High Price (29 page)

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 nicotine 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.

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.

T
he 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.

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.