Authors: Carl Hart
High Price (28 page)
Melissa and I had broken up in part because we no longer shared the same values. What I once saw as her happy-go-lucky and carefree spontaneity began to seem like irresponsibility. As I got more serious about my career, I wanted someone similar. That was part of what attracted me to Terri, the ambitious business major whose parents were not exactly thrilled by our relationship.
By my last semester when I graduated, I learned that I was on the dean’s list: no more Cs. I could hardly believe it. After getting the good news, I went to a nearby playground with Terri. She was a diligent and organized student and I thought she was extremely intelligent. I also saw that she put a lot of effort into her own schoolwork.
As we sat on some swings, Terri told me, “You’ve got it. You can do whatever you want in terms of education.” She looked me in the eyes to be sure I took it in. I knew she was going places herself. For her to say that about me really meant something. It was the first time I believed I could actually get my PhD. But before I could attend graduate school, I still had some deficiencies to remedy.
Soon I found myself spending twelve hours at a stretch in the lab, at least five times a week. Rob began to teach me to operate on the brains of the rats we were studying. After I got over my initial fear and disgust, I found that I was good at it. Soon I was basically doing brain surgery with ease, using a surgical suite that looked like it was set up for tiny dolls.
My undergraduate work also came at a time of tremendous excitement in neuroscience. That, too, inspired me, at times when my motivation began to flag. In 1990, as I mentioned earlier, Congress and President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be the decade of the brain, calling for greater national focus on neuroscience to accompany the increased funding the field was receiving. It seemed like important new discoveries were being made every day. We thought we would soon find answers to the deepest and most difficult questions about thought, desire, and action, questions that had challenged the greatest human minds for centuries. I was studying the heart of the system that was said to provide pleasure and drive desire, a specific dopamine network in the center of the brain. We figured we were close to understanding how it worked.
I felt like I was really learning something, that this knowledge was important and vital. If we could understand dopamine, we would decipher desire and unlock addiction. The science itself was intoxicating. With enthusiastic encouragement from Rob, Don, and Jim, I was soon on my way to graduate school. The black kid who’d once been in the trailer for the learning disabled, whom his high school had relegated to business math and parking patrol class, was now on his way to a doctorate. I could now see a clear way out of the maze.
Equal Rights
—
WYOMING STATE MOTTO
I
t was a cold night in Wyoming, not the worst kind, where your face numbs in even a brief exposure, but still a stunning chill that a Floridian has no words to describe and no preparation to cope with. MH and my sister Brenda had braved the late-winter weather for a visit; I was then working on my graduate studies at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Snow was everywhere. As the writer John Edgar Wideman observed in his book
Brothers and Keepers
, it snowed so much in Wyoming that it could make a grown man cry.
I’d earlier driven my mom and sister through the sleepy little town where I lived and then brought them to campus. I wanted to show them my lab. On most winter evenings, the campus was dark and desolate: most of the students and faculty quite sensibly did not linger outside. I started to select the right keys from a ring I carried and prepared to let them in. But MH was hesitant to go any further.
Despite the freezing temperature and our desire to get in out of the cold, I could see reluctance in her eyes. Her thickest winter coat offered little protection—but she was more frightened of entering the building than she was of the elements. She thought we’d get in trouble, possibly be arrested. Even though I had my own set of keys and had told her I worked there day and night, she remained concerned. Part of her still didn’t believe that a black man could legitimately enter a university building at night and that her son was actually a graduate student who spent many long evenings doing scientific research in this alien place.
The moment stuck with me as a vivid demonstration of how my family and I had internalized racist tropes about “knowing our place.” At this point, Brenda worked for Delta Air Lines as a reservations agent and her travel privileges were what allowed them to afford the visit. Like me, Brenda was starting to achieve some success in mainstream America, but every gain was hard-won and required ongoing struggle. We’d all had years of conditioning suggesting that a black person would not be accepted without suspicion in such a situation; the insidious nature of these unconscious cues shaping our feelings and behavior was crystallized in that moment for me.
My family had given me all the help that they could, but without the emotional and academic support of my mentors, girlfriends, and friends, I would never have been able to survive the transition to graduate school and ultimately get my doctorate. The social skills I’d learned in childhood had allowed me to get to this place; I’d need them more than ever to succeed here. No one—let alone someone from my background—could thrive here on their own.
As I’d advanced in my career, I had moved into environments that were progressively less black. Wyoming was the whitest. Both in terms of the wintry physical surroundings and the overwhelming sea of white faces on campus, it had the least color of anywhere I’d ever been. In fact, my time in the air force in England turned out to be the last time I worked in a genuinely integrated environment. As my scientific career moved forward, the number of black peers around me dwindled until frequently I was the only black person in the room. When I got my PhD in 1996, in fact, I was the only black man in America to receive a doctorate in neuroscience that year.
