High Price

she was the first woman in my life who gave me books as presents. She gave me Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler as a master’s graduation gift. I read it while enduring the lengthy and tedious ceremony.
    Soon I could see that she really was the kind of woman I sought as a life partner, and I think she felt similarly. In most ways, she seemed perfect. Except, of course, for being white. I wasn’t sure how to deal with that, even as I hated that it mattered.
    It was fine to have a fling with a white woman in Wyoming—but I couldn’t imagine making a family with one, given all the baggage that interracial relationships carried in the wider world. Together we read Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well , particularly the allegorical short story “The Last Black Hero,” which tells the tragic tale of a black militant who falls in love with a white woman and faces the paradoxes of trying to fight for racial equality while living in the inequitable world as it is.
    Like the activist in the story, I was uncomfortable envisioning a future with a woman who wasn’t black. I thought about what little black girls would think as they saw so many of the most successful black men marrying white women. I wanted to be one of those success stories—but I didn’t want to disappoint the people who looked up to me. I certainly didn’t want to reinforce the image that black women weren’t good enough for high-achieving black men.
    And so, as I prepared to leave for the NIH, Robin could tell that something was up and we needed to talk. She drove me to a spot up in the mountains, with a majestic view of the wide-open sky. Darkness had fallen and the stars were out. They seemed like they were everywhere in the late spring chill as we sat in the car on the mountainside. We started to talk.
    I didn’t want to hurt her, but I knew that if we got much closer, that was inevitable. So I explained as kindly as I could what I’d been thinking. I told her that I didn’t know if I could face my community and be the man I wanted to be if I was with a white woman. I stressed that it had nothing to do with her and that our relationship itself was wonderful. I didn’t want to have to make this decision. But to my surprise, she understood immediately. She didn’t want to let me go, but she didn’t want to stand in my way, either.
    I hadn’t intended on breaking up with her, just talking it all through, but that’s where we seemed to end up. It was painful, but we decided to stay in touch and be friends. I hated to do it—and hated that race was so inescapable—but I couldn’t see a way around it. I left for the NIH believing that our relationship was over.

CHAPTER 12
    Still Just a Nigga
    To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
    — JAMES BALDWIN
    N egro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace”
    That was the title of the “journal article” I’d discovered when I began trying to track down a reference from a paper I’d read about cocaine. I was looking for early historical reports of cocaine withdrawal. The authors had cited the reference with a disclaimer. They wrote: “Reports of patients with similar symptoms had appeared in the early 1900s, but because these reports were deeply interwoven with elements of racist hysteria they were never taken seriously.” But I still wasn’t prepared for what I found when I read the entire article.
    Of course, I knew that such blatant racism was common even in the medical literature in the Jim Crow era, and that I couldn’t hold historical work to modern standards. This was just science. If the author had accurately described cocaine withdrawal, it could be a useful citation, I told myself.
    It was March 1996 and I was in the science library at the University of Wyoming, finishing up my PhD. My dissertation dealt with how nicotine’s behavioral effects were influenced by changes in parts of nerve cells called calcium channels. For the opening of my thesis, I was required to describe the rationale for the experiments I’d done. That involved comparing the effects of nicotine to those of cocaine, and I wanted to cite relevant work about the influence of cocaine on human behavior. And since my education had shown me that if I had a particular thought, someone else had probably already considered the idea in depth, I went back as far as the leads would take me.
    The paper that cited