Of Grits, Lox, and the SAT
By: Tim Wise
Tags: Justice, Equality, Education, Politics, Testing

Although it has grown quite a bit over the past few decades, in the mid-1980s, Tulsa, Oklahoma was a much sleepier place.

In some ways, it reminded me of my hometown, Nashville: hot and ever-prayerful, with churches dotting the landscape and defining much of the community’s culture. In the case of Tulsa, that hegemonic Christianity was capped off by a 60-foot pair of bronze, praying hands outside Oral Roberts University’s “City of Faith,” a medical center built by the televangelist founder of the college, according to legend, after a 900-foot tall Jesus commanded him to do so.

No regular hospital, the center blended faith healing with medicine, operating under the impression that cancer would yield as readily to the power of heavenly entreaties as it might to chemo and radiation.

Which turns out not to be true, and which might help explain why the facility went bankrupt and closed a few years later. For those wondering, the 30-ton praying hands were then moved to the main campus of Oral Roberts University, a place where students must take pledges not to lie, curse, drink, smoke or engage in sexual activity, and where, therefore, a little divine intervention might well be needed.

In any event, it was the summer of 1986, the first time I visited Tulsa for the National Forensics League’s national high school speech and debate tournament.

On or about the second day in the city, three of us from Nashville and one debater from New York went across the street from our hotel to a Waffle House for breakfast. Although Waffle House was nothing particularly special for us, coming from the south, where it has long been a destination for hash browns cooked more ways than there are stars in our galaxy, for the New Yorker, it seemed more of a cultural revelation.

I can’t recall what Robert, Todd or I ordered, though I am sure it involved one or another style of the above-mentioned shredded potatoes, grease, and the requisite amount of toast needed to soak it up.

But I recall quite clearly what David ordered because he did it with such excitement, like a kid receiving a new puppy. He didn’t even need to read the menu. He had known what he wanted as soon as he walked in, and minutes later, enthusiastically looking up at the waitress, he ordered it in a manner befitting something from a Woody Allen film:

“I would like a grit, please.”

That would be grit, singular.

As in, just one grit, because having never had them before, how can one know if one will like them enough to desire grits, plural? Better to start slow and see what happens.

The moment was good for a laugh, and even David seemed to appreciate the humor of it once his culinary error was explained.

There was no shame in his not knowing what grits were, just as there would be no shame in a kid from Yazoo, Mississippi lacking familiarity with lox and bagels or any of several other things that Jewish kids in New York, like David, have grown up with for generations.

The experience was a reminder that what we know — what any of us know — is a function of that to which we have been exposed. It says nothing about our capacity for learning. It is merely an indicator of what we know at a particular moment in time.