High Price

to see my NIH mentor, but he didn’t understand why the incident had affected me so deeply. He tried to use the comparison of himself—an elderly white man—being stopped by police in a black area of Washington and asked why he was there.
    That made it only worse because it didn’t reflect the reality. Like many blacks, I’d come to expect this sort of denial and minimization from white people—many of whom seem to see acknowledging racial injustice as an admission of guilt by association or a signal that their privilege is undeserved. But I still felt a bit betrayed by his inability to recognize my perspective, and worse than before I’d gone to see him.

    The NIH ID that I was wearing when I was stopped by the NIH police and subjected to an impromptu one-man lineup.
    There I was with my NIH ID around my neck and my bank statement in my hand and I was still seen as a likely bank robber who’d strong-armed a customer. Or a “Negro cocaine fiend,” for that matter. Here in the United States, I was still just another nigga, no matter how many hours I had put into studying or conducting my experiments. When I met with Levon Parker, a black man who was director of student programs at the agency, and Leroy Penix, a black neurologist whom I sometimes shadowed on his rounds, they were upset but not surprised. The black professionals whom I respected didn’t talk about it publicly, but they’d all had the same kinds of experiences. It hit me hard why some of the blacks I knew at the agency called the place the “plantation.” The overwhelming majority of the scientists were white and most of the support staff was black.
    Parker contacted Harold Varmus, who was then the head of NIH. I was asked to meet with the director to discuss the situation. Soon my phone was ringing off the hook with people trying to pacify me and prevent what happened from being publicized and becoming an embarrassment to the agency. They wanted me to meet with the NIH police and tell them what they should be doing better, even though I had no qualifications for this task other than being black. Even then, I recognized it as a token response.
    Since I was just starting my PhD, I didn’t want to attract this kind of attention to myself, either. I spoke with Varmus on the phone (he was traveling) and met with his staff. I told them what I thought, but I realized that without public exposure and specific policy alterations, these incidents rarely lead to change. It was like the “beer summit” that President Obama later had with the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer who arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. after he was seen trying to get into his own house. Instead of tackling and revising the policies that produced these institutionally racist results, the events were symbolically addressed as isolated misunderstandings. The system that produced them was left untouched.
    A lthough I’d tried to cut my ties with her, the “breakup” that Robin and I had negotiated didn’t last. Less than a month went by before I realized how much I missed her. I began to think we’d made a big mistake. I had few friends in Washington, D.C., and none was as close as her. Although she was pursuing her PhD in clinical psychology in Wyoming, we spoke on the phone frequently and her support after my near arrest was rock solid. She helped me write the letters to the NIH officials that I sent as events unfolded. While I was dating other women, I began to yearn to see her again. I invited her to visit and she accepted.
    I’ll never forget the dress she wore when she came to Washington on June 10, 1994. It was a bold, brilliant blue and had a demure white collar. Our reunion was passionate, intense. Although I wouldn’t know it for a few months, we conceived our son Damon that night.
    Still, when she called several weeks later to tell me that she was pregnant, I didn’t know what to do. I remained ambivalent about creating a family with a white woman and deeply concerned about the issues Derrick Bell had so aptly described as making these relationships so fraught. But one thing I knew I didn’t want to do was leave a child fatherless. As the pregnancy progressed, I knew I had to make a decision about whether I’d return to Wyoming and be with Robin.
    And so, when Damon was born on March 13, 1995, I was right there in the delivery room. I watched in awe as Robin persevered through hours of labor. We had a large private room at Iverson