High Price

by Carl Hart

  Another academic mentor inspired me as well during graduate school. Jim Rose was the director of the neuroscience graduate program and the most thorough scientist I have ever met. Charlie introduced me to him during my initial visit to campus, taking me to his lab where he studied newts. I had never even seen one of these small brownish green aquatic salamanders before. But the wide range of experiments that Jim was conducting on their behavior and brains impressed me. From the molecular level to neural network level, all the way out to behavior, he was systematically exploring stress and sexual behavior in this animal.

  Jim wasn’t just your stereotypical cerebral scientist, either. A former high school wrestler and track star, he kept himself in such great physical shape that, at twenty-five years my senior, he could outrun me when we worked out together. His tolerance to the altitude may have had something to do with it; nonetheless, he frequently left me behind and huffing. Jim showed me that you could be manly and be a scientist—and he and his wife took care of me emotionally as well as physically. Every week, I’d have lunch with his wife, Jill, at Godfather’s Pizza, where she was so well known to the staff that they kept a bottle of her personal salad dressing in the kitchen.

  Jim helped me negotiate the politics of the university, as well as teaching my neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and neuroscience of sleep classes. He taught me how to give a scientific talk. His critiques of my work were so rigorous that I knew that if I passed the “Jim test,” I was ready to present my data to the world.

  In Wyoming, of course, I also continued to spend hours upon hours in the lab. Charlie later said to me, “I never had a graduate student before who was as dedicated and put in as much time all on their own. Other students were interested and so on, but they just didn’t put in the hours, and they weren’t as single-minded as you were. You were just so focused on getting done what you needed to get done.”

  Charlie, MH, and me on the day I received my PhD.

  Indeed, I knew I was well on my way to becoming a real scientist when I found myself working Saturday afternoons at the lab during football season. It was located not far from the stadium where the Wyoming Cowboys played, and every time they scored a touchdown, a cannon would go off, loud enough to be heard in the lab. I was still a huge football fan, so making the choice not to go to a big game that was so close was a real sign of dedication for me. I was just hungry for knowledge and scientific experience.

  Of course, I also felt extra pressure to compete well as a black person in such a white milieu. As Charlie put it: “I’ve tried to evaluate, well, was your race a benefit to you or a hindrance? And obviously, in some ways it was a little of each, probably. It may have opened some doors in the sense of having people willing to give you the opportunities. But I [also] got the sense that there was a lot of begrudging of your going farther than they thought you would.” It was as though people were pleased with themselves for giving me a chance, but astonished when I demolished the stereotypes they didn’t believe they still held by becoming a true competitor.

  This was clear from early on during my time in Wyoming. An experience I had at a cocktail party illustrates one way the issue played out. Probably during my second semester, I attended a party at the home of one of the neuroscience faculty members. This faculty member and I had a contentious relationship; he was disliked by many of the students because his teaching was obtuse and we struggled in his class. To make it worse, he belittled students and didn’t show any respect for us. In short, we thought he was an asshole.

  He had been raised on Long Island and my success seemed to make him especially uncomfortable. He’d make remarks like describing someone as “so rich he had the black maid and the black butler—no offense, Carl,” in a way that made clear either that he was oblivious or was blatantly disingenuous about his intentions. I was pretty sure it was the latter, but it was hard to tell.

  The neuroscience faculty and students got together for drinks or dinner regularly, either in the lab or at someone’s house. It was pretty much the only type of socializing many of us did: graduate school takes up virtually all of your time. That week, it was his turn to host.

  At one point during the party, he took me aside and said he wanted to show me something. We walked upstairs to his bedroom, where he pulled out a big-ass .44 Magnum, with a long barrel. It was obvious that what he was really doing was trying to demonstrate dominance and masculinity. So I played along.

  I oohed and aahed as he described the technical features of the gun and some of his adventures shooting. I said, “Wow, that’s a cool-ass gun.”

  Then I added, deadpan: “But when you come to my place, I gotta show you my Uzi.”

  His jaw dropped. His neck turned bright red. He had no idea how to respond. He couldn’t tell that I was simply one-upping him: his ideas about blacks were such that he believed it perfectly plausible that I kept an Uzi in my grad school apartment. So I just said, “Yeah, man, remind me next time and I’ll show you my Uzi,” and went back to the party. He knew I’d trumped him. Because he wasn’t sure whether I actually was crazy enough to have an Uzi, he backed off in his antagonistic interactions with me since I’d shown him that I couldn’t easily be played.

  But that was just a taste of what I faced as I worked to complete my master’s degree in psychology in preparation for getting my PhD. And a racial incident on campus soon spurred me to my first experience with real activism.

  The event that set things off wasn’t especially egregious. The campus newspaper, the Branding Iron, had run a naive, literally sophomoric essay claiming that affirmative action isn’t effective and that black students are given an unfair advantage, to the detriment of whites. Few would have objected to the mere publication of the piece: college is a place for people to explore ideas and make arguments and free speech means that some offensive and inappropriate material will invariably result. The real problem occurred because the paper, which usually ran counterpoint articles, did not do so in this case.

  A group of athletes and a few other black and Latino students came to me for advice about how best to respond. By this point, I was pretty well known among them at the university, since I spent time at the multicultural center, I attended as many athletic events as I could in support of the teams, and most of the black athletes had taken my Drugs and Behavior course. We ultimately agreed that what we wanted was the opportunity to publish a reply—and I figured that this would be easy to get and that would be that.

