High Price (5 page)

True, one of my uncles had been shot to death while sitting on the toilet in the bathroom of a club, an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that was unusual and it happened far away from our home. That kind of violence didn’t haunt our neighborhood. While we didn’t live in the Miami of postcard-perfect beaches and Art Deco hotels, our block was clean and tidy. It was occupied by hardworking strivers, the type who sought above all to be respectable.

Afterward, however, although my mom kept us out of the actual projects until 1980 when I was in high school, we moved about once a year and often lived in neighborhoods that were dominated by entrenched poverty and the knot of problems associated with it.

Of course, before, there were also those fights and the fear and the running to the neighbors to call the police. Before, the chaos for us was mainly in our home; after, it was everywhere. And no one bothered to explain it all to us. There was no sitting the children down and telling us, “Mommy and Daddy still love you but we can’t live together.” My parents weren’t much on explanations in general. They lived in a world where you learned by example, not by explanation. You were told what to do, not why, and that was it. You figured it out or you looked like a fool. There wasn’t time for childish questions or wondering.

Consequently, when I learned later about research comparing the spare verbal landscape of American childhood poverty to the richer linguistic precincts of the middle class, it really resonated with me. The classic study by Todd Risley and Betty Hart compared the number of words heard by children of professional, working-class, and welfare families, focusing specifically on the way parents talked to their kids.

It was painstaking research: the researchers followed babies in forty-two families from age seven months to three years. The families were drawn from three socioeconomic classes: middle-class professionals, working-class people, and people on welfare. The researchers spent at least thirty-six hours with each family, recording their speech and observing parent-children interactions. They counted the number of words spoken to the child and described the content of the conversations.

The researchers found that families headed by professionals—whether black or white—spent more time encouraging their children, explaining the world to them, and listening to and responding specifically to their questions. For every discouraging word or “No!” there were about five words of praise or encouragement. Verbal interactions were mainly pleasant, enjoyable, or neutral. In the working-class homes, there were also more “attaboys” than prohibitions, though the ratio was smaller. But in the families on welfare, children heard two “noes” or “don’ts” for every positive expression. Their verbal experience overall was much more punitive.

During my earliest childhood, my family did not receive what was then called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (or welfare as we knew it before President Clinton). But we did do so after the divorce. Moreover, my mother had dropped out of high school in ninth grade. And so her educational background made our home more similar to the welfare group linguistically. MH’s relatives—her mother and sisters Dot, Eva, and Louise, who also helped raise us—shared the same disrupted and scanty education. After the divorce, when she returned to Florida, my mother was overwhelmed, with so many children to support. She worked long hours, and so just having the time to do more than discipline us if we got out of hand was almost impossible. My father also faded out of my life as I grew toward adolescence and beyond.

Hence, unlike those growing up in more privileged families, we were brushed back more than we were praised. That may have ultimately helped me to thrive in the critical, skeptical world of science—but at first, it probably didn’t do much for my linguistic development.

Even more stunning was the difference Hart and Risley found in the total number of unique words directed at the poorest children. On average, the professionals’ children heard 2,153 different words each hour spoken to them, while the children of welfare parents heard only 616. Before they’d even spent a second in a classroom, the children of professionals had heard 30 million more words than the children on welfare and had many times more positive verbal interactions with adults. Several other studies confirm these findings in terms of the impact of parental education, style of communication with children, and vocabulary on early language learning and readiness for school.
¹
Less conspicuous factors like children’s exposure to a broad or limited vocabulary and to varying amounts of linguistic encouragement and discouragement can do far more than obvious scapegoats like drugs to influence their futures.

There is little doubt that I was affected early on by my mother’s lack of formal education and the limited vocabulary that was used in my home and by most of the people around me. They couldn’t teach me what they didn’t know. Nonetheless, I did learn many critical skills from them, among them the ability to listen, to patiently observe, and to be aware of myself. I learned to read other people, to pay attention to body language, tone of voice—all types of nonverbal cues. Data from recent studies show that children from working-class backgrounds like mine have greater empathy: they are both better able to read other people’s emotions and more likely to respond kindly to them.
²

As we’ll see throughout this book, what look like disadvantages from one perspective may be advantages from another—and ways of knowing and responding may be advantageous and adaptive in one environment and disadvantageous and disruptive in another. Much of my life has been spent trying to negotiate the different reactions and requirements of the world I came from and the one I live in now. Over time, I had to become fluent in several different languages, including the often-nonverbal vernacular of my home and the street, mainstream English, and the highly technical language of neuroscience.

It wasn’t long, however, before I began to appreciate what mainstream language could do for me. My awareness of what I was missing rose gradually, from an initial sense that the teachers were almost speaking a foreign tongue when I started school to a flickering awakening to the possibilities that a greater vocabulary and education more generally might offer over time. One incident stands out in my mind. Though most of my primary and secondary educational experiences were dismal, one seventh-grade teacher took an interest in me. She was about twenty-five, with long straight hair, caramel-colored skin, and full lips—one of the few black teachers at Henry D. Perry Middle School and a woman who could get any twelve-year-old boy’s attention.

New to teaching, she was on a mission to inspire the black students, to get us to see the importance of academic achievement. Some of the other black teachers tried to protect us by toughening us up and lowering our expectations to reduce what they saw as inevitable future disappointment, but she saw it differently. She taught me the word
sarcastic
, and I remember practicing spelling it and using it at home.

