go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you’d hold it because you never knew what kind of scary creature you might encounter. To make matters worse, between the bedroom where I slept and the bathroom was a long, dark corridor. That hallway was definitely a place that you didn’t want to explore at night. After dusk, creepy critters seemed to be everywhere.
My cousin Louie, who was about a year older than me, lived with Big Mama, too. He was there because he didn’t get along with his stepfather. We both shared a room with twin beds with my grandmother. She’d sleep on one narrow bed; the two of us cousins slept together on the other. Big Mama’s adult children occupied the other bedrooms, while Brenda slept in the front bedroom where my grandfather had died. Since his death, Big Mama had never been able to sleep there again.
At night, Big Mama fell asleep to some kind of talk radio, which she kept at high volume. Louis and I would just lie there in that overheated room with her, eventually crashing from sheer exhaustion. But the radio’s messages crept in: what we heard over and over was a parade of white guys forecasting doom, predicting complete catastrophe. There was always some world-threatening political, economic, or environmental crisis going on.
At the time, much of the news centered around the horrors of Vietnam, the Watergate crisis at the White House, and the Arab oil embargo. It scared me at first. I became anxious about the stuff they were predicting, fearing overwhelming disaster of one sort or another. I wondered how we would survive. Soon, however, I got desensitized. I realized that nothing was really changing, that the supposedly imminent apocalypse never really materialized. Our neighborhood was in a process of slow decline, but we weren’t exactly getting nuked or overrun by communists. I began to tune those kinds of thoughts out. Oddly enough, this forced immersion in bad news and doom-mongering ultimately made me somewhat optimistic, as well as boosting my skeptical thinking.
Louie was also a good influence in many ways. He was a genius at math: the only kid in the neighborhood that I knew who was in advanced classes. I didn’t like it when other kids knew more than I did or were better at something than I was, so I kept an eye on what he was studying and even asked him questions about math from time to time. I’d check out the covers of his textbooks, get the names of the teachers he liked. I wanted to be prepared.
Everything around me seemed to reward competition and competitiveness—from organized sports to the games we played on the streets, even board games. From top to bottom, I saw a culture of competition, not only at school and in terms of work but also even in romantic relationships and between family members. Winning matters; nothing is worse than being a loser. I got this message virtually everywhere. It dominated both the mores of the mainstream and of the hood.
Consequently, I wanted to ensure I was a winner in every way that seemed accessible. For example, though I almost always played on losing sports teams, I was also clearly the star of my team—so those losses didn’t bother me as much. In math, I wanted to be ready to learn what Louie had learned when I got to his classes the following year, because I wanted to be at least as good as he was. If there was a way that I could win—or even just show that I was capable of winning—I wanted to find it.
A skinny kid who was short like I was, Louie didn’t excel at football or basketball, which were the sports I preferred, but he could play baseball. He was a pitcher and was pretty good, too, so long as he wore his glasses. His coach would make him put them on; otherwise he didn’t like to wear them. He didn’t want to be seen as a geek. But his aversion to geekiness didn’t have the roots you might expect. Kids like us didn’t automatically opt out of competing for academic excellence, even though it may have
My cousin Louie, who was about a year older than me, lived with Big Mama, too. He was there because he didn’t get along with his stepfather. We both shared a room with twin beds with my grandmother. She’d sleep on one narrow bed; the two of us cousins slept together on the other. Big Mama’s adult children occupied the other bedrooms, while Brenda slept in the front bedroom where my grandfather had died. Since his death, Big Mama had never been able to sleep there again.
At night, Big Mama fell asleep to some kind of talk radio, which she kept at high volume. Louis and I would just lie there in that overheated room with her, eventually crashing from sheer exhaustion. But the radio’s messages crept in: what we heard over and over was a parade of white guys forecasting doom, predicting complete catastrophe. There was always some world-threatening political, economic, or environmental crisis going on.
At the time, much of the news centered around the horrors of Vietnam, the Watergate crisis at the White House, and the Arab oil embargo. It scared me at first. I became anxious about the stuff they were predicting, fearing overwhelming disaster of one sort or another. I wondered how we would survive. Soon, however, I got desensitized. I realized that nothing was really changing, that the supposedly imminent apocalypse never really materialized. Our neighborhood was in a process of slow decline, but we weren’t exactly getting nuked or overrun by communists. I began to tune those kinds of thoughts out. Oddly enough, this forced immersion in bad news and doom-mongering ultimately made me somewhat optimistic, as well as boosting my skeptical thinking.
Louie was also a good influence in many ways. He was a genius at math: the only kid in the neighborhood that I knew who was in advanced classes. I didn’t like it when other kids knew more than I did or were better at something than I was, so I kept an eye on what he was studying and even asked him questions about math from time to time. I’d check out the covers of his textbooks, get the names of the teachers he liked. I wanted to be prepared.
Everything around me seemed to reward competition and competitiveness—from organized sports to the games we played on the streets, even board games. From top to bottom, I saw a culture of competition, not only at school and in terms of work but also even in romantic relationships and between family members. Winning matters; nothing is worse than being a loser. I got this message virtually everywhere. It dominated both the mores of the mainstream and of the hood.
Consequently, I wanted to ensure I was a winner in every way that seemed accessible. For example, though I almost always played on losing sports teams, I was also clearly the star of my team—so those losses didn’t bother me as much. In math, I wanted to be ready to learn what Louie had learned when I got to his classes the following year, because I wanted to be at least as good as he was. If there was a way that I could win—or even just show that I was capable of winning—I wanted to find it.
A skinny kid who was short like I was, Louie didn’t excel at football or basketball, which were the sports I preferred, but he could play baseball. He was a pitcher and was pretty good, too, so long as he wore his glasses. His coach would make him put them on; otherwise he didn’t like to wear them. He didn’t want to be seen as a geek. But his aversion to geekiness didn’t have the roots you might expect. Kids like us didn’t automatically opt out of competing for academic excellence, even though it may have
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