He was the first in his family to go to any college, let alone a fancy college far from home in every sense. At Colgate it was a little harder to be a star athlete and star student at the same time. But once Watkins figured out how college life worked, how to develop either confidence or what passed for it, he did well enough. All this is pleasant but perfectly unremarkable, except that Mel Watkins is black. Even in this day and age, when Orlando Patterson of the Harvard sociology department can confidently write that ''by all objective measures .
Race is still the subject.
Watkins is black, thinks of himself as black and is perceived as black. His mother's father was Irish, his mother so light-skinned that she could have passed for white. His darker-skinned father had green eyes. There were American Indian ancestors in there somewhere, making Watkins a perfect example of how ludicrous it is in America to judge anyone on the basis of race. By most ''mean streets'' standards, he had an easy time of it.