I went to Harvard, which means I spent four years swaddled in the remnants of aristocracy. Before all that, for a couple of my elementary school years, my parents made little enough money that we lived in low-income housing at the Fresh Pond towers—at the end of the Red Line about 10 minutes from Harvard. That neighborhood was nothing like the ivy-covered colonials surrounding campus. Our car almost got stolen. I was one of two non-black girls in my fourth grade class.

The apartment buildings of Fresh Pond. I lived in the building at the far right. Credit: Rachel Ford James / Flickr

So I was keenly aware, unlike most of my college classmates, that Cambridge was experienced differently outside of the Harvard bubble. Absorbed as I was in that experience of college, I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. But I would have found many overlapping points had I bothered to trace the Cambridge of my childhood against the Cambridge of Harvard. It wasn’t until the summer after graduation—when I bought a bike and wandered from my usual footpaths—that I realized my elementary school was right across the street from a cluster of dorms called the Quad.

I actually attended two different elementary schools in Cambridge. In fourth grade, I went to Tobin, a minority-dominated school near our home with low test scores and uninvolved parents. My parents, being Chinese immigrants overly concerned about their child’s education, knew enough to work the system and have me transferred to Peabody. Peabody is the school next to Harvard’s campus; the average skin color was decidedly pale, and parents flocked to help with Halloween parties and the school production of Grease.

Racial segregation in Cambridge schools may not evoke the same political heat as in Boston across the river, but it existed and it exists still. In a 2010 Boston Magazine article, Jason Schwartz chronicled the school district’s efforts to close the minority achievement gap. (Incidentally, I first encountered it linked in another piece by Schwartz about Dzhokhar’s high school.) Cambridge opened new middle schools to address inequalities like this:

Kenneth Reeves…recalls watching a morning ceremony at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of the minority schools, and being unimpressed by the students’ canned, unsophisticated speeches. Later that day, he attended a graduation ceremony at the middle-class King Open School, where one student began his speech by saying, “As I ponder the plight of the Palestinians…” Reeves was floored. “You tell me if the eighth grader I saw in the morning is going to be competitive with Mr. Pondering the Palestinian,” he says. In fact, Chris Saheed, the principal of Cambridge Rindge and Latin, the town’s lone public high school, says that his teachers almost immediately can tell which elementary school an incoming ninth grader attended.

Academic achievement is only one manifestation of the cultural gap wrought by socioeconomic class. It’s hard to talk about race in America because the problems we attribute to race are so often problems of socioeconomic class. And while we can reject discrimination based on circumstances we cannot change, like skin color, erasing our class biases runs counter to the American dream. We can watch The Wire and acknowledge poverty’s cyclical nature. But a part of us—the optimistic part—would rather think of the few men and women who bootstrapped themselves out.

On May 18, 2009, a young black man was murdered in a Harvard dorm. The actual shots were fired in Kirkland House, but the botched burglary was planned and the murder weapon then hidden in Lowell—the residential house where I lived and god knows how few feet from my own room. Rumors, false, of more shootings rippled across campus as rumors do when violence shocks a community unused to it. Neither the victim nor the shooter turned out to be students, but the latter’s girlfriend was a senior in Lowell. Drugs were involved.

The incident prompted a discussion about how drug violence found its way into Harvard’s halls. But we had to study for finals. Then we dispersed for the summer. The shooting faded into memories of the previous school year.

I didn’t know Brittany Smith, the shooter’s girlfriend, though we almost certainly ate dozens, maybe hundreds, of meals in the same dining hall. She was two weeks shy of a Harvard diploma when the shooting happened. For her role in it, she was expelled and sentenced to three years in prison for accessory after the fact and other charges.

Lowell House dining hall, where I ate most of college. Credit: Steel Wool / Flickr

In making sense of all this, newspapers seized on Smith’s upbringing in Harlem. The common lament was that you could put a bright, overachieving kid in Harvard, but the specter of the streets never went away. She found more in common with her boyfriend, the eventual shooter and a young man also from Harlem, than the campus culture according to a Harvard Crimson article:

Smith’s Harvard classmate recalled that she often commented on the distinction between fellow black students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Smith would speak disdainfully of those from ritzier parts of New York City and would complain that Harvard students were insensitive to the struggles of blacks and ignorant of the realities of life in poverty.

Equating race with class is, unfortunately, statistically understandable. But at places like Harvard—far more racially than socioeconomically diverse—that’s where you get into trouble. I cannot pretend to speak for the experience of being black at Harvard, but here are some things that happened: In 2007, a black student event sparked calls to the police, in part, because their classmates didn’t think people in the group were actually Harvard students. And who can forget the Henry Louis Gates Jr. incident culminating in a White House beer summit. To the Harvard administration’s credit,the college’s traditional housing system was randomized because too many black students were choosing to live in the Quad houses. Segregation may decrease the number of contact points at the divide, but it increases the friction at these points until they rupture, like a fault.