  But when I met the student editor of the paper, he flat out refused. Unexpectedly, the interaction became adversarial. He declared that it was his paper and no one could tell him what to print. At that point, I went to the university president and described the situation, asking him to reason with the newspaper editor. He met with us and then with the editor, who wouldn’t back down. In an attempt to mediate, the president offered us three hundred dollars to pay for a full-page ad on the back of the paper, where the students could place any statement they wanted to make.

  Although this solution did not provide an equivalent editorial reply, simply a convenient commercial one, I told him that we’d take the money. We ran an ad calling for a boycott of the paper and describing the entire series of events. In the ad, we also said we had the support of the university president and the psychology department, although we hadn’t actually gotten permission from the president or the department to state this in the ad.

  All of this got people’s attention, particularly in sleepy Wyoming. At the same time, we discovered that the Branding Iron’s budget was supported by students’ fees, including ours. Yet there were no students of color on the paper’s staff. And when we said we were going to peacefully occupy the administration’s offices, the story got even bigger. Now the local papers, the local television stations, even National Public Radio picked up on it. Soon I was meeting with the governor, who was a Democrat, and being asked by Democratic Party leaders if I could represent the state at some meeting related to student leadership.
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br />   Along the way, we also had the usual activist struggles over strategy and leadership, and when I began speaking out on race-related issues, my relationship with some of the white folks around me changed. This made me more suspicious and distrustful than usual. Jim Rose gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten as a result, saying that I should face each person anew. Rather than defensively assuming that my views or actions had altered the relationship, I needed to be open first and let the other person’s actual reaction—not my expectations or apprehensions—determine my response. This mindfulness of the present allowed me to deal with the situation in front of me as it was, not as I thought it might be, and that helped me immeasurably in academia.

  Ultimately, although we did not get our counterpoint published as an op-ed in the student paper, the students who had protested did become more politically active on campus. Just after that, Wyoming had its first black student body president and the student senate experienced a wave of elections of minority students. Many of them later went on to jobs at the university—but sadly, most did not stick with their early activism. As is often the case, once many people become a part of the system they once criticized, they are rewarded for behaving in a manner similar to those around them.

  Nonetheless, I had learned that I could organize people to take effective action. I was continuing to grow and learn as a scientist. While I wouldn’t be conspicuously politically active again until much later in my career, the experience was galvanizing and formative. I was learning not only that I could succeed in academia but also that I might be able to change it.

  The most important relationship I began in Wyoming, however, was with the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my two sons. Robin and I first crossed paths when I served as graduate adviser to the psychology honor society there in 1992. She was a psych undergraduate at the time. Her intelligence deeply impressed me. In fact, I suspected she was smarter than I was. At age twenty-six, she already had undergraduate degrees in international studies and French.

  Robin was white. She was also one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Her style was striking. She always wore stylish hats and scarves, not just functional winter gear. While many of the students on campus looked like they’d just come in from feeding livestock at the ranch, Robin looked more like a Manhattanite, even though she had actually been raised in Montana.

  She has olive skin and green eyes, with lovely deep brown hair. We were friends before we became involved, but when we took the same class together in 1994, I knew I had to make a move. After she brought a plant to my office as a gift, I could see that she was interested in me, too. Soon we were inseparable.

  Unfortunately, not long after we first got together, I had to leave Wyoming. In the summer of 1993, I’d won a highly competitive minority fellowship to work at the National Institutes of Health: only one minority graduate or medical student in the entire United States was accepted each year. I hadn’t even considered applying, but Charlie had insisted and I eventually relented.

  And to my great surprise, I had won the chance to spend the summer working in Irv Kopin’s lab. Kopin was studying the neurobiology of stress, trying to understand the neurotransmitters and metabolites involved. However, what was even more impressive was that the lab I’d worked in was where Julius Axelrod had done much of the work that won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Axelrod had solved key problems in understanding how brain cells talk to each other, discovering mechanisms involved in neurotransmitter storage, release, and inactivation. It was thrilling to work in the lab where these critical discoveries had been made—and even more exhilarating to be asked to return the following summer, after completing my master’s, to do my PhD work there. That, however, would mean leaving Robin behind in Wyoming.

  When Robin and I had first gotten together, it seemed simple. We were both intensely attracted to each other, physically and intellectually. But we were also both at a point in our academic careers where we had little time to devote to a long-term relationship. I assumed it would be a casual thing, a nice diversion from our academic pursuits.

  However, over time, things got more and more intense. We spent all of our free time together—limited as it was by our work—and constantly talked. I opened up to her in ways I hadn’t done previously, and she, too, shared a great deal of herself. We were always talking about books and ideas: 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

  Negro 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 the provocatively headlined article had used it to support a claim that cocaine-related deaths and other problems had been described early in the drug’s history. I wanted to see for myself what arguments it made. Though immediately offended by the language of the header, I was also excited because I’d never seen this paper cited before. If I could track it down, I might be able to find a very early description of cocaine to add to my work, which might impress my professors.

  My first surprise came when I read the full reference: the “journal” in which the article had been published did not seem to be some august peer-reviewed medical publication. It was, instead, listed oddly as “New York,” perhaps having been cut off by mistake. I can’t recall how, but I eventually ascertained that what was meant was actually the New York Times, and, even though I now knew it was just a newspaper story published on February 8, 1914,1 I decided to get a copy of the whole article.