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The Slave Race



Jeff Wells has a great personal anecdote in his latest piece about his relationship with a bully as a kid:

One week, he got it in his head that I was his “slave.” To win my freedom, he said, I needed to beat him in a race. One contest a day was held at recess to see if I could be a free boy again. The first time I beat him I was thrilled, until he told me nuh ah - that was just practice. Darn it! When I beat him again, he said I’d merely earned X number of points; I needed Y to be free. Crap, this is harder than I’d thought…. And I kept competing, because I wanted my freedom, and because every time he moved the goalposts I felt more like a slave.

I’d like to say I woke up one day and told him to go to Hell, but I didn’t. The episode just petered out as he found some other child to torment. It wasn’t until later that I realized how much a party I’d been to my own enslavement by simply accepting the base premise.

Here’s a link to the full article.







1 Reader Responses

  1. alistair Says:
    July 30th, 2005 at 7:12 pm

    great story. i have to say that the day i beat richard jackson so bad the teachers were crying was the day my freedom began. i was 8. dear richard had bullied me, for what seemed to a child, as an eternity. he banged my head off a fence and put a hole in in it that i can still feel today. i wanted to take him dowm for months…..until one day he took my concorde pin. the supersonic aeroplane. it was the final straw and so i grabbed him and kept punching until the teachers pulled me off. the underlying premise was that i was concerned about was that he was the big kid. well that day he was the shocked, humiliated kid with a cut lip and two black eyes that he had to wear to school for weeks afterward……….and i was free.



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