High Price

by Carl Hart

  About ten years older than I was, Dwight soon became impressed when he saw me studying and getting involved in lab work. He saw my vocabulary improve as I practiced. He soon thought I was some kind of brainiac and began bragging about me and my scientific future to his friends. Meanwhile, I was living way above my means, maxing out the multiple credit cards that were then being sent to college students as though the companies were giving away money. When the bills inevitably came due, I first pawned the saxophone that I’d once tried unsuccessfully to learn to play. Then I asked Dwight about getting in on the dealing action.

  He flat out refused me. In the way that people in the life often look out for those who have alternatives, he didn’t want me to get dragged down. He said it was ridiculous for me to even think about and that I was too smart for this. He did, however, begin letting me stash money for him. Sometimes I kept it in the room where we housed the rats for my research. I don’t know if he even really needed me to do that or if he was just trying to give me a way to feel like a man who wasn’t reliant on him for charity. Still, he helped me get through my crunch and was another man in my life who refused to let me give up on myself. (Dwight himself, sadly, was later shot to death in Brooklyn; I don’t know the exact circumstances of his killing.) I slowly got out of debt and managed to stay that way. With Dwight’s help, I managed to keep my nose to the grindstone.

  Melissa and I had broken up in part because we no longer shared the same values. What I once saw as her happy-go-lucky and carefree spontaneity began to seem like irresponsibility. As I got more serious about my career, I wanted someone similar. That was part of what attracted me to Terri, the ambitious business major whose parents were not exactly thrilled by our relationship.

  By my last semester when I graduated, I learned that I was on the dean’s list: no more Cs. I could hardly believe it. After getting the good news, I went to a nearby playground with Terri. She was a diligent and organized student and I thought she was extremely intelligent. I also saw that she put a lot of effort into her own schoolwork.

  As we sat on some swings, Terri told me, “You’ve got it. You can do whatever you want in terms of education.” She looked me in the eyes to be sure I took it in. I knew she was going places herself. For her to say that about me really meant something. It was the first time I believed I could actually get my PhD. But before I could attend graduate school, I still had some deficiencies to remedy.

  Soon I found myself spending twelve hours at a stretch in the lab, at least five times a week. Rob began to teach me to operate on the brains of the rats we were studying. After I got over my initial fear and disgust, I found that I was good at it. Soon I was basically doing brain surgery with ease, using a surgical suite that looked like it was set up for tiny dolls.

  My undergraduate work also came at a time of tremendous excitement in neuroscience. That, too, inspired me, at times when my motivation began to flag. In 1990, as I mentioned earlier, Congress and President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be the decade of the brain, calling for greater national focus on neuroscience to accompany the increased funding the field was receiving. It seemed like important new discoveries were being made every day. We thought we would soon find answers to the deepest and most difficult questions about thought, desire, and action, questions that had challenged the greatest human minds for centuries. I was studying the heart of the system that was said to provide pleasure and drive desire, a specific dopamine network in the center of the brain. We figured we were close to understanding how it worked.

  I felt like I was really learning something, that this knowledge was important and vital. If we could understand dopamine, we would decipher desire and unlock addiction. The science itself was intoxicating. With enthusiastic encouragement from Rob, Don, and Jim, I was soon on my way to graduate school. The black kid who’d once been in the trailer for the learning disabled, whom his high school had relegated to business math and parking patrol class, was now on his way to a doctorate. I could now see a clear way out of the maze.

  CHAPTER 11

  Wyoming

  Equal Rights

  —WYOMING STATE MOTTO

  It was a cold night in Wyoming, not the worst kind, where your face numbs in even a brief exposure, but still a stunning chill that a Floridian has no words to describe and no preparation to cope with. MH and my sister Brenda had braved the late-winter weather for a visit; I was then working on my graduate studies at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Snow was everywhere. As the writer John Edgar Wideman observed in his book Brothers and Keepers, it snowed so much in Wyoming that it could make a grown man cry.

  I’d earlier driven my mom and sister through the sleepy little town where I lived and then brought them to campus. I wanted to show them my lab. On most winter evenings, the campus was dark and desolate: most of the students and faculty quite sensibly did not linger outside. I started to select the right keys from a ring I carried and prepared to let them in. But MH was hesitant to go any further.

