A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1998 by Timothy Noah

How a boy from Southeast D.C. made it to the Ivy League

Four years ago, Ron Suskind published an extraordinary account of inner-city life in The Wall Street Journal The angle was simple, but novel: to document the peer pressure and other difficulties faced by a black honors student in a tough ghetto high school where academic success was seen by other students as a betrayal of group identity -- an affront to a prevailing culture that disdained any aspiration to rise out of poverty as "acting white."

For his subject, Suskind chose Cedric Jennings, a 16 year-old would-be scientist whose father was a thief and a drug dealer and whose mother, a former welfare recipient, had dedicated most of her adult life to plotting her son's escape from the underclass. The setting was Ballou High School, "the most troubled and violent school in the blighted Southeast comer of Washington, D.C.," an obstacle course where Cedric learned to avoid going to honors assemblies lest the prizes he accept incite violence against him.

The article turned Cedric's plight into a narrative of excruciating suspense: Would Cedric propel himself out of his poisonous environment, or would he fall victim to what's been tagged the "crab bucket syndrome," in which those who show the effrontery to seek escape are dragged back down by jealous peers? At the end of the first newspaper story (a follow-up appeared some months later, and both stories eventually won the Pulitzer prize), Suskind provided a hopeful answer: Cedric, receiving an acceptance letter to a summer science program for minority students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proclaimed, "My life is about to begin."

Now Suskind has turned the next few years of Cedric's story -- a disappointing performance at MIT, where his hopes for university admission were dashed; a perilous senior year at Ballou, where his MIT humiliation nearly caused him to give up; his turnaround acceptance to Brown; and the grinding struggle to integrate himself, academically and socially, into that alien, ivied campus -- into a book. When newspaper series are expanded into full-length nonfiction narratives, they often have a padded feel. A Hope in the Unseen, however, manages to enlarge the initial story not only by extending the narrative but by broadening its theme. Before, Suskind was telling the story of underclass barriers to success. Now, he's telling the story of affirmative action in the waning years of 20th-century America. The result deserves to win recognition as a classic of book-length narrative journalism.

A disclaimer: I worked for six years in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal, where Suskind was a colleague and friend. (We've had almost no contact since I left the paper a little more than a year ago) Perhaps this biases me in favor of A Hope in the Unseen. Those who have met Suskind, though, know him to be a cocky and ebullient soul -- exactly the sort of person whose peers (including me) are loath to praise too highly, lest he become truly overbearing. In this case, however, there's no alternative, because the book is simply the best thing I've ever read about the confusing thicket of questions surrounding the preferential treatment of disadvantaged blacks.

That Cedric's path to the Ivy League was smoothed by special treatment is clear. He is not a pure, diamond-in-the-rough genius whose success, no matter what his environment, was guaranteed from birth. Such Einsteins have been known to exist from time to time, but obviously they're extremely rare, and their very freakishness guarantees that their stories wouldn't tell us much about the workings of American society. Cedric, Suskind makes plain, is quite smart, but his defining strength isn't intelligence but will. What's more, that will, while extraordinary, has been known to falter. In one of the book's more heartbreaking episodes, Cedric is tossed out of a magnet junior high school for becoming a minor discipline problem -- mostly talking back disrespectfully to teachers -- after a particularly painful visit with his father in prison. Cedric's expulsion means he won't be eligible to attend a magnet high school where college aspirations are the norm; instead, he!s banished to the Ballou crab bucket.

At Ballou, Cedric regains his resolve, but his experience at MIT shows that it isn!t enough to get him where he wants to go. Most of the kids in the minority program Cedric attends are from much wealthier backgrounds; their superior schools have left them much-better prepared for the programs academic rigors. The paradox, Suskind shows, is well known to the programs director, a retired black MIT graduate named Bill Ramsey. "When he first arrived, taking over a program that had been up and running for two decades, he had grand plans to find poor black and Hispanic kids from urban America -- kids who had somehow learned math and science in what are all but war zones -- and give them the boost," Suskind writes in one of the book's many interior monologues (all of them based on detailed interviews, he writes in an Author's Note). "Within his first year, he saw he'd been dreaming." Instead, Ramsey has redirected the program to benefit "polished middle- or upper-middle-class black and Hispanic kids -- leaders of tomorrow, all -- many of whom are here for little more than resume padding." Cedric is one of the "few twisted apples, poor kids from bad schools," who Ramsey sneaks in from time to time, and his performance steadily improves throughout the summer program. But not fast enough; in the end, Cedric is told by a white professor, "I don't think you're MIT material." Dazed, Cedric walks back to his dorm room, closes his eyes, and yells, "RACIST!"