The Personal Cost Of Black Success

Two men chronicle their rise into the meritocratic elite, exposing pernicious myths and brutal realities along the way.

- Christopher J. Lebron

NEW ENGLAND WINTERS are brutal affairs, with dry, driving winds that lash at those walking from here to there. On this night, but not just this one, anyone who spied me exiting one of Central Square’s liquor stores near the MIT campus with a large brown bag might well have thought that I had found some graduate-school comrades with whom to spend an evening, warming ourselves from the inside out with cheap alcohol. But it was all for me.

I returned to my grad-student apartment near campus and entered my bedroom, with its extra-long twin bed across from a wooden desk. I closed the door and got busy. One wine cooler, another, some straight swigs of whiskey, and there it was: release—a numbness leading to a drowsiness that would end the evening in dead-to-the-world sleep. The trouble with sleep, though, is that it is a pause button, not an undo button. Awake, I faced again the crushing loneliness that hit me the first year of my doctorate program in political science. It wasn’t just that I was the only black person in almost ever y room I entered. What hollowed me out was the feeling that I couldn’t connect with others in a way that made sense, certain as I was that they were tap-tap-tapping their feet—waiting for me to show how the hell I’d made it into the room in the first place, all the way from the Lower East Side of Manhattan and a family with a history of unemployment benefits and food stamps.