Astrophysicist, author, science communicator, and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York
(1958– )
Kids have different profiles in school. Some are shy, some are sociable, some are purposely disruptive, and some are the class clowns. And I’ll bet you that every successful comedian in the world today was a class clown in school, and that they would have been subjected to the ire of their teachers accusing them of disrupting the lesson plan.
At no time is anyone saying that maybe this person can become a world-famous comedian. Teachers generally don’t think this way. They want to homogenize who and what you are so that you are quiet, that you get high grades, and that you’re not disruptive. And your grades are their currency of judgment for your promise and performance later in life. In casual questioning that I’ve done, if you corralled the most influential people in the world—this could be attorneys or novelists or journalists, playwrights, poets, people who shape our culture—and put them all in a room and ask, “How many of you got straight A’s in school?” I bet none of them would raise their hands. Include in that a list of CEOs and inventors. If hardly any of them got straight A’s, then what is it that we’re trying to breed in our students if you’re after straight A’s? Maybe there’s something else that matters if school is to prep you for being a productive adult. Yes, you want to get as high a grade as you can. But if a student is left to feel inadequate, that’s an unhealthy learning environment.
There was a teacher in the sixth grade who cut out an ad for me about taking classes at the Hayden Planetarium. But it’s not like she said, Oh, I recognize that this guy is brilliant. That’s not how it came across. It was Look what he’s doing. Maybe we can find some way for him to invest that energy differently.
I was invited back to my elementary school to give a talk. They wanted me to talk about what a great education I had there. I said, “I can’t do that. I became what I am in spite of the teacher attitudes about who I was, not because of those attitudes. If you want, I’ll come back at another time and talk to your teaching staff.”
We had a dentist friend who lived a few floors below the roof of our building, Skyview apartments. I went up to the rooftop with my telescope when I was about twelve. He allowed me to snake my hundred-foot electric cord through the window to his apartment. It’s night, and so I’m not lit up. In New York, your sight line can land on so many different places. If you’re looking out a window and you’re looking up, there are thousands of windows. So why are they looking at your window? Except this one time I was noticed by people in this other building because they looked across. And they called the police. Well, my telescope is a thick tube, and why would a police officer know or understand telescopes? Maybe binoculars, but not telescopes, and I have a cable going over the roof. This is the seventies, and it’s Riverdale, and my skin color is substantially darker than that of anybody else in the community, and so suspicions were high. Since I was clearly a school-age kid, I think they felt a little better about it initially, but it wasn’t until I showed them the craters of the moon through the telescope that they said, “Oh, that’s great! Keep up the good work.” So they were ultimately swayed by an actual observation of the universe.
My parents were born in the late twenties, and so they came of age in the forties. My father served in the segregated army. We were trained how to behave at any and all times if the police approached, or if we were in the presence of the police. Don’t make any sudden moves. You want to minimize the occasions they would have to justify shooting you. And you address them as “Sir.” And you don’t run. It wasn’t fear of the police that we were taught. It was simply that’s what you had to do because the police are not your friends. If you have a question that you need answered or if you need help, go into a store, go to a merchant, a cabdriver, a medical doctor. Or, if you were crossing the street, a crossing guard.
Whereas my wife grew up in Alaska, where the police were friendly. They’d help you cross the street and give you a lift somewhere if you had a flat tire. Give you a lift? What kind of world is that?
As much as my head was in the stars, I was reminded that I was black every time I stepped into society. It was not an active awareness that I carried within me. It was how society defined me.
Another example of that didn’t involve the police. It was just the conduct of strangers. I was into time-keeping devices. I liked timing the photographs through the telescope. I greatly value just the principle of measuring time. And so I had a watch that had too many knobs and dials on it, you know? It had a tachometer and time in six time zones. At one point the sweep second hand, if anyone remembers what that is, fell off. I went to the local jeweler to get it repaired.
“I have this watch that I need repaired.”
So the guy looks at me, looks at the watch, and says, “I can’t open this.”
I said, “Why not?”
“It’s stolen.”
“Oh, I didn’t know it was stolen.”
Here I’m thinking that he knows something about it that I don’t know, without realizing that he was accusing me of having stolen goods. And I’m too naive or innocent to imagine he was thinking that I was a criminal because I certainly knew I wasn’t.
I tried to get the watch fixed in a variety of stores, and they said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have the key to open this.”
Well, necessity is the mother of invention. I found my own way to open the dial, and then I fixed it myself and put it back together. There’s a little pry point in the back of the watch. So I got to learn how a precision watch is made.
We were residents of the Bronx my entire life while growing up. Later on, while in high school, I objected to what so many people around me were doing in Riverdale. They were not saying that they were from the Bronx. They said they were from Riverdale. In fact, even on the return addresses of envelopes it would say Riverdale, New York. I just thought that was wrong. I thought they were rejecting something important about the borough. My high school, Bronx High School of Science, had the word “Bronx” in the name as a fundamental part of its identity. The simple use of that word contributed to my association with the borough.
My earliest memories are of the East Bronx, in the Castle Hill housing projects. I went to P.S. 36 there, for kindergarten. At that time, my father finished school and started getting jobs in the city government. That’s when his income level went above the level for the middle-income units of the housing project, and that’s when we moved to Riverdale.
In Riverdale, we were high enough in the middle class for our building to have a doorman, an ice skating rink, a pool, and a parking garage. I enjoy swimming, and at one point became a lifeguard. These were opportunities that came about simply by proximity. I lament the absence of opportunities for so many other people who remained in whatever circumstances they were born into.
What richness of discoveries and what poetry have gone unwritten because of want of opportunity to express it? I really ask myself that question a lot.