Caste systems are rigid social structures where a person’s culture, job opportunities, social status, neighborhood, income, and life expectancy are all determined by their birth status. In America’s caste system, to be born poor is to be in the lowest caste, whereas to be born poor and black means you’re an outcast. A ‘broke nigga’ in America is the equivalent of an untouchable in India. We love to talk about the American Dream, the idea that anyone in this country can make it to the top if they work hard enough, but the reality in America has been a lot more nightmarish. Our nation was built on an inescapable social hierarchy, with slavery as its foundation. Quite the opposite of allowing anyone to make it; being born with a drop of color in your skin ensured a life of servitude for more than four hundred years. Of course, things have improved, but not to the level Americans assume. The US falls behind Singapore, Austria, Japan, Ireland, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Lithuania, and a host of other countries in terms of social mobility measured by the World Economic Forum. This means where you start in America is typically where you’ll finish, especially if you’re born poor. And it should come as no surprise that social mobility for black boys born in America is by far the lowest of any demographic. When you’re poor, you’re taught to navigate welfare systems. You know how much money you can earn before you lose your housing
voucher. You know to make sure there are no adult males at your house if the housing authority visits. The systems are intended to keep poor people subservient and mired in poverty. You exert all your mental energy arguing with government bureaucrats that see you as subhuman rather than trying to see through the wool the system has placed over your eyes. You have many questions, but there are no good answers. You wonder things like, “Why are we supposed to take the lowest-paying jobs?” “How am I ever supposed to get out of poverty while making $10 an hour?” If you’re hoping a higher education will be your salvation, you ask yourself, “How am I supposed to pay $50,000 a year for college?” “How am I supposed to compete academically with kids hiring full-time tutors for every subject?” And as I got older, I asked myself, “How am I supposed to build capital when I have no money?” For most people living in poverty, the fact is, you can’t win. The game is rigged in ways that few poor people can even fathom, especially given the state of our public education system. Because of this, they focus on what they know—they focus on navigating poverty. I was one of the very few that had a realistic opportunity to escape, and that’s because I had my brain, my mother, and my teachers. Academic success came easily to me in those early years. My mother noticed and did everything she could to get us into better schools with more challenging curricula. In third grade, we moved into one of the best school districts in the city. Although we lived in one of the poorest corners of the district, that decision changed my life. Going to school there felt like I was being skipped ahead by two grades. The children at the new school were asked to think and I liked that. I adjusted to the higher expectations and performed exceptionally well, but I was soon back to feeling bored in class and in need of greater academic challenges. I had little patience in those days and always wanted to work at warp speed. I’d finish my work early, get bored, and start fidgeting and chatting with those around me who hadn’t yet completed their assignments (the most trouble I ever got into). Luckily, my teachers didn’t slap me with a attention deficit disorder label and try to medicate me into obedience as
CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 17 is done to many young children across America. The teachers saw that I needed bigger challenges and adjusted where they could, allowing me to take advanced courses and do independent study projects that stretched my limits. I often felt bored with school, but being bored at one of the best schools in the state meant I had a future. In that new school district, I began to realize how much life in my neighborhood was different from that of my classmates. My school peers were solidly middle class at a minimum. They’d never eaten mustard sandwiches. They weren’t at all familiar with the rules and guidelines of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), or the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8). My classmates had never been to a neighborhood like mine. Most never would. They didn’t have incarcerated family members or friends. Cops never harassed them. They never had their electricity or water turned off. It’s an understatement to say the new school was a culture shock for me, but I was able to experience some of the advantages of wealth, namely access to a better education in the new school district, safety, and higher expectations. Yet, I was still an outsider, and many of the perks were still beyond my reach. I loved basketball almost as much as school, but you needed to pay $60 a year to play on organized teams. Since we didn’t have that kind of extra money lying around, and we didn’t have a car to get to practices or games, I was unable to participate. That was about the time when I began to understand that money was intrinsically linked to quality of life. For a kid, having at least a little money meant being able to play organized sports, learning how to play a musical instrument, and getting to go on school trips. While not having any disposable income at all meant sitting on the sidelines, watching wealthier kids enjoy those (and other) opportunities. To have a chance at living life instead of watching others do it, I hustled kids on the basketball court, sold candy, washed cars, mowed
