High Price (23 page)

I worked a second job as an attendant at the gym on base, and played for the air force basketball team with games every Friday night and Saturday morning and practice daily after work. I took six to nine credits from the University of Maryland, which offered the courses on base, per semester. I also played on two British basketball teams: the Swindon Rackers and Swindon Bullets. My life was highly structured and all of this kept me extremely tired most of the time.

Nonetheless, professors began to take notice of my mind. Their reinforcement helped encourage me further. Not only was I being inspired by my teachers; I was also showing both them and myself that I could contribute academically.

Taking the required literature courses, I began to understand poetry and to see the hidden meaning in the allusions and references that had previously been obscured for me by dated language and unusual words. I read Auden and Shakespeare, and dove into the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown. It was thrilling to be able to comprehend, value, and, most important, analyze for myself what intellectuals did. I felt pride in being seen as smart and capable by people who had been immersed in academia. It was as though I’d broken some kind of secret code and could now enter a world that I’d never even really known existed before. When I wasn’t exhausted, I felt exhilarated.

England was where I started not just enrolling in college courses, but enjoying them; where I wasn’t just doing the work because it had to be done but because I liked learning and wanted to know more and was good at it. I’d had brief moments like that in math as a child. I’d caught a few more glimpses of this possibility in Japan. But all of that was nothing compared to my ability in Great Britain to completely immerse myself in schoolwork. My instructors began to see a spark in me and this gave me more and more motivation, building my confidence.

I was still profoundly ignorant about the mainstream world, however. I still didn’t know anything about the multitude of careers that mathematical talent could open up for me. I’d probably never met a scientist or a statistician or a mathematician. I’d no idea how heavily science relies on math and I couldn’t yet conceive of myself pursuing a career as any type of scholar.

In fact, I was so lacking in the mainstream form of what academics call “cultural capital”—the kind accumulated in the United States by growing up in the white middle or upper class—that I made some mistakes that I now cringe to think about. Cultural capital is the knowledge of the way a culture—whether it is the culture of an institution, the culture of a country or community, or the culture of a social class—really operates. It’s knowing the things that “everyone knows” in that class or place and the things that everyone automatically assumes that other people know.

For example, in my neighborhood back home, I was extremely high in cultural capital. There, people with cultural capital knew which employers were most likely to hire black people, where to get the best deals on food and clothing, which neighborhoods were “ours” and which were not, as well as who ran numbers and who had the best hookups for stolen goods. I knew the things that people of high status there should know, the things that kept me on top.

But in a middle-class neighborhood, cultural capital tends to include knowing things like which colleges are in the Ivy League and why that matters, in addition to the specifics of who has status, who does drugs, and where the best stores and restaurants are. The lack of relevant cultural capital is one of the things that maintains the sharp separation between people living in entrenched poverty and the mainstream. For instance, it allows some shady for-profit colleges and “institutes,” which don’t offer respected degrees—and sometimes don’t even teach needed skills—to prey on the poor. When I was in Japan, in fact, I almost enrolled in one such “distance learning” program (these are conducted as online programs today), which was eventually shut down. Poor people often don’t have the type of cultural capital that would let them know that these schools are seen as less than reputable by employers and by those who do have such cultural info.

Here’s how little I knew about academia before I began my career. One of the concentrations offered by the University of Maryland on air force bases in Europe was “women’s studies.” I figured I was a natural for that. I certainly wanted to understand women and had spent much of my life trying to figure out how to get them to do what I wanted. While I might have gotten quite an education if I had ended up studying Angela Davis, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Steinem, my idea of “women’s studies” and their ideas were not exactly similar. I had never even heard of feminism, let alone the black variant called womanism.

Although I can look back on this now and laugh, the results of lack of mainstream social capital are often not nearly as benign. Ignorance feels shameful; attempts to hide it can prevent learning and perpetuate the problem. When you publicly illustrate that you don’t know what “everyone” knows, it can be intensely embarrassing. Many of the difficulties faced by people who try to move from the hood into the mainstream involve the lack of these types of knowledge, which marks them as outsiders and can lead to repeated humiliating experiences.

Though I ultimately discovered that women’s studies did not contain the type of information I’d sought before I took classes in it, I was still naive enough to believe that psychology, instead, might hold the secret to understanding and manipulating women. The Psych 101 class I took consisted largely of Freudian ideas and I thought it was amazing that people could get paid to think up ideas about our minds and behavior like that. I figured I could do it just as well. I decided that I would study psychology and it would be useful for both my potential career working with black youth and for my personal life. My relationship with Anne, my classes, and the air force itself helped me start to accumulate mainstream cultural capital.

Indeed, one of my professors, a black woman named Shirley Bacote, soon taught me something very practical that helped change my life. Like many of the black airmen with backgrounds like mine, I sent money home to my family, whenever I could. It was expected, even obligatory. From the outside, doing this looks commendable and altruistic: helping the folks back home who don’t have the opportunities that you do.

But it can also be a trap, keeping you from investing in your own future. Shirley lectured about how black people don’t trust themselves enough to really invest in themselves. She wasn’t speaking directly to me when she said these things; she was teaching a small sociology course on race and class in America that had enrolled only one black man and a few sisters. However, I took her words to heart. I know that she must have known that most of us felt obligated to do this.

She explained that, while it was important to help your family and others in need, spending on your own education must come first. At school, you know you are developing marketable skills and that the money you spend there is working toward creating a better future. Back home, there will always be ongoing need. Invest in yourselves, she advised: that’s the most sound way to invest in your family in the long run. Because unless you do that, you won’t be able to advance enough to truly have the security to help effectively.

