Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach

administrative black box. The steps sloped down for days, giving the building a distant, unapproachable aura, as if to say
the road to knowledge is long, laborious, and gradual,
or
each one you climb represents a grand you owe us for your education,sucker.
The steps bottomed into an open plaza, flanked by giant granite fountains. Outreach to the heavily encroached-upon community took its best-financed form on these few hundred square feet: biannual free concerts featuring mainstream bohemian rap acts and second-string alternative-rock bands, overseen by tripled security but open to neighborhood residents if they somehow managed to find out about them. Milking the college cash cow by rote, the performers usually kicked lackluster forty-minute sets in fulfillment of their contracts and bounced, forty thousand dollars richer and muttering about lame college audiences. The only exception had been when the Events Committee unwittingly booked the Boot Camp Clik, a camouflage-rocking bevy of lyrical gunclappers from Brooklyn. Macon had caught the concert as a high-school junior on the requisite college-road-trip-with-the-parents. It had influenced his choice of school as much as anything.
    Half of Bucktown had journeyed uptown for the concert, and a sixteenth had made it past the rapidly retripled security in time to see the spot get blown. Grimy, reconstructed drums had boom-clacked through the rarefied air, gotten even non-heads nodding, and the next thing Macon knew, Boot Camp’s five-foot microphone don Buckshot was rocking his verse from atop an eight-foot vibrating speaker:
How the fuck did money climb up there and
how come I ain’t see it?
Macon had snapped a flick of Buckshot’s cornrowed head sandwiched between the engraved names of Plato and Sophocles, etched into the stone above the columns on Butler Library across the plaza.
    After Plato and Sophocles came Herodotus, Aristotle, and three or four more Western Thought All-Stars. As Macon had found out that weekend, Columbia shepherded all incoming students through two years of comprehensive Western literature and philosophy courses, the cornerstone of the famed Core Curriculum despite being taught largely by underqualified and overtired grad students while the actual professors labored over their forthcoming books in the well-heeled privacy of Riverside Drive faculty apartments. The courses, intended to allow young scholars to drop cocktail party references to Adam Smith’s economic theory and jest fraternally about Aristophanes’ sex comedies, bonded the university community by ensuring that all Columbia graduates forgot the same things.
    Andre and Macon turned left onto a cobbled pathway and headed toward the high black iron gates that announced the street entrances and allowed Columbia to shut out interlopers and imprison residents in times of trouble, i.e., the student uprisings of the 1960s and more recently the ethnic studies protests of 1996. The University, as the administration was called, exercised a subtle yet totalitarian control over its population, low-key enough to convince naive students that threatening to sit in Hamilton Hall until they were allowed to study the contributions of people of color to American life might catalyze a conversation with the administration. Instead, the stunt prompted a call to the police, a series of arrests and unfavorable editorials, a tacit backpedaling compromise to drop the charges and develop a research committee, and finally the quiet dissolution of said committee once the attentions of the media had waned and the angriest students had left for the summer, graduated, or found girlfriends.
    Andre and Macon passed through the gates and into Morningside Heights, a neighborhood semantically divorced from Harlem, rechristened to convince jumpy suburban parents that their children didn’t live in the Capital of Black America and would be as safe at college as they had been at their prep schools. It was a virtual bubble of