High Price

vivid demonstration of how my family and I had internalized racist tropes about “knowing our place.” At this point, Brenda worked for Delta Air Lines as a reservations agent and her travel privileges were what allowed them to afford the visit. Like me, Brenda was starting to achieve some success in mainstream America, but every gain was hard-won and required ongoing struggle. We’d all had years of conditioning suggesting that a black person would not be accepted without suspicion in such a situation; the insidious nature of these unconscious cues shaping our feelings and behavior was crystallized in that moment for me.
    My family had given me all the help that they could, but without the emotional and academic support of my mentors, girlfriends, and friends, I would never have been able to survive the transition to graduate school and ultimately get my doctorate. The social skills I’d learned in childhood had allowed me to get to this place; I’d need them more than ever to succeed here. No one—let alone someone from my background—could thrive here on their own.
    As I’d advanced in my career, I had moved into environments that were progressively less black. Wyoming was the whitest. Both in terms of the wintry physical surroundings and the overwhelming sea of white faces on campus, it had the least color of anywhere I’d ever been. In fact, my time in the air force in England turned out to be the last time I worked in a genuinely integrated environment. As my scientific career moved forward, the number of black peers around me dwindled until frequently I was the only black person in the room. When I got my PhD in 1996, in fact, I was the only black man in America to receive a doctorate in neuroscience that year.
    While Wyoming was blindingly white, however, its whiteness was different in character from that of UNC-Wilmington. There the campus had an overwhelming white majority in spite of being surrounded by a large black community and I experienced more overt hostility toward people who looked like me. In places like North Carolina and even New York, stereotypes about black people were often reinforced by what people saw around them: in Wilmington, for example, I’d often be the only black student doing research and involved in research-related functions, and most of the blacks on campus worked in low-level or service jobs, not academic or administrative positions. As I noted earlier, this is why many black Wilmingtonians referred to the university as UNC-White. Back east, white people saw blacks and maybe thought about rappers, poor people, or even criminals: their initial perceptions certainly weren’t of students, let alone scientists.
    But here in Wyoming, the large white majority simply reflected the actual population. And any blacks who were on campus were typically stars: they were athletes or outstanding students; they had no other reason to be in remote Wyoming. There were so few blacks that other people saw us almost as celebrities, and that seemed to allow them to consider us more as individuals and less through the lens of negative group stereotype.
    Indeed, when I first visited the Laramie campus in early 1992, the man who would become my graduate mentor took me to a college basketball game. “That is probably the most black people you will see in one place, right down on that floor,” Charles Ksir told me, indicating the players. We were surrounded by thousands of cheering white faces, some painted in the Cowboys’ awful signature colors of yellow and brown. The crowd was enthusiastic. On a campus of around fifteen thousand people, there were probably a few dozen blacks, most of them members of the basketball or football teams.
    Ksir, whom I would soon come to call Charlie, had been Rob Hakan’s mentor during graduate school. Rob had encouraged me to apply to study with him at Wyoming and follow in his academic footsteps. As it turned out, it was the only graduate program in psychology and neuroscience to which I was admitted. While my grades were good and my lab work was stellar, my scores on the test typically used to determine graduate school admissions, the GRE, were abysmal—particularly on the verbal part. And I’d achieved the score I did only with lots of help.
    Though it may not sound like it now because I’ve worked so hard on vocabulary, back in college I still didn’t know as many words as were expected of someone seeking a PhD. My lack of exposure to mainstream