McLeod Bethune. Richard Allen. Ida B. Wells. Dad kept urging me to pull from the tower for every writing project.
    These gripping biographies were as exciting to me as new video games on my Sega Genesis. Once I started reading, I could not stop.