“I loved the enormous highways, how they lifted us and then gently set us down,” Akhil Sharma writes, about a road trip to Disney World.
When I was in college, all I really wanted was to be a white guy. I didn’t want to be a sophisticated or important white guy. I thought the whole point of being white was to be able to slip into the background. Also, my tastes naturally drift toward the mass market. I once announced to a friend that what I was most looking forward to was the next Paula Abdul album and the next James Bond movie.
During spring break of our sophomore year, in 1990, Peter and I decided to drive from New Jersey to Disney World. We did this not out of some ironic feeling for Disney and what Disney represents but because we wanted to ride Space Mountain. We went in my gray Honda Civic, and the journey was immediately wonderful. This was the first time that either Peter or I had struck out into America. Many years later, I read “On the Road” and realized that our drive had triggered the same ecstatic response in me as the one that Kerouac describes. I loved the enormous highways, how they lifted us and then gently set us down.
My experience has been that even public places in America are segregated. Nonwhites tend to cluster in certain sections of the beach. Many restaurants are frequented primarily by people of one race. But the lines at Disney World were like no public spaces that I had ever been in before, in that there were white and Black and Asian and Hispanic people standing next to one another. Most of Peter’s and my time was spent in these lines.
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