While the economic consequences of America’s caste system are obvious, the social and psychological damages done by it are hidden. Humans make mental associations all the time. A snake, for example, is not intrinsically good or bad. In some cultures, people associate snakes with treachery, while in others, the serpent represents health and vitality. Because of these very different mental associations, people in these two types of cultures will have polar opposite emotional responses when you show them an identical picture of a snake. In America, greed is good. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of wealth and its associated status in a materialistic society. Exorbitant wealth is seen not only as good, but as the ultimate good. And since wealth is good, by association, anyone with wealth is also good. When society values Birkin bags, if you’re rich, you buy one of those and reap the positive associations people have with that bag. If fashion shifts and people now value rare jewels, you can buy those too. Paintings, names on buildings, stolen cultural artifacts, exotic animals, land, whatever is the new thing to love, a wealthy person can buy it, and people will associate that ‘good’ thing with wealthy people. If wealth enables you to buy whatever material item is being idolized at the moment, then being wealthy in and of itself becomes holy.
Fancy clothes are good, and I have fancy clothes. Expensive cars are good, and I have expensive cars. Mansions are good, and I have three. If I have all of these ‘good’ things, then by association, I must be good too. And if I have the most things, then I must be the best person. In America, we worship the rich because we worship things, and rich people have all the things. Rich people are good by definition—good in a materialistic society. The opposite is also true. If having expensive things means you’re good, then not having expensive things means you’re, at best, not good. Personality traits are not the social currency, so being emotionally available, dependable, or patient pale in comparison to being rich. You struggle to feel special or unique in any way. When character is valued less than things, then the inherent diversity and uniqueness of us all gets ignored, leaving the vast majority of society members feeling basic, uninteresting, and unloved. You aren’t bad per se, just not good. For poor people, the consequences of living in a materialistic society are damning. While not having expensive things isn’t good, causing someone to have less things is downright bad. Poor people living in absolute poverty (defined as having insufficient means of purchasing food, clothing, shelter, or transportation) have needs, not things. If you befriend a poor person, they’re likely to ask you for help quite often, as they can’t provide their families with the essentials for human life. This means you’ll have less material wealth as you socialize with more poor people. The Bible summarizes the plight of the poor perfectly with the proverb, “The poor are despised even by their neighbors, while the rich have many friends.”1 When you’re poor in a materialistic society, you are bad. The psychological harm caused by having your being defined as bad in society is often insurmountable. Despising humans because of attributes assigned to them by birth is nothing new. However, blatant bigotry based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality is universally condemned in 1 Proverbs 14:20
CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 25 mainstream American society (at least publicly. Behind closed doors we still have a long way to go). Blasting the poor as filthy, lazy vermin is still very much in vogue. “I’ve got a plan to end poverty,” announced a highly educated, very wealthy man sitting next to me at dinner. Given that I’d just mentioned my efforts to end poverty, I was interested in hearing his pitch. “It’s called the Zamboni plan,” he continued. “I take a Zamboni and run over all the homeless people in America.” He found his joke quite funny, and a few others joined him with a chuckle. The rest simply pretended as if nothing was said and moved on to the next topic. Suggesting at the dinner table that we commit genocide on the poor did not elicit even the slightest reprimand from this group of successful, well-mannered professionals educated in the most elite universities across the country. He never would have been allowed to say that about gay people or Mexicans, but it was perfectly acceptable to say about the poor and homeless. In elementary school, I became painfully aware of my poverty and was afraid it showed. I tried to change how I spoke, dressed, and behaved so I didn’t appear to belong to that class of people that everyone spoke so badly about. You know, those people. We hate poor people in America, so I learned to hate myself and those around me for being born poor. When poverty is despised, then anything associated with poor people is automatically categorized as bad in the collective cultural mind. Imagine feeling like everything about your culture—the way you dress, the food you eat, the way you speak, the home you live in, your hairstyles, your name, your hygiene, your etiquette, your humor—were all bad and something to be ashamed of. Unless you embrace the ‘badness’ of your clan, adopting a counter-culture mentality, your chances of having any genuine self-esteem are nil. The chest-pounding and violent posturing stereotypical of impoverished communities are typically little more than cries of mercy from a young man or woman begging to be valued, to be seen and loved as a human being. As a child, I didn’t understand all of this, so I hated my community
