-
I remember the very first time
I went to a nice restaurant,
-
a really nice restaurant.
-
It was for a law firm recruitment dinner,
-
and I remember beforehand
the waitress walked around
-
and asked whether we wanted some wine,
-
so I said, "Sure,
I'll take some white wine."
-
And she immediately said,
-
"Would you like sauvignon blanc
or chardonnay?"
-
And I remember thinking,
-
"Come on, lady,
stop with the fancy French words
-
and just give me some white wine."
-
But I used my powers of deduction
-
and recognized that chardonnay
and sauvignon blanc
-
were two separate types of white wine,
-
and so I told her
that I would take the chardonnay,
-
because frankly that was
the easiest one to pronounce for me.
-
So I had a lot of experiences like that
-
during my first couple of years
as a law student at Yale,
-
because, despite all outward appearances,
I'm a cultural outsider.
-
I didn't come from the elites.
-
I didn't come from the Northeast
or from San Francisco.
-
I came from a southern Ohio steel town,
-
and it's a town that's really
struggling in a lot of ways,
-
ways that are indicative
of the broader struggles
-
of America's working class.
-
Heroin has moved in,
-
killing a lot of people, people I know.
-
Family violence, domestic violence,
and divorce have torn apart families.
-
And there's a very unique
sense of pessimism that's moved in.
-
Think about rising mortality rates
in these communities
-
and recognize that
for a lot of these folks,
-
the problems that they're seeing
-
are actually causing rising death rates
in their own communities,
-
so there's a very real sense of struggle.
-
I had a very front row seat
to that struggle.
-
My family has been part of that struggle
for a very long time.
-
I come from a family
that doesn't have a whole lot of money.
-
The addiction that plagued my community
-
also plagued my family,
and even, sadly, my own mom.
-
There were a lot of problems
that I saw in my own family,
-
problems caused sometimes
by a lack of money,
-
problems caused sometimes by a lack
of access to resources and social capital
-
that really affected my life.
-
If you had looked at my life
when I was 14 years old
-
and said, "Well, what's going
to happen to this kid?"
-
you would have concluded
that I would have struggled
-
with what academics call upward mobility.
-
So upward mobility is an abstract term,
-
but it strikes at something
that's very core
-
at the heart of the American dream.
-
It's the sense,
-
and it measures whether kids like me
-
who grow up in poor communities
are going to live a better life,
-
whether they're going to have a chance
to live a materially better existence,
-
or whether they're going to stay
in the circumstances where they came from.
-
And one of the things
we've learned, unfortunately,
-
is that upward mobility isn't as high
as we'd like it to be in this country,
-
and interestingly,
it's very geographically distributed.
-
So take Utah, for instance.
-
In Utah a poor kid is actually doing OK,
-
very likely to live their share
and their part in the American dream.
-
But if you think of where I'm from,
-
in the South, in Appalachia,
in southern Ohio,
-
it's very unlikely
that kids like that will rise.
-
The American dream
in those parts of the country
-
is in a very real sense just a dream.
-
So why is that happening?
-
So one reason is obviously
economic or structural.
-
So you think of these areas.
-
They're beset by these
terrible economic trends,
-
built around industries
like coal and steel
-
that make it harder
for folks to get ahead.
-
That's certainly one problem.
-
There's also the problem of brain drain,
where the really talented people,
-
because they can't find
high-skilled work at home,
-
end up moving elsewhere,
-
so they don't build a business
or non-profit where they're from,
-
they end up going elsewhere
and taking their talents with them.
-
There are failing schools
in a lot of these communities,
-
failing to give kids
the educational leg up
-
that really makes it possible for kids
to have opportunities later in life.
-
These things are all important.
-
I don't mean to discount
these structural barriers.
-
But when I look back at my life
and my community,
-
something else was going on,
something else mattered.
-
It's difficult to quantify,
but it was no less real.
-
So for starters, there was
a very real sense of hopelessness
-
in the community that I grew up in.
-
There was a sense that kids had
that their choices didn't matter.
-
No matter what happened,
no matter how hard they worked,
-
no matter how hard
they tried to get ahead,
-
nothing good would happen.
-
So that's a tough feeling
to grow up around.
-
That's a tough mindset to penetrate,
-
and it leads sometimes
to very conspiratorial places.
-
So let's just take one
political issue that's pretty hot,
-
affirmative action.
