Don’t Touch My Hair? A True 60s Morality Tale

The following story is true, except for name changes. My only artistic contribution is my selection of the facts, and some possible memory failures. It seems to have a moral of some sort, but I don’t think any two people would agree as to what that moral is.

“ Michael“ was a black guy who lived in my college dorm a few rooms down from me. I think we were friends, although I’ve been told by several authors on Medium that no white person actually has any black friends. I did feel there was something a bit off about him, but I don’t think my feelings had anything to do with his blackness. He was just socially inept, often telling labored jokes that weren’t funny, and trailing off in embarrassment when he saw no one was laughing. But almost all my friends were socially inept, because most people thought there was something off about me, and they were probably right. Michael was a nerd, but all my friends had always been nerds, because those were the only people who would be friends with a nerd like me. That didn’t stop me from being uncomfortably aware of their nerdiness. Michael probably felt the same ambivalence about me. We were very different in many ways. Michael had a full scholarship to major in math. I was a word nerd, majoring in history, soon to switch to philosophy. I used too many words that my classmates didn’t understand, which earned me the abusive epithet “the vocabulary kid”. I was terrible at math, and he didn’t like my polysyllables any more than anyone else. So perhaps we were friends more or less by default…