High Price

decided that I’d become a counselor and work toward a career helping at-risk youth.
    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