to feel comfortable in my own skin. I’d somehow managed to become a decent basketball player on one of the top teams in the country. I worked several jobs to buy a car, go to prom, dress a little better, and eat out from time to time. I graduated with highest honors and accepted the offer to attend Harvard University on a full scholarship. I had solid footing on the ladder to success, whatever that was. Before starting my first semester at Harvard, I remember walking into Foot Locker with pride and stocking up on the oversized ‘tall t-shirts’ everyone from my neighborhood wore back then. I bought a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes—something I’d never considered splurging on before—and a pair of Timberland boots. I had to make sure I didn’t step in any of that Boston snow and ruin my new footwear. It was one of the most expensive shopping days of my life, but I was on my way to Harvard, and I wanted to look the part. I didn’t have the money to ship any of my things to Boston, so I stuffed everything I owned into two suitcases I’d won at a carnival. One of my suitcases began to burst before I even reached the airport, but I figured it would still make the trip. At the airport, I placed that suitcase on the scale with dread and it weighed fifty-three pounds. I wasn’t about to pay an extra $25 for an overweight bag, so I took out my coat and a hoodie to get it under the fifty-pound limit. It was hot, but I decided
to wear them both since I didn’t have much money to spare and didn’t intend to leave them behind. I finally landed at Boston Logan airport and knew it was the beginning of a special chapter in my life. There, I thought, I would just be a student from Indianapolis; I would no longer be defined by where I grew up. I naively figured that from there onwards, all that would determine my fate was merit and my performance in school. In which case, why would it matter where I started? After collecting my bags, I dragged them over to the Silver Line bus, and eventually got onto the “T,” Boston’s subway system. I was drenched in sweat at that point, thanks to the coat and hoodie, but I stood up the whole ride to campus, too excited to take a seat. “Harvard station,” I heard called over the intercom. It was finally my stop. I struggled past the other passengers with all my luggage and exited the subway, then made my way up the stairs. It still felt surreal. Just a few months ago I’d taken my first flight ever, when I took a short trip to St. Louis to visit Washington University. That was the first time in my life I’d been recruited. I felt wanted. My performance in academics and basketball paid for that ticket. At the time, I couldn’t imagine feeling prouder or having better prospects. There I was, about to begin my post- secondary studies at arguably the most prestigious college in the world. The moment I emerged from the subway station and turned into Harvard’s yard, my heart stopped. I saw parents everywhere, each driving the most expensive cars I’d ever seen. It never crossed my mind that this would be a family event. Kids were bringing in complete furniture sets, wardrobes, and shoe collections. I’d never seen cardigans or topsiders before, but there, they were everywhere. “Where’s your stuff?” asked one student. “Oh, it’s coming later,” I lied. Everyone on campus seemed to already know one another from boarding school. It took a little time before I realized that their asking, “Where did you go to high school?” was a subtle way of assessing my
CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 37 worth and rank. “North Central. Do you know Indianapolis?” I would answer. “No,” came the inevitable response. To many students, not going to the ‘right’ high school meant there was no reason to waste any further time speaking to me. I wasn’t elite. Fortunately, not everyone was snobbish. A few students kindly asked me to join their families for dinner once they realized I was alone. I politely declined. I appreciated the offers but wasn’t about to start being looked at as a charity case on day one. I unpacked my bags and sat there in my 250-year-old dorm room. Somehow, I’d just gotten a hundred times poorer. It seemed I was further from the top than I’d ever been. I felt bad for myself for half a second, then remembered what I’d done to get there and decided I was just as good as anyone else. I stood up, grabbed my basketball, and went to the gym. I began my meditative rituals on the court and those insecurities melted away. I wasn’t starting from scratch. I’d put in work that few humans can imagine to get there, and no one was going to tell me that I didn’t belong. I may be poor, I told myself, but I’ll be damned if I’m not elite. The first few months of college were brutal. Long before graduating from high school, I’d decided the best way I could help others would be to become a doctor. One of the biggest obstacles for poor people in the US is affordable access to healthcare. I figured as a doctor, I’d be able to practice medicine in poor communities and could serve those who needed help the most, while still earning a great salary. I also liked the idea that, as a medical professional, I might one day have a voice in shaping healthcare policy across the country. So, I’d chosen to do my premedical studies in the field of neurobiology. In the first two days of biology class, we went over everything I’d learned in my advanced placement high school courses. I couldn’t believe how fast we were going, but the other students all seemed fine with it. I asked around and soon discovered there were schools where kids are taught by college-level professors starting in the sixth grade. My
