A Member of the Club
Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World
Chapter One Invisible Man
Why This Harvard-Trained LawyerWent Undercover as a Busboy at anAll-White Connecticut Country Club
I drive up the winding lane past a long stone wall and beneath an archway of sixty-foot maples. At one bend of the drive, a freshly clipped lawn and a trail of yellow daffodils slope gently up to the four-pillared portico of a white Georgian colonial. The building's six huge chimneys, the two wings with slate gray shutters, and the white-brick facade loom over a luxuriant golf course. Before me stands the one-hundred-year-old Greenwich Country Club--the country club--in the affluent, patrician, and very white town of Greenwich, Connecticut, where there are eight clubs for fifty-nine thousand people.
I'm a thirty-year-old corporate lawyer at a Midtown Manhattan firm, and I make $105,000 a year. I'm a graduate of Princeton University (1983) and Harvard Law School (1988), and I've written ten nonfiction books. Although these might seem like impressive credentials, they're not the ones that brought me here. Quite ... read full excerpt from A Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World ebook
