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reflected the way she had been treated. We were all molded by these attitudes and behaviors before we could even name them. As I’m sure is true for my grandmother as well, I can’t even describe my own earliest experiences of racism—it was so pervasive that it’s like trying to recall how you learned to speak. You know there was a time before you had language, but it’s impossible to remember or to delineate particular incidents or to know what it was like to not know.
    Nonetheless, when I sat down with my sister Beverly to research this book, she showed me just how deep it went. In my family, Beverly and I have the darkest skin—and there was nothing subtle about the way the darker children were treated in my grandmother’s home. They called us “blackie” or “darkie.” Sometimes Beverly was “teased” that way even at home. I would always shrug it off but the tears in Beverly’s eyes as she recalled those words made me realize how much it had hurt everyone. Our behavior is shaped over time by sequences and patterns of reinforcers and punishers, often without much conscious awareness on our part of how we are being affected. Even racist behavior is learned this way.
    For most of my early childhood, however, I myself had little direct experience with white people, since I was growing up in a black neighborhood that they rarely visited. But I did see how the children of the people my mom worked for casually called her by her first name—a way we would never be so rude as to address an adult with whom we had not negotiated such intimacy. And I also saw how my parents and other adults in the neighborhood responded to their power and how cautious and cowed they could be in its presence.
    One of my worst memories is seeing my mother break down and cry when confronted by an unsympathetic white bureaucrat about our food stamp allowance, when I was nine or ten. We clearly needed the assistance: I could see how bare the cabinets and fridge were. Yet this woman acted as though my mother were trying to steal money from her personally. At home, MH was tough. She often stood up to my father, who was much bigger and stronger. She never showed much emotion beyond anger about it. But this unyielding bureaucrat’s power and petty condescension and my mother’s powerlessness in the face of it just broke her.
    Indeed, although I don’t remember feeling sad about my mother’s absence, I’m sure I missed her and was angry that she wasn’t around. I was frightened by my parents’ fighting, felt powerless over the way I was treated, and was enraged by things like the biases I saw in the world and at my grandmother’s house. In my family, one of the few feelings it was okay for males to express was anger—and to do that properly, you needed to have power or else you would be crushed. When I was little, I got crushed a lot: by my mother, aunts, sisters, and cousins. So that was a lesson I learned early as well.
    Although I had carefree and childish fun, too, much of my childhood was spent securing status and power in any way I could. If it didn’t give you clout or influence, if it didn’t make you cool or make you laugh, I wasn’t interested. That focus shaped my youth in many complicated and often conflicting ways. As I look back, it’s painful because this struggle for respect ultimately marred or even took the lives of many of my peers. I know now that childhood shouldn’t be dominated by a preoccupation with status. But to some extent, mine was. This obsession was another key survival strategy that molded me.
    So did the stark contrast in my world before and after my parents split. When they were together, the fighting was terrifying, but we lived in a nice neighborhood of young working-class families. It now reminds me of the idealized suburb of TV’s The Wonder Years , only with black people. The homes were neat, with manicured lawns and flat one-story houses of the psychedelic-faded-to-pastel colors people seem