From roughly ages eight to eighteen, I had understood my people to mean black people. There was little reason not to. We had in my corner of Oak Cliff something close to what sociologists call institutional completeness: The condition of a group within a larger society where the major institutions—economy, politics, family, schooling—are reproduced, thus enabling the smaller group to have little social connection with the larger group. In practice this meant that the teachers were black, the bank tellers were black, the tax man and the trash man and the mailwoman were black, and even (until
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