For the senior English course I teach called Literature, Culture, and Society, I ask students to write an autoethnography.

Before asking students to write their own narratives, I shared mine with the class.

Mr. McClellan’s autoethnography (title forthcoming!)

Writer’s statement:

It still feels strange for me to write a narrative set in San Quentin and focus so much on myself. A part of me still feels I am hijacking the story of the inmates I know who are working so hard at the truly hard work of rehabilitation. I am working on coming to terms with my race and class, and what I owe to those who have not enjoyed the privileges I have. With this piece, I hope to honestly explore how I have responded to some of the triggers DiAngelo outlines in “White Fragility.” As DiAngelo argues, I am far from the only white man to struggle with explicit discussion of my own racial identity, so I also write this piece for other white men, perhaps like my teammates in this program, who struggle to work towards authentic allyship. Finally, I end the piece ambiguously to reflect my incomplete progress. In the words of my friend Carlos, this writing is a part of my effort “to make [myself] into the right guy” to not only tell the stories of the men I meet in prison, but also to help reform society into one that they have a legitimate place in.

The first time I went to San Quentin, the first thing I noticed was how beautiful it was. A small village sits at the foot of the Richmond bridge, as the buzzing freeway traffic quickly gives way to a barely-there two-lane-10-mile-per-hour road. Small townhouses are packed in along a sweeping hill - just steep enough to give each an unobstructed view of the bay. Along the shore, canoes and rowboats are hauled up on the pebbled beach and rope swings hang just over the water line. Further down the road is a quaint post office. And just beyond that, the looming white stone facade of the oldest cell block, a guard tower or three with unseen riflemen, and the famous prison with its 4,000 or so inmates.

San Quentin is a place full of contradictions. Sitting on what might otherwise be some of the most valuable real estate in the Bay Area, it’s California’s oldest prison. It is the only prison in the state that offers college degree programs, but is 40 percent over its capacity. It has an inmate-produced newspaper and podcast, but the prisoners have no internet access. It has a Shakespeare company and puts on TED talks, but is home to California’s death row. It’s progressive, but it’s still a prison.

I was there for one of those progressive programs. San Quentin has a proud tradition of athletics, starting with a baseball program that began almost a century ago, and teams visiting to play inmates started in the 1990s. The basketball program had received a lot of press in recent years - the Warriors and Cavs each visited on off days during their most recent title runs - but the soccer program lagged behind. A friend of mine, hoping to revitalize it, recruited me to play.

It was easy enough to find the rest of the team in the parking lot - we had to wear all black, head to toe - the inmates wear blue, the guards green, and black is only allowed to outsiders visiting. We could carry a clear water bottle and our drivers license.

For this first game, I was the only teacher. I was joined by engineers, employees of giants like Google and Visa, management consultants, grad students, venture capitalists, and startup staffers with impenetrable job titles. One of my new teammates even rolled into the prison parking lot in his pristine new Tesla. Since I first moved to the Bay Area from New England nearly four years ago, I had taken great pains to put mental distance between me and the professions and industries my new teammates represented. I’m a humble teacher, I tell myself, not a shameless capitalist!

Entering San Quentin with this group gave the lie to this self image. All of us graduated from four-year colleges with selective admissions. Most of us have earned some kind of advanced degree (whether master’s, JD, MBA, or otherwise). Yes, I am guessing that as a teacher, I likely earn on the lower end of this group, but that is a far cry from the earnings of the men we were about to meet, as wages for prison labor are typically measured in cents per hour.

The last checkpoint before entering the prison proper involved receiving a giant, cold, gloopy UV stamp on our forearms reading, NO HOSTAGES. “You can come back out as long as you don’t sweat that off - or lose,” said the guard.

Just before walking down the final ramp taking us to the yard and our opponents, we realized that we needed a team name, because the San Quentin News would be covering the game. I suggested The Outsiders, a knowing nod to our status as privileged insiders, at home in the world outside these walls.

