Class of 2002

The Class of 2002 is the Yale cohort through which Rob Peace’s undergraduate years acquire a shared social and historical identity. Its members arrive at Yale believing that college can remake them, yet the class also exposes how differently that blank slate operates across race and class. For Rob, the cohort becomes a place of friendship, performance, racial self-definition, academic ambition, marijuana dealing, and unresolved attachment to Newark. Its celebratory name, “Class of Oh-Deuce,” carries genuine pride, but the group’s experience also reveals the limits of Yale’s promise of reinvention.

Formation and the Yale Beginning

The Class of 2002 begins with the arrival of the fall 1998 freshman class, when roughly twelve hundred teenagers enter Yale amid nervousness, independence, ambition, confusion, and bravado. Students scramble to choose classes, join extracurricular organizations, and establish social lives that they assume will furnish the memories of a future reunion. The opening weeks create an apparently universal opportunity: nobody knows what anyone else was like in high school, and each student can present a newly chosen identity as an athlete, intellectual, humorist, leader, partier, stoner, or debater.

That freedom is not equally available to everyone. White students largely move among fraternity houses, bars, quad parties, and other familiar social spaces, while Black students must first situate themselves within their own race. The process is described as complicated, conflicting, silent, and largely invisible to white classmates, many of whom treat Black culture as monolithic. The famous “black tables” in the dining halls therefore function differently for those seated there and for those watching from outside: they can be places of filial recognition among students from varied backgrounds, including the West Coast, the Caribbean, and Brooklyn, while also becoming signs through which Yale’s racial divisions are reproduced.

The Class of Oh-Deuce

The Black students of the cohort call themselves the “Class of Oh-Deuce,” turning the graduating year into a shared expression of vitality and pride. At dance parties, one student may call out “Oh-WHAT?” and the others answer “Oh-DEUCE!” repeatedly. The chant creates a temporary collective voice inside a university whose social world otherwise encourages students to sort themselves into separate racial and class-coded spaces.

Rob participates in this culture through his friendships and through the Af-Am House. Jeff Hobbs, his roommate, attends dances where Rob’s friends teach him how to move, call him “Da Jeff,” and draw him into their performances. Jeff recognizes that his presence carries an element of disingenuousness, since he is a white student welcomed partly as a benign joke, yet he also finds the atmosphere easier than the social affect expected among more preppy classmates. The Class of Oh-Deuce thus offers both genuine fellowship and a reminder that belonging can remain conditional, theatrical, and racially marked.

Rob Peace Within the Cohort

Rob’s place in the Class of 2002 is shaped by the distance between his achievement and his origins. At St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, his academic and athletic record had already made him exceptional: he was third in his class with a 3.97 grade-point average, among the top ten butterflyers in New Jersey, a math tutor, and a student accepted by Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. Charles Cawley’s offer to cover his college expenses through a blank personal check made Yale financially possible, while Friar Edwin Leahy told Rob that accepting the benefactor’s unusual offer was a responsibility he had to earn.

At Yale, however, Rob does not simply leave Newark behind. He studies molecular biophysics and biochemistry, joins the Yale University water polo team, and works within the demanding academic and athletic culture of the university. At the same time, marijuana becomes a bridge between the world he came from and the world he has entered. He becomes a regular presence at the Weed Shack, a two-story house on Temple Street near campus, where Sherman Feerick and others smoke, sell marijuana, and criticize Yale’s wealth, privilege, and social conventions. Sherman, another person connected to Newark beyond Newark itself, directs some business toward Rob and teaches him how to avoid the university’s attention.

The Class of 2002 therefore surrounds a contradiction. Rob is a Yale student whose education promises social mobility, but he is also selling marijuana to fellow students and using the profits to address expenses that Charles Cawley’s tuition payments do not cover, including books and laboratory equipment. His classmates may see reinvention as a matter of personal choice; Rob must manage several identities at once. He is an accomplished scientist in training, an athlete, a roommate and friend, a Newark son, and a dealer whose activities remain hidden from much of the campus.

Memory, Class, and Continuing Ties

The cohort’s shared identity is built around the expectation that college experiences will later become stories told at reunions: remembered adventures compressed into the question of what the students once did together. For Rob, that future-oriented social memory exists alongside a past that cannot be made anecdotal. His father’s imprisonment remains central to his understanding of justice, race, and family, even while most of his Yale acquaintances know little about it.

During his year in the Elihu Society, Rob delivers a four-hour biography that overturns the society’s expectations. Rather than speaking briefly about his mother or about racism at Yale, he recounts his father’s life, the Pierson Street fire, the apartment on Chestnut Street, the murder trial, prison visits, the successful appeal and its reversal, and his continuing letters to appellate judges. The Class of 2002 is thus not merely a backdrop for Rob’s academic success; it is the cohort within which he performs and revises the story of who he is. Yale gives him an audience capable of hearing the account, but the account itself insists that his identity cannot be reduced to the categories through which the university recognizes him.

The class also becomes part of the social network through which Rob’s Yale identity later circulates. After graduation, people in East Orange still refer to him by his middle name, Shawn Peace, while his Yale education gives him symbolic authority in the proposed Peace Realty venture. Tavarus argues that lenders will have to listen because Shawn Peace went to Yale, even though his airport job may raise questions. The degree functions as cultural and symbolic capital in one setting, but Rob’s Yale identity can also be dangerous in the drug economy. He conceals it from suppliers and presents himself as a desperate, struggling, not-too-bright hustler, using Carl as a beard to make that performance credible.

After Graduation and Retrospective Meaning

The Class of 2002 represents a transition rather than a completed escape. Rob graduates from Yale with the education, networks, and reputation that should open further institutional routes, but he does not fill out graduate-school applications because he is absorbed in real-estate research. His study of Newark and the Oranges convinces him that local property investment is difficult: taxes are rising, tenants struggle to provide deposits and pay rent on time, lenders are suspicious, and profit margins are thin. He turns instead toward Ohio, where he sees modest homes, stable working families, and manufacturing-based communities that resemble the Newark of an earlier era.

The trajectory is marked by further reversals. Rob later works at an airport, refuses a post-accident drug test, rejects the first of three union appeals, and is fired after supervisors confront him. His Yale credential remains a source of credibility for Peace Realty, yet it does not protect him from employment instability or from the pressures of the drug economy. When Rob asks Tavarus and Curtis for three days to repair the situation created by Kamar, his real-estate vision passes through the same tense social world as his criminal enterprise. The promise of the Class of 2002 has become inseparable from the circumstances the degree never erased.

The cohort’s significance is therefore double. It records a moment when Rob and his classmates believe that anyone can become anyone else, but it also reveals the unequal histories carried into that moment. For many students, Yale’s blank slate is a temporary experiment in self-invention. For Rob, it is a contested surface over which Newark, family loyalty, race, poverty, academic distinction, and criminal stigma continue to write themselves. The Class of 2002 names the community that witnessed his most visible ascent, while its story also makes clear that graduation could not by itself reconcile the worlds he had learned to inhabit.