  Despite the freezing temperature and our desire to get in out of the cold, I could see reluctance in her eyes. Her thickest winter coat offered little protection—but she was more frightened of entering the building than she was of the elements. She thought we’d get in trouble, possibly be arrested. Even though I had my own set of keys and had told her I worked there day and night, she remained concerned. Part of her still didn’t believe that a black man could legitimately enter a university building at night and that her son was actually a graduate student who spent many long evenings doing scientific research in this alien place.

  The moment stuck with me as a 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 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, doing more brain surgery on them. I knew that I was well prepared to do the lab work.

  On my recruitment visit to the University of Wyoming, Charlie took me skiing. It was my first and last time skiing.

  I wasn’t so sure about the classes, however. Thankfully, before starting graduate school I spent a week in May with my girlfriend Terri’s father. He lived in Longmont, Colorado, and taught me a critical lesson that paved the way for my graduate school success. Terri’s father had served in the military and was an information technology consultant. He said that the most important thing for me to do in grad school was to ask questions when there was something I didn’t know.

  I sort of nodded politely when he told me; it seemed obvious. Of course, if you don’t know something, you need to ask about it. I’d always worked under that principle and had not been embarrassed previously to ask what might be seen as dumb questions. That had long been one of the keys to my educational success.

  But he stopped me. He could see that I wasn’t hearing him. “No, seriously,” he said. “This is important. If you don’t know, you have to ask.” I suddenly realized why he was stressing it: he knew I might feel that since I was now a graduate student, I would have to start pretending that I knew things I really didn’t know. I might be embarrassed, at this new level of recognized achievement, to admit ignorance. He was right.

  And if I hadn’t followed his advice, I probably never would have gotten my master’s, let alone a PhD. With my background and the holes in my early education, there were many important things I didn’t know. I had to be brave enough to ask what others might see as obvious questions. Not learning key things I needed to know for my work would be worse than possibly looking ignorant for a moment. And often, it turned out, other graduate students were similarly baffled by the “dumb” things that I thought I should have already known.

  Indeed, this is why teachers often say there are no dumb questions: sometimes the most important discoveries come from questioning seemingly axiomatic assumptions. One such assumption during my graduate training was that dopamine was the “pleasure” neurotransmitter, and that drugs like cocaine and nicotin
e produced pleasure by increasing the activity of this neurotransmitter in the brain. Seminal evidence for this view came from studies of rats trained to press a lever to receive intravenous injections of cocaine or nicotine. For example, when rats are given an opportunity to self-administer cocaine, they do so robustly. But when given a drug that blocks dopamine several minutes before having an opportunity to self-administer cocaine, well-trained rats initially work harder to receive cocaine injections but eventually give up, presumably because the dopamine signal is being blocked. Researchers interpreted the rats’ initial burst of responding as an attempt to compensate for the lack of pleasure due to dopamine blockade.

  With nicotine, however, under identical conditions, rats do not display the burst in responding; instead they stop responding immediately. Despite the fact that the rats’ behaviors were different depending on the drug—cocaine or nicotine—many researchers’ interpretation remained the same. That is, in both cases it was interpreted that the animals were no longer able to get the pleasure experience they’d come to expect, because dopamine was being blocked. My question was, if so, then how could both responding more and responding less be interpreted the same?

  I never received a satisfactory answer. At best, someone would say, “Good questions.” Later I began to realize that the dopamine-pleasure connection was far more complicated than the way it was being described.

  The more I studied drugs, in fact, the more I learned about these types of basic inconsistencies in our ideas about them. Back then, however, I was simply excited to be part of the scientific conversation and didn’t dwell much on it. I found a study partner early on—doing so would be another key to my success—and settled in to do the work. My graduate work consisted of not only research and coursework but also teaching undergraduate courses. During my first year of graduate school, I served as Charlie’s teaching assistant for his Drugs and Behavior course. I taught the course on my own during my final three years of graduate school. By the time I had completed my graduate studies, I’d gained plenty of teaching experience.