High Price

language in early life was another obstacle I had to overcome. Rob had bought me word books and quizzed me on lists of new words about once a week. Jim had also helped expand my language skills. But I hadn’t advanced enough by the time I took the GRE to have overcome the severe deficit with which I’d started, at least as far as could be measured on that standardized test. Unlike richer students faced with lower-than-desired test scores, I couldn’t afford prep courses. I had to rely on my mentors and friends.
    And Charlie immediately made me feel welcome in Wyoming. Soon he became one of the key nodes in the new social support network I built that enabled me to get my PhD. Charlie was a professor of psychology and was studying the effects of nicotine on dopamine at the time. When I visited, it was February, the deepest trough of winter. I walked past the booth set up to celebrate Black History Month—and noticed that its attendants were white people. I’d never seen that before; there was simply no black student available to do the job.
    Charlie gave me a complete tour. As we walked through the campus bookstore, he pointed to a book that was prominently displayed, called Black Robes, White Justice . It was the autobiography of Judge Bruce McMarion Wright. He asked if I’d read it. I hadn’t, but I did know that Judge Wright was better known in New York as “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce” for what the police and prosecutors saw as his lenient sentencing decisions. He was black and a prominent civil libertarian. Charlie used the book to start a conversation that let me know he had thought deeply about how race plays out in the United States and that his knowledge and intellectual interests extended beyond neuroscience.
    This was important to me because I knew people would expect more from me than they would from a white person in the same position. For example, I would be expected to know something about why there were so few black neuroscientists or something about how to address the “drug problem” in black communities. The conversation with Charlie suggested that he knew this as well, and that was encouraging and reassuring.
    During our walk and later back in his office, we talked frankly about race and justice in America. This was a topic that the white folks with whom I’d interacted back in North Carolina had always studiously avoided. And when it did come up, even my well-intended white mentors would often say things about how I should shape my attitude to be sure I was able to best take advantage of the opportunities I had. They never acknowledged how awful or disturbing it was that I continually had to confront the dilemma or that the fundamental problem was the racism, not my response to it. This made it feel like it was my own personal issue and it was an ongoing irritant.
    In contrast, Charlie started by putting it all on the table. In essence he said, “It’s there, I see it and I’m white, and it’s not something wrong with you.” He talked about his youth in Berkeley, California, during the days of the Black Muslims and how it was oh so easy to talk the correct liberal talk. But actually participating and working with others to try to do something about it: now, that was something else entirely. Charlie had engaged in repeated discussions with Black Muslims and had been called a “blue-eyed devil” for his efforts; he knew how to deal with racial and political conflict up close and personal.
    I decided right then that, if accepted, I’d attend graduate school at Wyoming, and Charlie became my most important mentor there. I knew I could learn from him since he was so willing to be straightforward, rather than dodging unmentionable tensions or assumptions or dismissing the prevalence of racism itself. And so, when I did receive my acceptance letter in April 1992, I was eager to attend.
    Indeed, in order to take Rob’s advice about outworking those who might have other advantages, I decided to get an early start. Charlie hired me to work in his lab the summer before my first classes started. There I would perform the experiments I wanted to conduct for my master’s thesis before beginning my course work in September. This research involved studying the effects of nicotine on dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, a region thought to be involved in the experience of pleasure and reward. This was a line of research that aligned with Charlie’s own interests. I’d spend more time with rats,