While Wyoming was blindingly white, however, its whiteness was different in character from that of UNC-Wilmington. There the campus had an overwhelming white majority in spite of being surrounded by a large black community and I experienced more overt hostility toward people who looked like me. In places like North Carolina and even New York, stereotypes about black people were often reinforced by what people saw around them: in Wilmington, for example, I’d often be the only black student doing research and involved in research-related functions, and most of the blacks on campus worked in low-level or service jobs, not academic or administrative positions. As I noted earlier, this is why many black Wilmingtonians referred to the university as UNC-White. Back east, white people saw blacks and maybe thought about rappers, poor people, or even criminals: their initial perceptions certainly weren’t of students, let alone scientists.
But here in Wyoming, the large white majority simply reflected the actual population. And any blacks who were on campus were typically stars: they were athletes or outstanding students; they had no other reason to be in remote Wyoming. There were so few blacks that other people saw us almost as celebrities, and that seemed to allow them to consider us more as individuals and less through the lens of negative group stereotype.
Indeed, when I first visited the Laramie campus in early 1992, the man who would become my graduate mentor took me to a college basketball game. “That is probably the most black people you will see in one place, right down on that floor,” Charles Ksir told me, indicating the players. We were surrounded by thousands of cheering white faces, some painted in the Cowboys’ awful signature colors of yellow and brown. The crowd was enthusiastic. On a campus of around fifteen thousand people, there were probably a few dozen blacks, most of them members of the basketball or football teams.
Ksir, whom I would soon come to call Charlie, had been Rob Hakan’s mentor during graduate school. Rob had encouraged me to apply to study with him at Wyoming and follow in his academic footsteps. As it turned out, it was the only graduate program in psychology and neuroscience to which I was admitted. While my grades were good and my lab work was stellar, my scores on the test typically used to determine graduate school admissions, the GRE, were abysmal—particularly on the verbal part. And I’d achieved the score I did only with lots of help.
Though it may not sound like it now because I’ve worked so hard on vocabulary, back in college I still didn’t know as many words as were expected of someone seeking a PhD. My lack of exposure to mainstream language in early life was another obstacle I had to overcome. Rob had bought me word books and quizzed me on lists of new words about once a week. Jim had also helped expand my language skills. But I hadn’t advanced enough by the time I took the GRE to have overcome the severe deficit with which I’d started, at least as far as could be measured on that standardized test. Unlike richer students faced with lower-than-desired test scores, I couldn’t afford prep courses. I had to rely on my mentors and friends.
And Charlie immediately made me feel welcome in Wyoming. Soon he became one of the key nodes in the new social support network I built that enabled me to get my PhD. Charlie was a professor of psychology and was studying the effects of nicotine on dopamine at the time. When I visited, it was February, the deepest trough of winter. I walked past the booth set up to celebrate Black History Month—and noticed that its attendants were white people. I’d never seen that before; there was simply no black student available to do the job.
Charlie gave me a complete tour. As we walked through the campus bookstore, he pointed to a book that was prominently displayed, called
Black Robes, White Justice
. It was the autobiography of Judge Bruce McMarion Wright. He asked if I’d read it. I hadn’t, but I did know that Judge Wright was better known in New York as “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce” for what the police and prosecutors saw as his lenient sentencing decisions. He was black and a prominent civil libertarian. Charlie used the book to start a conversation that let me know he had thought deeply about how race plays out in the United States and that his knowledge and intellectual interests extended beyond neuroscience.
This was important to me because I knew people would expect more from me than they would from a white person in the same position. For example, I would be expected to know something about why there were so few black neuroscientists or something about how to address the “drug problem” in black communities. The conversation with Charlie suggested that he knew this as well, and that was encouraging and reassuring.
During our walk and later back in his office, we talked frankly about race and justice in America. This was a topic that the white folks with whom I’d interacted back in North Carolina had always studiously avoided. And when it did come up, even my well-intended white mentors would often say things about how I should shape my attitude to be sure I was able to best take advantage of the opportunities I had. They never acknowledged how awful or disturbing it was that I continually had to confront the dilemma or that the fundamental problem was the racism, not my response to it. This made it feel like it was my own personal issue and it was an ongoing irritant.
In contrast, Charlie started by putting it all on the table. In essence he said, “It’s there, I see it and I’m white, and it’s not something wrong with you.” He talked about his youth in Berkeley, California, during the days of the Black Muslims and how it was oh so easy to talk the correct liberal talk. But actually participating and working with others to try to do something about it: now, that was something else entirely. Charlie had engaged in repeated discussions with Black Muslims and had been called a “blue-eyed devil” for his efforts; he knew how to deal with racial and political conflict up close and personal.
I decided right then that, if accepted, I’d attend graduate school at Wyoming, and Charlie became my most important mentor there. I knew I could learn from him since he was so willing to be straightforward, rather than dodging unmentionable tensions or assumptions or dismissing the prevalence of racism itself. And so, when I did receive my acceptance letter in April 1992, I was eager to attend.
Indeed, in order to take Rob’s advice about outworking those who might have other advantages, I decided to get an early start. Charlie hired me to work in his lab the summer before my first classes started. There I would perform the experiments I wanted to conduct for my master’s thesis before beginning my course work in September. This research involved studying the effects of nicotine on dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, a region thought to be involved in the experience of pleasure and reward. This was a line of research that aligned with Charlie’s own interests. I’d spend more time with rats, doing more brain surgery on them. I knew that I was well prepared to do the lab work.