Before that, the only way I’d been able to express the idea of sarcasm was in phrases like “you trying to be funny?” but here was one word that captured a complex, specific idea. Rap music would soon add cool new words like
copacetic
to my life. But it wasn’t until I joined the air force and began taking college courses that I fully recognized the power of language.

In my neighborhood, I think our conversations were restricted mainly by our limited vocabulary and inability to pronounce certain words. I remember being embarrassed when I learned from a white high school classmate that the correct pronunciation for the word
whore
was not “ho.” Also, I, as well as most of my family, had great difficulties pronouncing words beginning with
str
. For example, I would pronounce the word
straight
as “scrate.”

As a result, verbal exchanges in my neighborhood were minimized. Someone might not even reply to a greeting or question, simply looking up and nodding respect with a hint of eye contact or signaling negation with a small, almost imperceptible turn of the head. These signals were all much more subtle than the language. They weren’t appreciated or often even recognized at all by mainstream America.

Consequently, my confidence rose when I began to work to expand my vocabulary: I could take charge when I knew more mainstream apt and apposite words. I soon recognized the sheer power that precise language could give me. It was liberating, even exhilarating at times. But as a child, of course, I didn’t know what I wasn’t being exposed to.

I did learn early on to observe and pay attention before I spoke. Growing up, the worst thing of all was to look foolish or uncool: it was best to stay quiet unless you were absolutely sure you were right. Being strong and silent meant that you never looked stupid. Even if I didn’t care much then about being seen as smart by teachers, I certainly cared about not looking dumb, especially in front of friends. Always, I had to be cool.

Another study also captures some key differences between my family of origin and my current family. Sociologist Annette Lareau and her team spent two years studying twelve families, comparing middle-class blacks and whites to poor people of both races. Families were visited twenty times in a month for three hours per visit. The researchers found that middle-class parents—again, both black and white—focused intensely on their children.

In a parenting style that Lareau labeled “concerted cultivation,” these families built and scheduled their lives around activities aimed at “enriching” the children’s experience—organized sports, music lessons, extracurricular activities linked to school, and so on. Parents constantly spoke to their children and paid attention to their responses, encouraging them to ask questions if they felt anything was unclear or if they were simply curious. Discipline did not involve corporal punishment and was almost exclusively conducted through verbal exchanges: the main idea was to teach moral reasoning, not just obedience.

In fact, children were encouraged to see themselves as worthy of having an opinion in adult conversations and to interact with authorities as though they deserved to be respected as equals (or at least, future equals). They were urged to express their opinions and argue their positions even in disciplinary matters—and these were arguments that they might, by making a particularly strong case, actually win. But their daily life was also highly scheduled and exhausting, at the cost of time spent with relatives or friends.

Life in working-class families like mine was very different. Lareau called their parenting style “the accomplishment of natural growth,” and it was based on different assumptions about children. The idea was not to “perfect” children and ensure that their talents were discovered and honed. Rather, children were seen as naturally growing into what they would become, without a constant need for adult direction.

Consequently, children were not the main focus of adult attention. As in my family, children were expected to learn by watching and doing; verbal explanation was not especially important. One of MH’s favorite admonishments was “Get out of grown folks’ business!” She didn’t see herself as a guide introducing us to that world; it was a separate sphere we would figure out how to enter soon enough. So, when we got attention, it was usually for doing something wrong. Then, physical punishments were often meted out.

The use of corporal punishment during my childhood began after the divorce. At that time, we were disciplined harshly and with little chance for appeal or excuses—that was “back talk” or being “hardheaded,” not moral reasoning. And it could make it all worse if you tried it while you were on the receiving end of a beating. We got whipped with belts, tree branches, and the cord on the iron. This was a common occurrence until I was about fourteen and started threatening to hit my mother back. But long before that point, it was made clear that in our world, obedience was what mattered and was valued.

Children where I grew up and in Lareau’s working-class sample spent most of their time outside of school in unstructured activity, usually playing with cousins and siblings outdoors. Older children were expected to care for younger ones. And adults and other authorities were seen as sources of power, to be respected and feared, not confronted. If we were going to disobey, we learned rapidly to cover our tracks.

Both of these parenting styles have their advantages, Lareau found (although I should note that she did not look at families that used corporal punishment as severe as in my family after my parents split). The middle-class way was not, as some might expect, superior all around. The working-class children were often happier and better behaved. They were much closer to their extended families and were full of energy. They mostly did as they were told. They knew how to entertain themselves and were rarely bored. They were more adept at relationships.

The middle-class youth, however, were much more prepared for school and far better situated to deal with adult authorities. They could speak up for themselves and use well-crafted arguments to come to conclusions more skillfully. This elaborated way of thinking also helped them better make plans that required multiple steps. Essentially, they were more prepared for success in the American mainstream than the working-class children were. And this was true regardless of whether they were black or white. Through this parenting style, middle-class children were being trained to lead, whether intentionally or not.

Meanwhile, the poor and working class were being trained for life on the bottom. Middle-class children were constantly being taught explicitly to advocate for themselves with authorities, while the lower classes were taught to submit without question. Or, if they were going to resist, the poor learned by experience to do so covertly, not openly.

Indeed, covert resistance permeated my early life so thoroughly that it was as natural as breathing. Even today, I feel uneasy and disconnected when I have to do something like pay an outrageously overpriced bill for cable TV or parking. Part of me still thinks that paying full price is for those who don’t have a friend who can cut them a special deal. It has taken me several years to begrudgingly accept the fact that I am indeed out of touch with the part of life that was once defined by getting the inside deals.