as much as the next person. I bought into the American narrative that we were all poor because we were somehow not good enough or not working hard enough. I told myself I was going to work my way out. I was going to matter. I saw how people looked at me when I told them where I lived or when they learned that my family didn’t own a car. I was humiliated whenever I slipped and let my poverty show, and it stung when I thought others noticed. I wanted out. I decided to master this rich, noticeably white world and prove my worth. I tried to advance socially in the obvious ways—being exceptional so people assumed someday my existence would matter. I leaned into being smart and worked on becoming more athletic. But any of these positive traits would be negated if I was seen as being poor, so I hid it the best I could. I never let kids from class come over to my apartment to study or hang out. I always pretended to live a few blocks down the street in a nicer neighborhood when being dropped off. At school, I waited until the lunch lines were empty so the other kids didn’t notice my free lunch card. I started to care about brand names, but there was no way I could afford them. “I want the new Penny Hardaway shoes,” I told my mother, completely unaware that these plastic sneakers cost $175. “Sure, if they have them at PayLess,” she replied as we walked to the store to buy my school shoes for the year. That wasn’t a no! Which was rare in those days when I asked for something. You can imagine my devastation when the lady working in the store reached down, rubbed my head, and gently told me, “We don’t carry name-brand shoes here.” We went home with cheap knockoffs. And the teasing started immediately when I got to school, most of it coming from other poor kids. We were taught to hate ourselves and were vicious in enforcing the rule amongst each other. I hid the hurt, as always, and responded with jabs about their tattered clothes or dirty homes as was the custom. We hardened each other with cruel humor and wit. The words that really hurt, we buried those deep in our psyche and
CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 27 hobbled on. I didn’t make the mistake of buying imitation brands again. In the future, I’d go to Value City or T.J. Maxx to find discounted clothing due to some minor manufacturing defect to appear middle class. Still, I treated my shoes with the utmost care, knowing I couldn’t afford a new pair any time soon. At least those didn’t have any holes like my old pair. Of course, everyone knew that I was poor, but at least helped me pretend they didn’t know. Youth is all about building confidence. It’s impossible to do so when you feel your defining characteristic, being poor, is inherently bad. In American society, status is mostly about material wealth. When you have no money, all you can do is create false signals to appear well-off (or at least not as poor as you truly are) to have a shred of self-esteem. School was no longer fun; academic success became my way of achieving dignity and self-worth. Learning no longer had intrinsic value. It was a means to an end, a way to shake off the stench of poverty. I became increasingly self-conscious. I spent more and more time thinking about how others viewed me instead of doing the inner work to understand who I was as a person, what brought me joy, and how to show up for others. I still cared about people and expressed that through friendship, giving, volunteering in the community, and so on. But the purity was gone. I started a decade-long journey of whitewashing the poverty from my skin to metamorphose into a full-fledged human being. I clearly had a gift for learning. I made straight A’s with relative ease and won the respect of my classmates. Unlike in my neighborhood, where few people saw examples of how excellence in the classroom could lead to financial wealth, my schoolmates had the importance of academics pounded into their heads from day one. They weren’t any smarter than my friends at home, but they were better trained. And they knew that if they made it through college, they’d at least end up as well off as their parents were. With them, academic achievement was a badge of respect because of how it predicted future wealth. I learned that regardless of the economic class you were born into, the
average person is, well, average. If you started off life poor and you were average, you stayed poor. Graduating from high school didn’t guarantee anything and, most of the kids in my neighborhood didn’t know anyone who’d gone to college. We looked around us and saw poverty, that begot poverty, that begot even more poverty. For a poor kid of average abilities there was no hope of escaping it, so why would they waste their time trying? The middle-class kids often had parents with some sort of trade skill. Their parents were plumbers, electricians, teachers, etc. Their families weren’t dealing with the stress of just trying to make ends meet. Those kids had examples of what a relatively burden-free life could be, and how to get there. The average middle-class kids knew they’d stay middle class. They just had to ensure they at least graduated from high school to obtain that lifestyle, which they mostly did. The rich kids were a different breed altogether. They were born on top and knew they would stay on top. Average