High Price

little I knew about academia before I began my career. One of the concentrations offered by the University of Maryland on air force bases in Europe was “women’s studies.” I figured I was a natural for that. I certainly wanted to understand women and had spent much of my life trying to figure out how to get them to do what I wanted. While I might have gotten quite an education if I had ended up studying Angela Davis, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Steinem, my idea of “women’s studies” and their ideas were not exactly similar. I had never even heard of feminism, let alone the black variant called womanism.
    Although I can look back on this now and laugh, the results of lack of mainstream social capital are often not nearly as benign. Ignorance feels shameful; attempts to hide it can prevent learning and perpetuate the problem. When you publicly illustrate that you don’t know what “everyone” knows, it can be intensely embarrassing. Many of the difficulties faced by people who try to move from the hood into the mainstream involve the lack of these types of knowledge, which marks them as outsiders and can lead to repeated humiliating experiences.
    Though I ultimately discovered that women’s studies did not contain the type of information I’d sought before I took classes in it, I was still naive enough to believe that psychology, instead, might hold the secret to understanding and manipulating women. The Psych 101 class I took consisted largely of Freudian ideas and I thought it was amazing that people could get paid to think up ideas about our minds and behavior like that. I figured I could do it just as well. I decided that I would study psychology and it would be useful for both my potential career working with black youth and for my personal life. My relationship with Anne, my classes, and the air force itself helped me start to accumulate mainstream cultural capital.
    Indeed, one of my professors, a black woman named Shirley Bacote, soon taught me something very practical that helped change my life. Like many of the black airmen with backgrounds like mine, I sent money home to my family, whenever I could. It was expected, even obligatory. From the outside, doing this looks commendable and altruistic: helping the folks back home who don’t have the opportunities that you do.
    But it can also be a trap, keeping you from investing in your own future. Shirley lectured about how black people don’t trust themselves enough to really invest in themselves. She wasn’t speaking directly to me when she said these things; she was teaching a small sociology course on race and class in America that had enrolled only one black man and a few sisters. However, I took her words to heart. I know that she must have known that most of us felt obligated to do this.
    She explained that, while it was important to help your family and others in need, spending on your own education must come first. At school, you know you are developing marketable skills and that the money you spend there is working toward creating a better future. Back home, there will always be ongoing need. Invest in yourselves, she advised: that’s the most sound way to invest in your family in the long run. Because unless you do that, you won’t be able to advance enough to truly have the security to help effectively.
    That stuck with me. I’d been contributing to supporting my family since I was twelve and started getting paid under the table. It had always bothered me, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on exactly why. I knew that my teenage jobs hadn’t been like middle-class kids’ summer jobs, to provide a little spending money for the kid and maybe a lesson in responsibility. Instead, I actually helped put food on the table.
    If my sisters and I hadn’t worked, there would have been many times when we would have had little in our kitchen cabinets or refrigerator. Without our childhood jobs, a difficult situation would have been even more difficult. It had never occurred to me that this wasn’t the way family life was supposed to work. Parents were supposed to support their children, financially and emotionally, not the other way around, at least during childhood. I hadn’t recognized how profoundly poverty and race had shaped my life until I’d left the country. I could see the way racism marred America much more clearly now.
    For me, home was indeed where the hatred was, not just literally but in all the ways Gil