Attempting to push early modern presentism to the radical, logical conclusion of a more personal historicism, this essay draws on a number of interpretive practices and theoretical insights--Stephen Greenblatt's self-reflectivity, Toni Morrison's "rememory," Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory," bell hooks's "passion of experience," and Linda Charnes's alternative historicism--to establish the ethical and interpretive significance of my own painful situatedness as an African American man in Renaissance/Early Modern studies. Specifically, I illustrate that significance in a reading of Richard Mulcaster's "Positions Concerning the Bringing Up of Children," a sixteenth-century educational treatise that responds, as I argue, to early modern educational access and social mobility with an insidiously complex, exclusionary admissions policy.