or below average, it didn’t matter. They would inherit their parents’ wealth and could do as they pleased. They still had a pecking order and competition among themselves, but there was less room for them to move up, so they tended to be a less ambitious bunch. Americans, ironically, have this narrative about poor people being poor because they’re ‘lazy,’ but I always found the rich kids to be the laziest by far. And well, they could be. They had so much help and support, there was no chance they wouldn’t make it to college. Drug habits just meant a stint in rehab. They really had to try hard to end up not rich. For those kids, social status was mostly inherited. If your family had the most money, then you were the most popular. Everyone had some money and some status, so the tension caused by the lack of basic human necessities wasn’t present. In my new school, kids didn’t use violence as a tool to work out their differences. Words and ostracizing were their weapons of choice. They would gossip about each other, stop talking to someone who upset them for a few weeks or spread nasty rumors. No one ever got beaten up or killed for any of that. It was just kids emotionally
CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 29 abusing one another for status. Their problems and in-fighting seemed trivial to me, but that was my new world, and I had to adjust. If I could deal with the problems of poverty at home, then I could play their social games at school. Knowing I’d never be valued by the rich kids caught up in the money game, I gravitated toward the nerds and the athletes. My athletic abilities were nowhere near my intellectual gifts, but I figured I might as well hedge my bets. It also didn’t hurt that my friends at home valued athletics and the potential riches sport could bring, so by doing well at both school and sports, I’d be able to be ‘good’ in both worlds. I didn’t grow up with money, but I had several extreme advantages in my ascent from poverty. I could effortlessly absorb huge amounts of information, and I loved to learn. I had a mother that cared about education, and I went to a great school. I had very bright siblings who were able to teach and protect me. School was clearly my ticket out. I decided to be a doctor. I liked the predictability and structure of science and wanted the wealth and prestige that came with being a physician in the US. Adults all nodded in approval when I said I wanted to be a pediatric cardiologist. I’d help kids and make tons of money doing it. It was a lofty goal, but practical enough. My dream, though, was basketball. Despite my athletic skills being nowhere near my academic abilities, it was hard to resist the allure of someday being a pro athlete. I have a genuine love for basketball that still lives in me to this day, but I’d be lying if I said the wealth and status that came along with being a professional athlete weren’t major motivations for me back then. The media mostly provides kids like me with grossly unrealistic examples of people that started off with nothing and went on to make hundreds of millions of dollars in professional sports. A total of only sixty players worldwide are drafted into the National Basketball Association every year, even though over half a million kids will play high school basketball in the US—nearly every one of those kids believes they’ll go pro.
I know I did. Kids in poor communities countrywide bet their lives on an outcome with a lower probability than winning the lottery. And the adults encourage it. There are far more adults willing to mentor and nurture excellent athletes than there are who want to develop excellent students. That’s because we value athletics as a society over intelligence. So, despite my obvious advantages, all I really wanted to do was be like Mike. All of this was magnified post-puberty. Suddenly, social status meant even more as we all began jockeying for partners. When I finally got old enough to play for school teams (you don’t usually pay to play at your school), some great coaches took me under their wings. I’d always worked hard in school, but in sports, I had to push myself even further because I wasn’t the most talented, and I had a very late start with high-level, organized sports. From my playground days, I was a better basketball player than most kids my age, but high school basketball in Indiana is a different monster. And my high school was a perennial powerhouse—one of the top basketball teams in the nation. I had to scratch and claw just to make the team. The feedback loop was incredibly positive and being poor didn’t matter all that much anymore. I got way more love and attention for playing basketball than I ever did for my scholastic achievements, and I bathed it in. Girls liked me, teachers wanted to talk to me about our games, even strangers stopped me in the grocery store to ask for an autograph or to share their analysis of last week’s game. Finally, I’d stumbled into a bit of social capital. I started to stand up straight, speak more directly, and felt a sense of pride in who I’d become. I felt I was earning my humanity. I poured everything into being a student-athlete, getting up at 5:00 a.m. to work out before school, and staying up until midnight to finish my homework. I say this not to encourage others to follow in my footsteps, but to point out how absurdly difficult it is to make it out of poverty in America, even when you have huge advantages like a high IQ, great teachers and coaches, and a 6’3” frame.
CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 31 We had outstanding basketball and weight training coaches and athletic trainers. Follow the dollars and you’ll see what a society truly cares about (the highest-paid public employee in a state is usually the head coach of the basketball or football team). Knowing all of this, I gave everything I had to mold myself into a decent player. Luckily, I had help along the way. One coach in particular constantly pushed me to my limits. He was somebody who really cared about his students as individuals and wanted us to show us that the only thing that could stop us was our own self- limiting beliefs. We didn’t believe him, of course; we knew the world wasn’t fair. But it was nice to have someone at least tell us that. With him, I’d train until I vomited, couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand up, and then train some more in a few hours. Despite me not being anywhere near the best player on our team, he invested his time in me because he saw my hunger. Because school up to that point had been relatively easy for me, basketball was the first time I ever had to dig into my inner depths. I became comfortable with pain and exhaustion. I needed to go beyond my mental boundaries just to have a chance to get on the floor. My coaches and trainers showed me what I was capable of and redefined tasks I once saw as impossible into just another good challenge. I improved drastically as a basketball player because of the investments that exceptional coach and others made in me. Years of training hard by myself were less effective than a month with these men teaching me the game. Wealthy children get this level of attention in every activity they do. Whether it’s sports, art, school, camping, or debate, they can afford world-class teachers to teach them and push them from the time they start walking and talking. Because of these incredible advantages, they significantly outperform relative to their skill levels because society invests so much more in them than we do in anyone else. As poor kids, we have to show elite promise before anyone will invest in us. As rich kids, your worth is a given.
Few people from my neighborhood had my experience of jumping from the bottom to the top tier of our local caste system. Everything went right for me in my school years. And it had to. People liked to use me as an example of the “American dream,” and I would always laugh it off. I was not naïve enough to buy into that fairy tale. I knew I was always one wrong step away from a life of poverty, and so were all my friends at home. When you’re poor, you get no second chances. If you’re caught with drugs, you get charged with intent to sell, and you’re tried in court as an adult. No questions asked. If you act out in class, no one asks what’s going on at home. You’re labeled a troublemaker and placed in remedial classes. If one of your parents gets sick, it was time to quit school and help at home. The older I got, the wider the gap between home and school grew. In the neighborhood where I lived, fighting evolved into shooting. People dropped out of school, started having kids as teenagers, and one by one lost their battles against poverty. None of my friends from class were living that life. Their biggest pressures were about upcoming tests or sporting events. And I no longer bought into the myth that hard work was the only thing that mattered. I saw proof every day that in America, the key to success in anything was being born with money. I knew if I wanted a better life, I had to be more talented and work twice as hard as my classmates who were born on second and third base. I was up for the challenge. When I learned to combine the intense work ethic I developed through sports with my natural academic gifts, there was no limit to what I could achieve in the classroom. With the help and support of so many people around me, I somehow avoided every potential landmine and pitfall I faced. Academically, I was qualified to gain entrance into every school in the country. Athletically, I was recruited by mid-level Division I programs. By that point, I knew I wasn’t on track to make it to the NBA. I just didn’t have the skills or raw athletic ability. In any endeavor, talent becomes increasingly important as you move into elite levels of competition (since
CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 33 everyone is trying to be the best, hard work only gets you so far). I’d done everything in my power to position myself to receive a full scholarship, without which I never could’ve dreamed of attending college. Then, one day, out of the blue, I got a call from a Massachusetts phone number. “Hi, Darryl? This is the men’s basketball coach from Harvard.” My days at the bottom were done.