I remember very little about that first game. I didn’t even get a great view of the yard itself, as I did my best not to look conspicuous - as if that were possible in a gaggle of black-clad white and Asian men walking into a prison yard full of predominantly black and latino men wearing prison-issue whites and powder blues.

My first clear memory comes from the warmups, when I noticed the inmates hadn’t changed into cleats. This was obviously because they didn’t have any. With cleats, even my ancient, stiff, tattered pair leftover from my short and underwhelming high school career, we were at an enormous advantage. We’d be able to make quick cuts and take softer touches on the ball, while our opponents lunged and slipped in whatever cheap sneakers, work boots, or flip flops they could get from prison-approved vendors. As a metaphor for the privilege I walked into San Quentin with, my cleats were too on-the-nose even for my taste.

My other memory from that first game is of Carlos. Perhaps feeling a tinge a guilt about my advantageous footwear and, well, perhaps a bit tired from tracking the opposing winger up and down the field (the inmates have a lot of time to work out), I arrived late for a challenge near the sideline. My mark won the ball easily and deftly sent his teammate streaking downfield. From the bench behind me I heard the giddy shrieking, “You can’t go in soft like that!” I turned to see Carlos in full bloom: fully bearded, shirtless, Jolly Roger tattoed across his chest, eyes wide, and laughing at me.

After the game both teams congregated in a discussion circle, something that became a tradition after each game. A few leaders among the inmates spoke first, sharing some of their personal stories. Here I learned that Carlos had grown out his beard for a role in the upcoming San Quentin production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, that he recently gave a talk in the prison’s TEDx event, and that he was the gardener responsible for the carefully manicured flower beds ringing the chapels we passed on our way down to the yard. Carlos and others spoke earnestly about their crimes, their efforts to rehabilitate, and the sense of community this team brought them. As the subject shifted to the day’s game, many inmates spoke in the kinds of cliches that I might chide my students for using: On this field, I feel free for 90 minutes. The competition makes me forget about the walls around us.

In this context, these cliches felt like new truths with real power. What was it like to be forgotten by society? Their work of rehabilitation was lonely. These men didn’t have a parade of positive reinforcement. Even though they didn’t have internet access, they were well aware of the popular perceptions of prisoners like them; the same attitudes that led Californians to vote for the three-strikes law. They had limited contact with their family to provide love and encouragement. They told us that we were their connections to the outside world that gave them hope that they would one day be welcomed back into society. One inmate shared that these games gave him common ground to talk to his elementary-school-age son; on Sunday phone calls they could both share stories about their Saturday games in the park.

I wanted to share something in return, but I was at a loss. I found it impossible to mouth similar cliches - I looked forward to this all month. This experience makes all of the stresses in my life seem insignificant. - even though that’s exactly what the inmates craved.

Although I spoke with inmates every time I returned and grew close to many of them, it would be over a year before I shared anything in the postgame circle.

One detail I missed in my first visit - which later became painfully obvious - was the self-segregation in the yard. During the run of play in one game (we had procured a set of cleats for the inside team by this point), just after one of our attacks fizzled out and I tracked back anticipating a quick counter, I was surprised by a ghastly shrieking (an especially unsettling sound in a prison yard), soon joined by a deafening pounding of drums. A handwritten sign in the area said SAN QUENTIN POWWOW. It was a drum circle, of course. This was evidently a common enough occurence that it didn’t surprise my opponent; while I slipped up and listened to this sideshow, he never broke stride and eased by me.

In our postgame circles, when inmates spoke of the power of this game to bring men of different backgrounds together, they not only meant inmates and outsiders, but men of different races. The relative integration of the inmate soccer team was a rarity in the yard - the majority of the players were latino, but there were plenty of black and white men playing, too, as well as the occasional Asian and pacific islander. In comparison, the basketball teams were almost entirely black (the defacto captain of the soccer team, Cancun, was usually the lone latino player in games I’d seen) and the baseball team predominantly white.

