Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jennifer Foote Sweeney was a correspondent in the Los Angeles and London bureaus of Newsweek, a national writer for Newhouse News Service, and a reporter for metropolitan newspapers before becoming editor of Life at Salon.com. She lives in northern California with her husband and two daughters.

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Life As We Know It

Washington Square Press

From: Pluses and Minuses

THE COLOR OF LOVE

Erin Aubry Kaplan

Two years ago, if anyone had asked, I would have said that I would probably never marry. I had nothing against the institution, but by my middle thirties I had come to believe that the marriage I'd always imagined might never happen. I didn't find this tragic; I found it liberating. Not getting married meant absolution from a number of entanglements I could do without -- a deadwood relationship, compromised living space, the halfhearted internal debate about whether to have babies. While I embraced the idea of marriage, I embraced solitude in equal measure. I found a certain elation in the prospect of a future in which I could allow my emotions and shoe-buying impulses to run free. At age thirty-seven, my desire for freedom seemed to have neatly trumped my yearning for anything, or anyone, else. And that was fine with me.

In this rare state of contentment, I met Alan Kaplan, who was forty-three and in a state of extreme discontent. We met at his house on a Sunday afternoon, though he didn't want to meet me at all, let alone on a weekend. He was a white public high school teacher who had become the epicenter of a racially charged controversy at his campus. Because I am a journalist with a particular interest in matters of racial justice, I had been enlisted by an irate group of black parents at the school, and subsequently by my paper, to do a story about it.

According to the parents pushing the story, Kaplan was guilty of racial impertinence. (These parents hoped that, as a black woman, I would be sympathetic to their viewpoint.) They said he was intellectually arrogant in a white-privilege sort of way, eager to overwhelm his black students' frail sense of self-esteem by, among other things, extending the discussion of slavery to issues of latter-day segregation in his classroom. Kaplan insisted that the system failed black and white students alike, and asked his students to confront the racial achievement gap in his classroom and to question why teachers have different sets of expectations for black and white students.

The parents felt that identifying latter-day segregation was not his business or his purview. According to them, Kaplan's insistence that he was only trying to do the right thing was merely a cover for the fact that he was improperly fixated on race -- he had issued himself a street-gang name, K-Dawg, and even dated black women. "You know the type," the leader of the parent group said meaningfully, and a bit wearily.

I did. This also was not the first I'd heard of Kaplan or his exploits: my younger sister, Heather, had been his student in the 1980s and had complained regularly about his intransigence. Many of her complaints, I vaguely recalled, had to do with race. Heather's an attorney now, and when I asked her whether she thought Kaplan had been racist, she argued vehemently with herself for about ten minutes before giving something of an answer.

"He was harder on black students than on other students," she said. "He definitely had issues about race, and he wasn't always diplomatic about expressing them. And he'd get mad with me because he felt I was squandering my potential, not living up to myself. I don't think that was racist per se."

I thought of all this as I rang Kaplan's doorbell one Sunday in April. Yet I was more than willing to get his side of the story. I was also intrigued: What sort of white man would keep pushing the racial envelope in this day and age? He was either exceedingly honest or exceedingly boorish, or both. In spite of everything, I had liked his voice on the phone when we talked to arrange this visit -- rough-edged, with the nearly unconscious authority of a veteran teacher, but younger than I had expected.

He didn't bother to hide his uncertainty. "I must tell you, I'm very reticent about seeing you," he said, already sounding regretful. I gave him my usual pledge of open-mindedness and then said we had to meet right away, as I was on deadline. Sunday, at his place? I heard a startled silence and prayed I hadn't pushed too far -- without him, there wasn't much of a story. "All right," he said. "Do you take cream in your coffee?"

It turned out to be the powdered stuff, which I don't really like but took because he gave it to me. I sat on the floor of his tiny living room because he had no coffee table, and I preferred the floor as a writing surface. Kaplan was dressed in jeans and an old T-shirt. He had the resigned look of a man headed for the gallows. He was nothing like the odd, obsessive recluse I'd imagined, the sort who would erect a wall of racial self-righteousness around himself and loudly proclaim himself to be K-Dawg. Instead, he had tousled brown hair, a graying goatee, and sad eyes that nonetheless burned bright and curious: he wanted to see exactly how his death would unfold.

I stayed at Kaplan's house for nearly five hours. Talking to him was terribly easy. He had a native charm that was rooted not in assurance but in attentiveness and honesty, even as he detailed the ugliest moments in his ongoing battles with nervous parents and administrators who objected to his teaching style and his determination to impart the hard lessons of race in American history. (As for the moniker K-Dawg, he said one student had given it to him as a kind of joke, because despite being very familiar with racial issues, Kaplan was as unhip -- and un-hip-hop -- as they come.)

He sat on the floor opposite me and offered more powdered cream, and I said yes. Nearly three hours into our interview, he asked if I was hungry. Did I want dinner? It was my turn to hesitate and his turn to look abashed, afraid that he had overstepped his boundaries. "Dinner?" I asked, pretending to mull it over. "That'd be good."

He gave me a place setting, salad, and lasagna that he'd heated up in a microwave. He didn't eat because he didn't have any more, I learned later. I also learned that 364 days out of the year, Kaplan, a quintessential bachelor, never had anything to eat in the house. His refrigerator typically contained nothing more than a couple of jugs of ice water and a pack of batteries; he used the stove so infrequently that he'd had it turned off several months before my visit.

We sat at his dining table, and the climate between us shifted as the sun shifted and day lengthened into early night. He leaned forward on the table with his hands clasped tightly together, as if in prayer or anticipation. I noted that he smelled faintly woodsy, that he wore a diving watch and no other jewelry, that the fluorescent light above the table revealed his eyes to be perhaps more green than brown.

He cocked his head, furrowed his brow in mock gravity, and asked me about myself: How did I get started as a writer? How was my sister doing? Did I work out? "Nice arms," he said, as decidedly as he had said anything all day. He didn't look abashed now. I thanked him, feeling inexplicably delighted, because I didn't work out at all and knew somehow that he knew that.

As a reporter, I was somewhat used to this kind of intimate rapport. He was trying to save his skin, and I must say I have always been prone to falling in love with my subjects -- for an hour, or a day or two at most -- taking the prolonged conversations and forced intimacy to heart before writing a story that either favors them or does not, and then filing it all away in my professional memory.

I welcomed such encounters because they stood in -- briefly -- for genuine love and connection. I could believe what I wanted about my subjects...