High Price

went wrong. We just thought that the guy was out of place. He was on the border of our turf and this particular intrusion by a white man was something that we didn’t have to tolerate. We had the power here.
    As we came up from behind him, I slowed the car to a crawl. By then, Richard had positioned the gun in a menacing position, rolling down his window and sitting as though he was taking aim. “Put yo’ hands up, muthafucka!” he shouted. The dude froze.
    I will never forget the complete look of terror on that man’s face. His eyes opened wider than I thought it was possible for eyes to go. He was standing still but clearly shaking. His heart must’ve been pounding out of his chest. He was probably just heading home from work, an ordinary guy in his twenties, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I’m sure he never expected anything like this. Looking back, I realize it must have been incredibly traumatic.
    At the time, though, we thought it was hilarious. The four of us started laughing when we saw the look on his face. I’m sure he thought we wanted to rob and/or kill him. But that was not our intention: we thought we were just messing around. Our laughter must have seemed stone cold. In retrospect, I have a hard time imagining how we could have done it, given the terrible toll we’d all experienced from gun violence. Still, we had nothing particular in mind. It was just an impulse, one that could have had terrible consequences but fortunately didn’t. Richard stared at the dude, keeping the gun aimed squarely at him. After a few more seconds, the guy’s instincts must have taken over and he ran like hell. We just drove away.
    The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a minute, but the image of that man’s fear and the sense of power we had—as well as, I see now, our heedlessness—has always stuck with me. I can see the world from other perspectives as an adult, but back then, I really couldn’t. My concerns were entirely focused on the respect of my peers and whatever was necessary to maintain my status. I just didn’t see that white guy as human; he wasn’t one of us. We kept laughing and going over what we thought were the funniest parts of his reaction.
    “You saw that muthafucka’s face?”
    “I bet he nutted on himself.”
    “Damn . . .”
    As I grew up, I maintained a complicated relationship with the street. First and foremost, I saw myself as an athlete. Sports and girls kept me busy at many times when cousins and friends were getting into troubling incidents that didn’t end as well as that one did. Sports also gave me the typical “jock” perspective of skepticism about things like smoking that might interfere with performance. First football and then, for most of high school, basketball were the primary reasons I went to school: while I practiced intensively and with great commitment in sports, I did only the bare minimum schoolwork needed to keep up the 2.0 average required to stay on the team.
    My expectations about school had always been low, but not as low as most of the educators’ expectations were for me, with a few conspicuous exceptions. Here’s one example: My senior year, one of my classes was parking patrol. Just as it sounds, we just sat there and watched cars in the parking lot. I’m not sure what it would have taken to fail that class but virtually anything would have required more intelligence than it took to pass it.

    Shooting a layup during a high school basketball game.
    Another example involves the end of my engagement with real math in high school. In ninth grade, I’d actually been placed in one of the highest-level math classes. I had continued to do well in math throughout elementary and middle school, despite my refusal to do homework. But then I tore up my knee playing football and had to have surgery. It was after this that I switched from football to basketball. Before my injury, I’d excelled at algebra. However, because I’d missed so many classes when I was in the hospital, school officials told me I didn’t need to finish out the semester in the top class. Instead, I could take business math, which was basically addition and subtraction, third-grade-level stuff. That completed my math requirement—and therefore my math classes, period—for high school.
    Rather than challenging me to learn, they gave up, figuring that it didn’t matter because I was just one more nameless black kid who would never go to college anyway. And of course,