As I walked out of the yard that day with my teammates, I noticed that the drum circle wasn’t the only racially organized space. The area around the basketball courts was full of almost entirely black men, latinos gathered by the punching bags and pull-up bars, and a small group of white guys hung out near the ramp we took out of the yard. The spot in the yard that was the most integrated was centrally located: the tables where men of all - or at least, several - races played checkers, chess, and allegedly, Dungeons and Dragons.

Why hadn’t I noticed this segregation before?

When I asked some inmates about what I saw, they explained that this segregation was intentional on the part of the inmates. My immediate reaction was revulsion - these men needed all of the support they could get. Every man involved in the soccer program spoke so highly of the community built through it, and how central that was to his rehabilitation. Why would they willfully cut off so many? At worst this seemed to be openly admitting to racism.

Upon reflection, my revulsion seems hypocritical. I have lived in, and benefitted from, intentional segregation for my whole life. As a child, I never would have used the word “segregated” to describe my hometown, but the word describes it well. Throughout my schooling, my town’s population never fell below 93 percent white. When students in my high school began the question, “what are you,” they often finished it with, “Irish or Roman Catholic?”

Whether I like to admit it or not, I, too, am part of a group that systematically chooses to segregate itself: my hometown’s racial makeup is a legacy of the white flight from Boston out to the suburbs in search of racial comfort in a new segregated white community. White suburbs like the one I grew up in consolidated wealth through exclusionary housing and lending practices, using that wealth to pay for elite schools, sending white students like me off to their choice of selective colleges and prestigious careers. My elite education has allowed me total freedom of movement. In 2016, coming out of my graduate program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, I took a job across the country, teaching in San Jose’s East Side Union school district. There, every student I taught was a student of color, and about 85 percent were latinx. I imagined this as a progressive move, using the advantages I had gained through systemic racism to support students who had been harmed by it. On top of the daily planning, teaching, and grading, I was exhausted by efforts to reform the school’s punitive and racially coded dress code (no hoodies!). Students came to me seeking counsel about their mental health and fears that their neighborhoods would be raided by ICE - fears that turned out to be well founded after that fall’s presidential election.

By the end of the year I felt burned out, so I left San Jose to come here to Mountain View, but my students remained. Wasn’t I reenacting white flight?

San Quentin’s walls obviously limit the inmates’ freedom of movement. Most have never been outside the prison since they arrived. A few prison jobs bring them outside: work at the neighboring sewage treatment facility or holding the line in fights to contain wildfires. Even when they are released from San Quentin, their access to the world will still be limited. They will face the onerous requirements of parole and probation, the difficulty finding secure housing without any savings, and the ludicrous gauntlet of job seeking with a felony conviction and years long void on a resume, if they have one at all.

Given this distance between my experience of the world and that of the inmates, I have struggled with the question of how to be a true white ally. As I wrestle with this question, I continue to return to San Quentin.

The last time I went into San Quentin, I gave a ride to Ted, a first-time player, another white man, who happens to be pursuing his MFA in documentary film at Stanford. On the car ride up, he described a previous documentary short he made about a woman who had recently been released from prison, and her struggles to stay clean and free. When I asked him whether he’d consider making a film about our soccer program, and the inmates I’ve come to know well, he said that he felt guilty that he made that woman’s story seem trite, and didn’t want to make a similar mistake at San Quentin.

In the postgame circle that afternoon, Ted described his work, and the eyes of Carlos lit up. As we walked slowly out of the yard, Carlos pitched Ted on making his dissertation film on our soccer program. Carlos knew the full media approval process, explained the likely timeline - four months until cameras in the door, which would give Ted just enough time to get his film together before his planned June graduation. Ted responded with reluctance, saying, “Your story is really one worth telling, but I’m not sure I’m the right guy to tell it.”

Carlos didn’t miss a beat with his response: “Who cares? You have to make yourself into the right guy.”