-
So depending on your politics,
you might think that affirmative action
-
is either a wise or an unwise way
to promote diversity in the workplace
-
or the classroom.
-
But if you grow up in an area like this,
-
you see affirmative action
as a tool to hold people like you back.
-
That's especially true if you're
a member of the white working class.
-
You see it as something
that isn't just about good or bad policy.
-
You see it as something
that's actively conspiring,
-
where people with political
and financial power
-
are working against you.
-
And there are a lot of ways that you see
that conspiracy against you --
-
perceived, real, but it's there,
-
and it warps expectations.
-
So if you think about what do you do
when you grow up in that world,
-
you can respond in a couple of ways.
-
One, you can say,
"I'm not going to work hard,
-
because no matter how hard I work,
it's not going to matter."
-
Another thing you might do is say,
-
"Well, I'm not going to go
after the traditional markers of success,
-
like a university education
or a prestigious job,
-
because the people who care
about those things are unlike me.
-
They're never going to let me in."
-
When I got admitted to Yale,
a family member asked me
-
if I had pretended to be a liberal
to get by the admissions committee.
-
Seriously.
-
And it's obviously not the case
that there was a liberal box to check
-
on the application,
-
but it speaks to a very real
insecurity in these places
-
that you have to pretend
to be somebody you're not
-
to get past these various social barriers.
-
It's a very significant problem.
-
Even if you don't give in
to that hopelessness,
-
even if you think, let's say,
-
that your choices matter
and you want to make the good choices,
-
you want to do better
for yourself and for your family,
-
it's sometimes hard
to even know what those choices are
-
when you grow up
in a community like I did.
-
I didn't know, for example,
-
that you had to go
to law school to be a lawyer.
-
I didn't know that elite universities,
as research consistently tells us,
-
are cheaper for low-income kids
-
because these universities
have bigger endowments,
-
can offer more generous financial aid.
-
I remember I learned this
-
when I got the financial aid letter
from Yale for myself,
-
tens of thousands of dollars
in need-based aid,
-
which is a term I had never heard before.
-
But I turned to my aunt
when I got that letter and said,
-
"You know, I think this just means
that for the first time in my life,
-
being poor has paid really well."
-
So I didn't have access
to that information
-
because the social networks around me
didn't have access to that information.
-
I learned from my community
how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well.
-
I learned how to make
a damned good biscuit recipe.
-
The trick, by the way,
is frozen butter, not warm butter.
-
But I didn't learn how to get ahead.
-
I didn't learn how to make
the good decisions
-
about education and opportunity
-
that you need to make
-
to actually have a chance
in this 21st century knowledge economy.
-
Economists call the value
that we gain from our informal networks,
-
from our friends and colleagues
and family "social capital."
-
The social capital that I had
wasn't built for 21st century America,
-
and it showed.
-
There's something else
that's really important that's going on
-
that our community
doesn't like to talk about,
-
but it's very real.
-
Working class kids are much more likely
-
to face what's called
adverse childhood experiences,
-
which is just a fancy word
for childhood trauma:
-
getting hit or yelled at,
put down by a parent repeatedly,
-
watching someone hit or beat your parent,
-
watching someone do drugs
or abuse alcohol.
-
These are all instances
of childhood trauma,
-
and they're pretty
commonplace in my family.
-
Importantly, they're not just
commonplace in my family right now.
-
They're also multigenerational.
-
So my grandparents,
-
the very first time that they had kids,
-
they expected that they
were going to raise them in a way
-
that was uniquely good.
-
They were middle class,
-
they were able to earn
a good wage in a steel mill.
-
But what ended up happening
-
is that they exposed their kids
to a lot of the childhood trauma
-
that had gone back many generations.
-
My mom was 12 when she saw
my grandma set my grandfather on fire.
-
His crime was that he came home drunk
-
after she told him,
-
"If you come home drunk,
I'm gonna kill you."
-
And she tried to do it.
-
Think about the way
that that affects a child's mind.
-
And we think of these things
as especially rare,
-
but a study by the Wisconsin
Children's Trust Fund found
-
that 40 percent of low-income kids face
multiple instances of childhood trauma,
-
compared to only 29 percent
for upper-income kids.
-
And think about what that really means.
-
If you're a low-income kid,
-
almost half of you face multiple
instances of childhood trauma.
-
This is not an isolated problem.
-
This is a very significant issue.
-
We know what happens
to the kids who experience that life.
