High Price
felt like we were treated with respect based on how we behaved, rather than on race. The military rules were clear and felt less capricious. I began to change my attitude and become more open and hopeful about the future.
I have to emphasize here, however, that I did not change overnight.
There was nothing sudden at all about my transformation from a kid with a poor education who knew little about the history of my people and the ways of mainstream America into someone capable of becoming a tenured professor at an elite university. I only gradually became aware of the gaps in my knowledge, and the analysis that I undertook would allow me to transcend them by understanding their roots and the forces that shaped my family and neighborhood. I didn’t go instantly from being an indifferent student to one who spent hours in the lab. And I certainly didn’t change from someone whose focus was primarily on my social life into a serious academic simply by joining the air force.
But the air force was the environment that allowed me to start to make these changes, to start to understand what I’d missed in my earlier education and my own capacity for change. My commitment to the service made in boot camp was only the beginning. There would be many more times when I failed to make the best choices, when my lifestyle threatened to swamp my desire for a different life and when the pull of the reinforcers I knew was stronger than my commitment to my future. In fact, my college education itself started in part because of a choice I made to take drugs to be cool with my friends.
A n imposing Bob Marley poster hung on Mark Mosely’s door, larger than life, showing the reggae star onstage at the height of his power. Bob’s dreads were arrayed around him as he sang into the mic. The scent of incense—typically sweet jasmine—wafted into the hall from Mark’s dorm, but the poster was hung on the back of the door, visible only from inside. His window shades were usually pulled down and the lighting was dim.
When Bob’s music was not emanating from a record on the Denon turntable or reel on the Akai 747, Mark played other reggae and jazz. His place looked like a revolutionary Afro-centric pad from the 1970s, but it was actually located in a recently built residence hall in Okinawa, Japan, on Kadena Air Base in 1985.
Several years older than me, Mark was a jet mechanic; I met him because we lived in the same building on the base in Japan to which I’d been assigned after I’d completed my initial training. His goal was ultimately to study sociology back home at the University of California. In the meanwhile, he would school other black airmen to raise our consciousness during our military service.
But—although some associate Marley and his music primarily with the marijuana that is a sacrament for his Rastafarian religion—Mark did not take illegal drugs. He didn’t burn incense to hide the odor of cannabis and he didn’t lower the lights to shelter eyes reddened by marijuana. The higher consciousness he sought involved intellectual and revolutionary enlightenment.
In fact, the marijuana smoking that led indirectly to my college career occurred in a different social setting. I got high with another group of friends in Japan. It was during this time in Okinawa that I began to realize that I would have to make some real decisions about the peers with whom I surrounded myself because the ideas and habits that I shared with them would be an important influence on my future. Like I’ve said, I didn’t become studious and intellectually driven overnight. Mark was a powerful force in my education, but there were competing elements. At first, it wasn’t at all clear that I’d manage to keep my commitment to myself, my sisters, and the service.
I ’d originally been slated to go to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, rather than overseas. But my cousin Cynthia, whose husband was in the air force and stationed at Kadena, convinced me to swap with another new recruit and join her and her family in Japan. I knew nothing at all about Japan or its culture. I did know that a girl I was seeing was going to be sent there. I thought it would be interesting to see another country, and having a friend-girl and at least some family there would make the transition easier. It seemed as good a place to start as any. As far as I was concerned Okinawa was the same as Tokyo, and Tokyo was like any big city in the United States. Boy, was
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