classmates had been groomed for this, while—for the first time in my life—I struggled to keep up in school. I got a C- on my first test and started questioning if Harvard had made a mistake in letting me in. On top of that, I got hit with the realities of Division I basketball. I considered myself good at the sport, but it was a whole different level of talent, and I was out of my depth. I was now playing against some of the best college players in the country—some of whom would go on to play in the NBA. Basketball at this level was a full-time job, and there I was, trying to do that and take one of the most difficult course loads available at Harvard. I foolishly started working a part-time job and signed up for a few extra-curricular activities. I didn’t have much of a choice since I needed the money and had to start building out my resume for medical school (yes, Harvard students start thinking about graduate school from day one of Freshman year). I was overwhelmed with the number of things on my plate and wasn’t performing to my expectations in anything. I needed to dig deeper. I decided I didn’t care about social life or sleep. I worked constantly. I started reading several chapters ahead in my textbooks so the material wasn’t so new to me during lectures. I worked alone in my room because there was too much socializing in the libraries. I went to office hours, saved some money to get a writing tutor, and mapped out every fifteen-minute block of time of every day so I could juggle it all. The lack of socializing didn’t bother me that first semester. I quickly realized that I didn’t fit in at all. I wore a durag, spoke with a funny accent, had extra baggy clothes, and didn’t know anything about prep schools or secret societies. Dating was also tough when the other guys all had multi-million dollar trust funds. One of the hardest things for me to adjust to was how different friendships worked at Harvard. Growing up poor, your friends were everything. They were the people you relied on to help you when things inevitably hit their worst. If you were going to get jumped in a fight,
CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 39 they’d have your back. Same went for if you really needed a place to stay when things were too crazy at home. Our problems were real, so we needed real friends to help us through them. Being poor, you couldn’t survive on your own. Friendships for rich people, I learned, aren’t like that. They have money and can buy whatever services they want, so they don’t feel like they really need people. They treat each like business associates. If someone gets into trouble, rather than coming to help, they’ll distance themselves from that person. If they get an opportunity to swap out one friend for a wealthier one, they do it in a heartbeat. They didn’t care about you, they cared about your money, access, and status. It’s a dreadfully cold and lonely world. I become guarded and defensive. I made a few friends with people who had backgrounds like my own, but I mostly kept people at a distance and stayed focused on my reason for coming to Harvard in the first place. I was there to escape poverty and to help people like me get access to a better life. That would make the nightmare of a place worthwhile. The more I got to understand it socially, the more I hated Harvard. I came close to leaving several times that first semester—at one point, I had the transfer papers filled out. But eventually, things started to click. Once we got to the point where the material was new even for the prep school kids, keeping up became a lot easier. And then before I knew it, I was helping other students grasp concepts. That first semester was without question the hardest of my life, but I stuck it out, and I had all A’s on my first college transcript at the end of the term. School never became easy, but as I learned how to master the classroom, my stress levels dropped, and I had space to work on the other aspects of my life. Academically I belonged. Socially, I was doing okay. Being an athlete helped, and I mostly stuck with the other minority students, especially those who grew up with household incomes below $1 million a year.
That gave me a start, but I knew in order to thrive there, I was going to have to figure out how to speak with a broader set of students than that. So, I started to venture out and befriend a wider variety. When I first got to Harvard, the income differentials were overwhelming. I’ll never forget the first day I agreed to go along for a group dinner. We had unlimited swipes at our dining halls, so I saw no reason to go off campus and pay for food. But dinners were a big part of socializing at school, so I decided it would be good for me to go. I figured I would only have an appetizer, so it wouldn’t cost too much. To my great surprise, when the bill came, everyone started whizzing out their credit cards to pay for the check without even giving it a glance. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My heart leapt into my throat. These kids had ordered everything under the sun and not eaten half of it, and there I was, hungry as hell, pretending to be full to save money. And now I was expected to pay for it all? I just couldn’t. I buried the shame when the waiter came to the table and asked, “Are we splitting the bill evenly?” “No, I only had an appetizer. Put ten dollars on my card, please.” I said this, then sunk into my chair, vowing to never leave the dining hall again. But things got better. Harvard pays kids a ton of money to work campus jobs. I remember calling my mom not long after I started working there. “They’re paying me $15 to move refrigerators. And they pay time and a half for overtime!” To this day, I don’t know how I did it all, but I worked at the grill and the library, I cleaned bathrooms, I had a research job, I worked at the cleaners, and I tutored other students. I made enough money to at least get myself a few pairs of loafers and some form-fitting t-shirts, and I saved enough to go on the occasional trip to New York. I even went to Puerto Rico with some friends from school. One of the best things about Harvard is that everyone there is a nerd. I gained a lot of social clout for being one of the smarter kids, despite coming from a public school. Growing up, I was just cool enough to be able to have a girlfriend and get invited to the occasional party, but in the
CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 41 land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Harvard kids were awful dancers, super awkward, and most had never even been to a party. So, I thrived. As a black man on a predominantly white campus, I was often fetishized and stereotyped when it came to dating, and although I knew that was the reason for some of the “romantic” attention I received, I ignored it. I was finally getting my self-esteem back, and I wasn’t going to let my conscience get in the way. I got invited to join social clubs and started to venture beyond the jocks and minorities. There was a lot of growth that happened during my time at Harvard, but also a lot of shrinking. I was proud of myself for going out of my comfort zone and meeting people from different countries, ethnicities, and social classes. But more and more, I became aware that no one was curious about my culture, aside from their interest in hip-hop and dance moves. We weren’t meeting one another in the middle. In my heart, I knew what was really happening. I was learning how to be white and how to be rich. My culture wasn’t worth learning about in the eyes of my classmates. I came from poverty, and that was something to be escaped, not celebrated. My previous life was summarized in that one word: poverty. And it was expected that I would shed that past and learn more ‘civilized’ ways of being. It’s nearly impossible to become the best version of yourself when you’re trying to fit into a group that, by default, will never accept you. I fought it, but slowly and surely, I began leaving my past self behind. I lost my accent. I threw away my durags. I told myself I liked super- skinny girls. Over time, I stopped wanting to simply escape poverty; I started wanting to be rich. I’d gotten a taste of what it felt like to have status and I liked it. I began a decade-long transformation that would ultimately leave me lost and wondering who the hell I’d become. I was constantly analyzing the fascinating new world I found myself in. Over time, I noticed something surprising: once you got over how
well-spoken they were, the wealthiest kids at Harvard weren’t really all that smart. This is all relative of course, but I never would have imaged the least qualified students would be the ones with the most resources. It clicked when I started learning more about their primary and secondary school experiences. Apparently, there were schools all over the country that charged $50,000 a year for kindergarten! Because private schools aren’t reliant on public funds, their curriculum isn’t limited by state-legislated mandates. Which means the standards and curriculums at those schools reach far beyond state regulations. At those schools, the teachers all have doctorate degrees. Children are free to explore at their own pace, they often don’t have grades, and they get unlimited one-on- one attention. The schools are small, so almost everyone makes the varsity sports teams. They have almost unlimited budgets for after-school programs, so every kid gets a chance to be president or founder of whatever club or group they wish to join. But it’s not just about a better academic experience. The guidance counselors have all the Ivy League schools on speed dial, and they receive a guaranteed number of spots for their students every year. Preparation for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) starts for these kids in sixth grade and continues through high school. Kids at boarding schools have regular dinners and outings with their teachers, and those teachers provide their students with even more connections—in addition to excellent letters of recommendation. At those elite schools, students are given the answers to all the tests in life. It’s nearly impossible for them to fail. I’m fully supportive of this kind of academic environment. It’s wonderful that students get this kind of nurturing and guidance. What didn’t sit well with me was knowing that those students were getting spots in what was supposed to be one of the toughest academic institutions on the planet. They hadn’t earned their spot by being the best or the smartest. They’d simply grown up with an exceptional economic advantage. Maybe it was my athlete mentality, but I found it difficult to accept this reality
CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 43 without judgement. When you play basketball in Indiana, you quickly learn what real talent looks like. I would put my work ethic on the basketball court up against anyone else’s. But my talent? Not so much. I greatly outperformed my abilities and had no qualms admitting it. Academically, I benefited from my talent advantages, so I understood both sides of the coin. When it comes to elite levels of competition, talent takes over. Some kids are blessed with exceptional talents, and when that’s combined with a solid work ethic, those kids become stars. Everyone wants to be great, and everyone tries hard, but that’s not always enough. No matter what effort I put into basketball, I knew I’d never be as good as LeBron James. Then again, no matter how much effort LeBron James put into school, he’d never be as good as me in the classroom. There’s nothing fair about the distribution of talent. For some reason, people have a difficult time acknowledging the importance of talent when it comes to elite-level success, but it’s just a fact. For the rich kids, they didn’t need much talent. They were taught how to appear smart and were given a seat at the table. And if the $50,000 a year’s worth of training wasn’t enough, their parents would simply donate a few million dollars to their school of choice and get them in that way. I share this insight not to ridicule my wealthy classmates. A few of them were indeed brilliant—most were not. But I say this because growing up poor, I always assumed rich people were exceptionally smart. I thought people became wealthy because they outworked and outsmarted the rest of us lowly peons. As it turns out, the key to being rich is being born rich. We use academic institutions to pretend that the world is a meritocracy—meaning success is based on demonstrated ability and merit—but it isn’t. Meritocracy is a myth used to convince the poor to work themselves to death. Consider the American College Test (ACT) and SAT scores, for example. Since talent is randomly distributed regardless of economic class, why do children from wealthier households consistently perform better on these tests? Well, if your parents have a lot of money, you start
