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over time. One incident stands out in my mind. Though most of my primary and secondary educational experiences were dismal, one seventh-grade teacher took an interest in me. She was about twenty-five, with long straight hair, caramel-colored skin, and full lips—one of the few black teachers at Henry D. Perry Middle School and a woman who could get any twelve-year-old boy’s attention.
    New to teaching, she was on a mission to inspire the black students, to get us to see the importance of academic achievement. Some of the other black teachers tried to protect us by toughening us up and lowering our expectations to reduce what they saw as inevitable future disappointment, but she saw it differently. She taught me the word sarcastic , and I remember practicing spelling it and using it at home.
    Before that, the only way I’d been able to express the idea of sarcasm was in phrases like “you trying to be funny?” but here was one word that captured a complex, specific idea. Rap music would soon add cool new words like copacetic to my life. But it wasn’t until I joined the air force and began taking college courses that I fully recognized the power of language.
    In my neighborhood, I think our conversations were restricted mainly by our limited vocabulary and inability to pronounce certain words. I remember being embarrassed when I learned from a white high school classmate that the correct pronunciation for the word whore was not “ho.” Also, I, as well as most of my family, had great difficulties pronouncing words beginning with str . For example, I would pronounce the word straight as “scrate.”
    As a result, verbal exchanges in my neighborhood were minimized. Someone might not even reply to a greeting or question, simply looking up and nodding respect with a hint of eye contact or signaling negation with a small, almost imperceptible turn of the head. These signals were all much more subtle than the language. They weren’t appreciated or often even recognized at all by mainstream America.
    Consequently, my confidence rose when I began to work to expand my vocabulary: I could take charge when I knew more mainstream apt and apposite words. I soon recognized the sheer power that precise language could give me. It was liberating, even exhilarating at times. But as a child, of course, I didn’t know what I wasn’t being exposed to.
    I did learn early on to observe and pay attention before I spoke. Growing up, the worst thing of all was to look foolish or uncool: it was best to stay quiet unless you were absolutely sure you were right. Being strong and silent meant that you never looked stupid. Even if I didn’t care much then about being seen as smart by teachers, I certainly cared about not looking dumb, especially in front of friends. Always, I had to be cool.
    Another study also captures some key differences between my family of origin and my current family. Sociologist Annette Lareau and her team spent two years studying twelve families, comparing middle-class blacks and whites to poor people of both races. Families were visited twenty times in a month for three hours per visit. The researchers found that middle-class parents—again, both black and white—focused intensely on their children.
    In a parenting style that Lareau labeled “concerted cultivation,” these families built and scheduled their lives around activities aimed at “enriching” the children’s experience—organized sports, music lessons, extracurricular activities linked to school, and so on. Parents constantly spoke to their children and paid attention to their responses, encouraging them to ask questions if they felt anything was unclear or if they were simply curious. Discipline did not involve corporal punishment and was almost exclusively conducted through verbal exchanges: the main idea was to teach moral reasoning, not just obedience.
    In fact, children were encouraged to see themselves as worthy of having an opinion in adult