Put another way: There’s a certain kind of white person I like to tell about my first real kiss. It was with a classmate in the seventh grade who was black. Awww, isn’t that great, I can almost see the listener thinking. Then I tell the rest of it. The next day, three girls cornered me out behind one of the portable classrooms at the edge of the school grounds. They were black. Their leader was a girl who’d been the boy’s best friend since childhood and felt that she should have been first in line to get that kiss. Her two friends had held my arms while she gave me a pretty good beatdown.

And that’s all I say. Usually, it’s clear that the listener wants there to be more: some throat-clearing rhetoric about how I understand the social tensions that led to et cetera cetera cetera, or maybe that the girl and I had become friends later in high school. When I don’t say anything like that, sometimes people look uncomfortable, like I’ve said something racist, though they can’t identify exactly what it is.

The truth is that the girl and I didn’t become friends, but by a year later, if either of us thought about the incident at all, we remembered it as just girls fighting over a boy. It could have happened between two black girls or two white girls, but it hadn’t. The difference between the way middle-class educated people thought about race and the way people like me lived it was like the difference between what was in surgical textbooks and what happened in an Army field hospital.

When I say that the only thing that made those early years bearable was my cousin CJ, though, I don’t mean that he knew everybody at school and introduced me around, easing my way into social success.