studying for the ACT and SAT in sixth grade. If you take the same test over and over, with someone telling you how to master the test, you’ll do well. Kids from lower-income families often never study for these tests given the high costs of SAT Prep courses and tutors—add that to the growing number of ways poor kids are competing with one hand tied behind their backs. It took a fascinating course in philosophy to help me resolve my frustration with this inequity. In that course, the professor walked us through a mental exercise where everyone starts off life equally, but through merit, those with talent gain all the wealth and power. Was that fair? I’d never questioned meritocracy. I assumed the people that were the best at school or sports should get the best things because…well, I didn’t know why. That’s just the way things were. But suddenly, I was forced to grapple with the idea that I never did anything to deserve my talents. So why was I any more deserving of this opportunity for a better life than anyone else? My being born with an innate ability to learn was no more of a fair reason for me to have riches than someone born into it. I didn’t think the legacy kids deserved to have such extreme advantages over everyone else, but I never questioned my own privileges. Why should someone have to live outside just because they weren’t born with abnormal talents? Who deserves nothing? I genuinely love learning. Once I finally got away from a school environment where I was forced to read hundreds of pages a day, I even learned to love slowly gliding through a good book. School, however, was always a means to an end. I found a lot of the tasks we were assigned at every level of school unnecessary and oftentimes even counterproductive. The US education system is structured more like a weeding-out system than a way to provide useful skills and knowledge to the general population. Look no further than the lack of basic financial education, vocational training, emotion
CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 45 management, civics, or even cooking skills to see school isn’t where you learn the most important skills for adult life. Instead, we force kids in the prime of their lives to spend ungodly amounts of time studying often useless topics, all so they can compete for a limited number of good jobs. Practical application of a subject, to say nothing of aptitude and personal interest, has no bearing on curriculum requirements. I always found it pointless trying to guess what a poet writing in Old English five hundred years ago meant or why they wrote something. I also found absurdly biased history lessons a colossal waste of time. We’re expected to learn in school what the system wants us to learn with no questions asked. Even a class like economics exists mostly to promote classist propaganda. I started to question more and more accepted ‘truths’ about society. I began to read books outside of what was on the syllabus. Once I satisfied all my academic requirements, I spent what remaining time I had in the real world. If life wasn’t a meritocracy, I had to find out what it really was. Instead of using my brain for my own advancement, I dedicated more and more of my free time to helping those that didn’t win the genetic lottery. My initial academic worries aside, I was confident I wouldn’t end up living in poverty again, given my performance in school. People who graduated from Harvard didn’t end up poor, and there was no way I would not graduate with the grades I was getting. Knowing this, I spent my mental energy trying to figure out how to help all the people still living in poverty. “Why are we spending so much time talking about career planning?” I asked at yet another job networking event during freshman year. “Let’s be real, we’re all going to get jobs. Why don’t we discuss bringing up the rest of our community?” I got blank stares back. “We’re not all going to get good jobs. Don’t be naïve.” I was a little surprised to hear that. “Really? I think everyone who graduates from here can make $100,000 a year if they want to,” I persisted. This time, the looks I received told me they thought I’d just said the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. “That’s not a good job.”
To me, $100,000 a year was more money than I’d ever need. It was more than triple what my mother earned and raised four kids on. I wish I could say I changed their minds and convinced everyone that it was more than enough money to live on and that perhaps the brightest kids in the world should be thinking about the hardest problems our society faces rather than asking how they’d be able to afford a $10 million second home. But I didn’t have that kind of courage yet. Still, I was unjaded and determined to make a difference, so I stayed focused on helping others. I ran social programs for children in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, engaging mostly with kids who were growing up in environments similar to those I was raised in as a child. As my worldview expanded, I started asking how I could help the poorest people in the world, not just the poorest people in the richest country. I co-founded a non-profit organization that focused on economic development mostly in Western Africa and the Caribbean. We used our newfound proximity to knowledge and wealth to deliver basic goods to the world’s poorest people. One of the great things about being at Harvard was having access to some of the best minds in the world in our professors, and we weren’t shy about seeking guidance and advice when needed. Not to mention, with all the money and connections on campus, raising $50,000 in donations was suddenly realistic. I experienced what I thought was poverty while I was growing up in Indiana. Though as I started doing international aid work, I realized I had no idea what real poverty was. Growing up poor, we might’ve had the water cut off occasionally, but I didn’t know anyone who didn’t have permanent access to clean water—and everyone had a toilet. When I traveled to the world’s poorest countries, I visited areas where miles and miles of people lived in complete destitution, with no running water and barely enough food to eat. The people in these countries still died of diseases long-since eradicated in the developed world. People wasted away without enough energy to even swat away the flies that landed on their faces. Those in the midst of humanitarian crises didn’t smile or even look at you; there was no hope in their eyes.
CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 47 Mothers watched as their babies lay despondent beside them, knowing they couldn’t feed them. Hungry children would approach us and pull on our clothes, begging us for money. We gave what we could, but the need was overwhelming. It was difficult to witness this kind of suffering. I remember seeing a line of thirsty, severely malnourished children, several with distended abdomens. They stood under a nearly bone-dry waterfall, waiting with their mouths open, hoping to catch a few drops. We saw the consequences of extreme poverty everywhere we went. I’ll never forget the smell of rancid latrines in the summer. My heart still aches when I think about the first time I saw a starving human chained to a tree. The man was suffering from a mental illness, and the people in his village believed it to be a demon possession. I wish I could say it was the only time I witnessed such a horror. I still cringe when I remember a mother drinking visibly fecal-contaminated water. When you see poverty like that, you can’t unsee it. Those memories and so many others will haunt me for the rest of my life. Our non-profit organization drilled boreholes to access water, built irrigation systems for dry-season farming, and revamped social enterprises whose profits funded orphanages. After suffering a career-ending knee injury while playing basketball, I threw all the energy I’d previously dedicated to basketball into fighting poverty worldwide. I had the time to sit in on lectures at the School of Public Health and in the economics department. I read every international development book I could get my hands on. I went to office hours of Nobel Laureates to get advice on my projects and ask about their development theories. I was obsessed, and I loved my work. I stuck it out as a neurobiology major and finished all my pre-med curriculum requirements. But my heart was already set on economic development. The idea that there was a way to systematically lift not only poor communities but poor nations out of poverty was incredible to me. Maybe there didn’t have to be poor people. Perhaps we could design a world where everyone had enough, and some had even more.
Around that time, a teacher, mentor, and close friend of mine pulled me aside and asked what I wanted to do with my career. I thought about it and realized I was already doing what I wanted with my life. “This,” I told him. “I just need the tools to get better.” He asked, “Have you ever thought about applying for a Rhodes Scholarship?” I hadn’t. I honestly didn’t even know what the scholarship was for. I knew Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, but I couldn’t tell you what it signified. I started digging into it and wasn’t all that impressed with the history. Cecil Rhodes is the Babe Ruth of colonization. He “made” (a euphemism for stole) a fortune plundering Africa, then decided to put it all in a trust before he died. He wanted men from all the British colonies to have a chance to come and study at Oxford so they too could become “refined gentlemen.” I didn’t buy into all that, but I did see it as an opportunity to study international development and public health with some of the brightest minds in the world before I went on to medical school. As luck would have it, I applied for and won a Rhodes scholarship and was off to England to study at Oxford University a few months after I graduated from Harvard College. If you think Harvard is old money, try Oxford. Harvard was founded in 1636, about 400 years after curious minds began to gather on the lawns of Oxford, England to discuss and debate the mysteries of the physical and spiritual worlds. The majestic Annenberg dining hall at Harvard that tourists flock to each year was modeled after its older Oxford counterpart. In Europe, class is something you’re born into. No matter how much money you make in England, you’ll always be lower class if you’re born lower class. In a strange way, that made it a lot easier for me to forget about being poor. There was no need to worry about something I couldn’t change. Plus, it was a foreign country, and I didn’t feel the need to try to change things there. I simply wanted to experience the new world it provided. Unlike my early days at Harvard, I dove right into social life at
CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 49 Oxford. The unbelievably extravagant (and frequent) black-tie events at Harvard were nothing compared to the white-tie affairs at Oxford, complete with long tailcoats and top hats. I’d been around extreme wealth for four years, though, so it didn’t faze me much. I enjoyed the extravagance to an extent and didn’t take it all that seriously. There was classism for sure, but I gave it little thought. I went out of my way to meet students and professors from various countries, social classes, and academic departments. Academically, I no longer felt the need to prove myself. If someone didn’t believe in my intelligence, then they never would. I decided that was their problem with racism and classism, not mine. Instead, I focused on learning. I went to Harvard to escape poverty; I went to Oxford to learn how to help others do the same.