That stuck with me. I’d been contributing to supporting my family since I was twelve and started getting paid under the table. It had always bothered me, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on exactly why. I knew that my teenage jobs hadn’t been like middle-class kids’ summer jobs, to provide a little spending money for the kid and maybe a lesson in responsibility. Instead, I actually helped put food on the table.

If my sisters and I hadn’t worked, there would have been many times when we would have had little in our kitchen cabinets or refrigerator. Without our childhood jobs, a difficult situation would have been even more difficult. It had never occurred to me that this wasn’t the way family life was supposed to work. Parents were supposed to support their children, financially and emotionally, not the other way around, at least during childhood. I hadn’t recognized how profoundly poverty and race had shaped my life until I’d left the country. I could see the way racism marred America much more clearly now.

For me, home was indeed where the hatred was, not just literally but in all the ways Gil Scott-Heron implied symbolically in his lament written from the perspective of a black heroin addict. The man in the song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” is trying without success to use drugs to relieve his pain, pain so severe that he’s considering never going home again. Listening to this song, I began to understand why someone might be driven to that sort of escape; to empathize in ways that I had not been able to do when I’d smoked marijuana and found the alteration in consciousness disorienting rather than liberating.

I still held conventional views about drugs as destroyers of life, however—and I would continue for years to come to buy into the idea that crack cocaine was the main thing that was devastating my neighborhood and other black communities back home. But I was also beginning to be able to see from multiple perspectives and to recognize more complexity than I’d earlier admitted. In this light, Gil Scott-Heron’s own later problems with cocaine were only more tragic for me.

The public perception of his personal relationship with drugs and his songs about them unfortunately perpetuated myths about certain types of drug use. Because his own use appeared to be so pathological—and it seemed to have such a visible negative impact on him later in life—it played right into the stereotypes that use always leads to devastating addiction and that drug use by black people is the real source of our problems. Many of his antidrug songs recapitulated this conventional wisdom, without the penetrating analysis he usually brought to political issues.

While I listened then, though, I didn’t yet recognize this. I saw drugs as being in opposition to black consciousness, as an obstacle. Fighting against drugs, listening to Scott-Heron’s antidrug songs, and sharing them with others was a way to fight oppression. It was a way to show that you were righteous. I didn’t see then that the way we fought drugs actually made our oppression worse. I viewed the drugs as the problem, not our ideology around them or our treatment and law enforcement policies.

In fact, when I was home on leave in 1987, I became utterly convinced that crack cocaine was the cause of everything that I now saw as wrong with the neighborhood. I didn’t realize it then, but I had reframed in my mind many things I’d seen around me. At the time, I was making the same mistakes in thinking that our leaders were. For example, I began to think that violence, the presence of guns in the hood, and the willingness of people I knew to use them were all caused by drugs. I left out the pieces—like my own family’s experiences with domestic violence and parental absence and my personal experiences with gun crimes—that didn’t fit.

I’d always looked up to my brothers-in-law and the rest of the older guys in our DJ group, seeing them as the baddest brothers in the world. But when I was back home, I started to hear them decry “these kids today.” They said crack was turning nice girls into “chicken-head hos” and driving ordinary boys to “thugs, ready to cap a muthafucka.” They couldn’t stop talking about the lawlessness of the younger brothers coming up.

Of course, they’d schooled me themselves in all the nuances of respect and disrespect when I was younger. They’d trained me in the southern culture of honor that doesn’t allow even the slightest dis, like a stepped-on shoe or dirty look, to go unchallenged. It wasn’t like we hadn’t ourselves carried guns and, in some cases, even used them to avenge incidents that outsiders would surely have characterized as trivial or even crazy.

Indeed, in the early 1980s, one of my brothers-in-law himself had been arrested after his bright-colored vehicle was used in a shooting: two people had been killed in the drive-by incident. No one was convicted for the crime because the shooter remains unidentified—but the chain of events that led up to the killings had begun when someone stepped on someone else’s shoes. No drugs were involved.

The motives of young men who engage in these types of potentially fatal interactions over slights to honor are frequently portrayed as irrational overreactions. But these types of altercations that seem to have such petty origins are by far the leading motivation for deadly violence—contributing to significantly more crimes than the pharmacological effects of drugs. In their influential study of homicides in Detroit, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson concluded that the young men involved, far from being irrational, “may be acting as shrewd calculators of the probable costs and benefits of alternative courses of actions.”
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This is how the calculation might be made. Before taking action to avenge a slight to honor, there are risks including the loss of reputation and status from being labeled a coward that must be considered. Conversely, possible benefits include impressing women and other men, resulting in an increased chance at both long-term survival and successful reproduction.

Potential costs of acts of revenge themselves, of course, include death, injury, or prison. But Daly and Wilson found that only about 10 percent of those involved who survived were ultimately convicted of a more serious crime than manslaughter, because the courts recognized that they were acting in self-defense. This means that they tended to serve little prison time. As a result, we can’t conclude that such people are acting without considering the consequences: many of the risks were visible to them. And we can also observe that such crimes take place overwhelmingly among young men who have little to lose, with few resources and limited future prospects. This type of behavior had characterized male youth in my neighborhood long before crack cocaine was even invented.

Now, though, my brothers-in-law and the rest of the Bionic DJs claimed today’s young men were different. It was all about crack. These kids had no code at all: “They’d just as soon smoke you as look at you. Shit done changed,” they were saying. According to the oldheads, the “new” cocaine business meant that young bloods no longer followed any rules about respect. From hearing all this, I began to believe that crack really had changed things. The hot sound of rap, now ubiquitous, with its conflicted, ambiguous relationship to drugs—often glorifying slingers and hustlers, sometimes claiming to simply report what was “real,” other times trying to scare brothers straight—also made it all feel new.