lawns, fixed houses—anything to keep from being poor and on the bottom of the ladder. I always had some entrepreneurial plan percolating at the back of my mind. I used my earnings from selling newspaper subscriptions to buy packs of gel pens, which I’d then sell individually for a small profit to the kids at school. As I became more business savvy, I started letting other kids sell the pens for me, thereby increasing my sales base. In low-income neighborhoods, high-paying job opportunities don’t exist. You don’t have relatives to call on that can get you interviews. You can’t go work for your father’s construction company or your mother’s medical practice. All that tends to be available are minimum wage jobs, like collecting carts from grocery store parking lots, working a cash register, or selling drugs (usually not making much more than minimum wage with a lot more risk). Or maybe you decide to rob and steal for your dignity rather than languishing away, waiting for the manager of some dead-end job to call you in for an interview. That’s not how things worked for kids in my advanced classes. Their parents were doctors, lawyers, accountants, or worked in some other well-paying profession. Those kids never came to school hungry, never saw an eviction notice on their doors, and never watched all the men in their lives get carted off to jail for trying to feed their families. They began their lives with opportunity, and the world both expected them to succeed and ensured they did. Economic mobility is mostly a myth. In a merit-based world, how much money your parents make would have nothing to do with your future income. Everyone’s talent and drive would determine their lot in society. We can ignore for a moment the absurdity of assuming someone’s IQ or vertical leap should determine whether they have a warm place to sleep at night and food in their belly, as a meritocracy would warrant. We don’t live in a merit-based society in America: we are an aristocracy. In America, your zip code tells you nearly everything you need to know about what will happen in your life. First, your zip-code determines how your neighborhood will be policed, and whether you’ll be born with
CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 19 a parent—most likely your father—incarcerated. Your zip code will tell you what job opportunities your parents have (or don’t), whether they have any formal education they can pass onto you, how high their stress levels are, how clean and safe your streets will be, and whether you’ll go to bed and school hungry. None of this is your choosing or your fault, but it’s your fate nonetheless. Second, our schools are funded based on property taxes. So the quality of our education, the primary way that we think of moving up in American society, is determined by how expensive of a home our parents can afford. Of course, the worst performing schools are almost universally in the poorest neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods with the highest performing public schools cost the most to live in. Nothing is more important for student achievement than teacher quality, and the teachers in low-income communities are asked to teach students facing the greatest difficulties while receiving the lowest pay. It’s no surprise then that the best teachers often wind up at the wealthiest schools. Third, social networks determine financial success. As the old adage goes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And when you’re poor, you tend to only know poor people. Having friends in low places doesn’t get you very far in a fiercely competitive business environment. Wealthy children go to wealthy schools from kindergarten onwards, often paying as much as $60,000 a year on tuition for K-12 schooling. I never quite understood this until I bluntly asked a good friend’s dad why he was willing to pay so much money for his kids’ educations when there were free public schools that were academically rigorous in neighborhoods he could easily afford to live in. “Darryl, I’m a businessman,” he began as he grasped my shoulder. “When I go watch the kids play sports, I’m always sitting next to two other parents who can afford to pay $60,000 a year for their kids to finger paint.” The networking alone made the price tag worthwhile. When you’ve been having playdates with the CEO of Apple’s kids since you were toddlers, getting that first job out of college in Cupertino isn’t so hard.
Fourth, and the most ignored in American society, your zip code determines how much wealth you’ll inherit. Wealth is incredibly unevenly distributed in America and the world. If the human population were one hundred people, two would have half of the wealth. We speak mostly about wealthy people being self-made, but that’s hardly ever the case. The vast majority of wealthy people aren’t famous, don’t want to be on any public ranking lists, and they inherited their wealth. Capitalism is called that because of the absolute importance of owning capital in the system. Your zip code will determine if you inherit $50 million from your parents or debt and funeral costs. Nothing determines your long-term financial outcomes more than inheritance— not even close. It takes money to make money, as they say. And when you’re born rich, the interest on your inheritance will generate more money while you’re still in your diapers than most poor people will earn in their lifetimes. When I explain these unfortunate truths, people often get angry. “So, are you saying there’s no hope for poor kids?” No, there is hope, just not in the ways people assume. Yes, exceptional people will have an opportunity to reach levels of incredible wealth in America. But the vast majority of us aren’t LeBron James, and don’t possess extreme talents that society puts a high value on (being the kindest friend, best mother, best tomato picker, etc. won’t lead to any financial wealth). We shouldn’t be designing society just for the—by definition, few—humans who have rare skills. Instead, we should aim for a society where everyone has the basics, and those that want to invest the energy can have the opportunity to receive exceptional rewards. The answer is not for us to fight for a single seat at the table. We just need more chairs. Our current system is designed for the rich to stay rich and the poor to stay poor. We point to the few instances when someone goes from rags to riches to mask the fact that for the vast majority of us, if you’re born in rags, you’ll die in rags. I began to develop two separate personas as I continued to straddle
CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 21 the different worlds of wealth and poverty at school and at home. I heard people say that money couldn’t buy you happiness, but I knew it could buy fresh food, a car, a bus pass, access to healthcare, books, a graphic calculator, a computer, or an instrument to learn music—all things we typically can’t afford as poor Americans. Given the consequences of being on the bottom of a cruel, hierarchical world, like any rational poor person, I decided to do whatever it took to get my hands on some capital, social or financial.