-
They're more likely to do drugs,
more likely to go to jail,
-
more likely to drop out of high school,
-
and most importantly,
-
they're more likely
to do to their children
-
what their parents did to them.
-
This trauma, this chaos in the home,
-
is our culture's
very worst gift to our children,
-
and it's a gift that keeps on giving.
-
So you combine all that,
-
the hopelessness, the despair,
-
the cynicism about the future,
-
the childhood trauma,
-
the low social capital,
-
and you begin to understand why me,
-
at the age of 14,
-
was ready to become
just another statistic,
-
another kid who failed to beat the odds.
-
But something unexpected happened.
-
I did beat the odds.
-
Things turned up for me.
-
I graduated from high school,
from college, I went to law school,
-
and I have a pretty good job now.
-
So what happened?
-
Well, one thing that happened
is that my grandparents,
-
the same grandparents
of setting someone on fire fame,
-
they really shaped up
by the time I came around.
-
They provided me a stable home,
-
a stable family.
-
They made sure
-
that when my parents weren't able
to do the things that kids need,
-
they stepped in and filled that role.
-
My grandma especially
did two things that really matter.
-
One, she provided that peaceful home
that allowed me to focus on homework
-
and the things that kids
should be focused on.
-
But she was also
this incredibly perceptive woman,
-
despite not even having
a middle school education.
-
She recognized the message
that my community had for me,
-
that my choices didn't matter,
-
that the deck was stacked against me.
-
She once told me,
-
"JD, never be like those losers who think
the deck is stacked against them.
-
You can do anything you want to."
-
And yet she recognized
that life wasn't fair.
-
It's hard to strike that balance,
-
to tell a kid that life isn't fair,
-
but also recognize and enforce in them
the reality that their choices matter.
-
But grandma was able
to strike that balance.
-
The other thing that really helped
was the United States Marine Corps.
-
So we think of the Marine Corps
as a military outfit, and of course it is,
-
but for me, the US Marine Corps
was a four-year crash course
-
in character education.
-
It taught me how to make a bed,
how to do laundry,
-
how to wake up early,
how to manage my finances.
-
These are things
my community didn't teach me.
-
I remember when I went
to go buy a car for the very first time,
-
I was offered a dealer's
low, low interest rate of 21.9 percent,
-
and I was ready
to sign on the dotted line.
-
But I didn't take that deal,
-
because I went and took it to my officer
-
who told me, "Stop being an idiot,
-
go to the local credit union,
and get a better deal."
-
And so that's what I did.
-
But without the Marine Corps,
-
I would have never had access
to that knowledge.
-
I would have had
a financial calamity, frankly.
-
The last thing I want to say
is that I had a lot of good fortune
-
in the mentors and people
-
who have played
an important role in my life.
-
From the Marines,
from Ohio State, from Yale,
-
from other places,
-
people have really stepped in
-
and ensured that they filled
that social capital gap
-
that it was pretty obvious,
apparently, that I had.
-
That comes from good fortune,
-
but a lot of children
aren't going to have that good fortune,
-
and I think that raises
really important questions for all of us
-
about how we're going to change that.
-
We need to ask questions about
how we're going to give low-income kids
-
who come from a broken home
access to a loving home.
-
We need to ask questions
-
about how we're going
to teach low-income parents
-
how to better interact
with their children,
-
with their partners.
-
We need to ask questions
about how we give social capital,
-
mentorship to low-income kids
who don't have it.
-
We need to think about
how we teach working class children
-
about not just hard skills,
-
like reading, mathematics,
-
but also soft skills,
-
like conflict resolution
and financial management.
-
Now, I don't have all of the answers.
-
I don't know all of the solutions
to this problem,
-
but I do know this:
-
in southern Ohio right now,
-
there's a kid who is
anxiously awaiting their dad,
-
wondering whether,
when he comes through the door,
-
he'll walk calmly or stumble drunkly.
-
There's a kid
-
who's mom sticks a needle in her arm
-
and passes out,
-
and he doesn't know
why she doesn't cook him dinner,
-
and he goes to bed hungry that night.
-
There's a kid who has
no hope for the future
-
but desperately
wants to live a better life.
-
They just want somebody
to show it to them.
-
I don't have all the answers,
-
but I know that unless our society
starts asking better questions
-
about why I was so lucky
-
and about how to get that luck
to more of our communities
-
and our country's children,
-
we're going to continue
to have a very significant problem.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)