High Price

somewhat optimistic, as well as boosting my skeptical thinking.
    Louie was also a good influence in many ways. He was a genius at math: the only kid in the neighborhood that I knew who was in advanced classes. I didn’t like it when other kids knew more than I did or were better at something than I was, so I kept an eye on what he was studying and even asked him questions about math from time to time. I’d check out the covers of his textbooks, get the names of the teachers he liked. I wanted to be prepared.
    Everything around me seemed to reward competition and competitiveness—from organized sports to the games we played on the streets, even board games. From top to bottom, I saw a culture of competition, not only at school and in terms of work but also even in romantic relationships and between family members. Winning matters; nothing is worse than being a loser. I got this message virtually everywhere. It dominated both the mores of the mainstream and of the hood.
    Consequently, I wanted to ensure I was a winner in every way that seemed accessible. For example, though I almost always played on losing sports teams, I was also clearly the star of my team—so those losses didn’t bother me as much. In math, I wanted to be ready to learn what Louie had learned when I got to his classes the following year, because I wanted to be at least as good as he was. If there was a way that I could win—or even just show that I was capable of winning—I wanted to find it.
    A skinny kid who was short like I was, Louie didn’t excel at football or basketball, which were the sports I preferred, but he could play baseball. He was a pitcher and was pretty good, too, so long as he wore his glasses. His coach would make him put them on; otherwise he didn’t like to wear them. He didn’t want to be seen as a geek. But his aversion to geekiness didn’t have the roots you might expect. Kids like us didn’t automatically opt out of competing for academic excellence, even though it may have seemed that way from the outside.
    Where I grew up, nerds, dorks, and other kids who had a reputation for being “smart” in school did not automatically become targets for bullies for “acting white,” as the stereotype of poor black neighborhoods portrays it. We didn’t scorn nerds any more—or less—than white kids do. We definitely didn’t scapegoat them for the reasons that some “experts” have invoked to try to explain some of the persisting racial achievement gap in school. We were no more anti-intellectual than the rest of America.
    It wasn’t school achievement itself that we saw as “acting white.” It’s something much more subtle than that. And understanding this complexity is important to understanding my story and to recognizing what’s really going on in poor neighborhoods. What was being reinforced and what was being punished was not about education.
    Sure, there were some black children who were bullied for “acting white” in the neighborhoods where I grew up. And, indeed, some of those kids were high achievers in school. Some, however, were not. It wasn’t scholarly success itself that made people targets. We didn’t disdain academic achievement per se and we didn’t look down on those who got good grades because of their marks. “Acting white” was a whole different ball game, something that frequently correlated with school performance but wasn’t defined by it.
    What really got kids labeled as dorks or sellouts and picked on about their schoolwork were their attitudes toward other black people. It was the way they used language to demonstrate what they believed was their moral and social superiority. The kids who were targeted wouldn’t speak in the street vernacular that the rest of us used, even on the street or in other informal settings. They wouldn’t really deign to talk to us at all if they could avoid it. Their noses in the air, they looked down on us. It was snobbery, not schoolwork, that was “white” to us.
    The dorks and L7s (picture it in a kid’s handwriting: it means squares) couldn’t see any value in things that were important to us, viewing us as ghetto, just like white people did. That’s what “acting white” really meant. Kids like this failed to recognize that sports were, for us, often the only way to show mastery. They couldn’t see that leadership—even if you were leading the “bad kids”—mattered. They didn’t respect loyalty, which we learned to place