Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearinghouses around the world.
And now, welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
As Mark Twain once said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." America's college campuses have experienced a wave of protests over the past couple of months, Firing up my Wayback Machine on YouTube, the images conjure memories of the late 1960s when anti-Vietnam War demonstrations swept through the nation's universities. Similar to 60 years ago, some of the same institutions are prominently featured, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and NYU, which were active in the past and continue to make national headlines with these movements today.
As written in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, "The right of the people to peaceably assemble" has shaped the direction of our country through various pivotal moments. And long before the Constitution was ratified, in 1773, the Boston Tea Party saw colonists, frustrated by the crown's imposition of taxation without representation, dump 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. In 1913, thousands of suffragettes and their supporters marched on Washington, calling for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. And in 1965, protesters led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched from Selma, Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery, raising awareness of discrimination faced by the Black people and the need for a national voting rights act.
Compared to memorable moments of the past, an aspect of contemporary protest often involves individuals embracing what our guest, Rob Henderson, refers to as "luxury beliefs." Rob's personal journey from growing up in the foster care system in Los Angeles to being adopted at the age of eight has provided him with valuable insights into the perspectives of privilege. He explores these themes in his new book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, as well as a recent Wall Street Journal essay titled, "Luxury Beliefs That Only The Privileged Can Afford."
On today's episode, we're going to discuss Rob's writing and the pervasive influence of luxury beliefs in America, especially its leading colleges and universities. We'll also explore Rob's childhood in the foster system detailing how he overcame enormous challenge to achieve remarkable success.
Our conversation with author Rob Henderson is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Remember, please, to subscribe wherever you listen and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where they can find this show.
Our guest today, Rob Henderson, grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and with his adoptive family in the rural town of Red Bluff, California. At 17, he joined the United States Air Force, and after completing his service to the nation, earned his bachelor's degree from Yale and a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge. Rob's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. In February, he published his book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, now available from Gallery Books.
Rob, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Rob Henderson:
Hey, Josh. Thank you. It's great to be here.
Josh King:
So over the course of our conversation, we're going to speak about some of the accolades I just mentioned in the intro, the piece in the Journal really that captivated my wife who really said, "You got to read this," which led me to reach out and get our hands on a copy of your book, Troubled.
But in the book's preface, you write, "Whatever authority I have to speak about the matters contained within this book comes from the origins of my name itself, not the credentials after it. My name is Robert Kim Henderson."
So Rob, if your name is what qualifies you to speak on the matters we're going to talk about, what is the origin story behind Robert Kim Henderson?
Rob Henderson:
Right, yeah. I open the preface of the book explaining where each of my names originates from, essentially to help the reader to understand this story they're about to read about my background.
So my first name, Robert, comes from my biological father, whom I've never met and I have no memories of. I was born into poverty in Los Angeles. My birth mother and I, we were homeless for a time. We lived in a car. Eventually, we settled in this slum apartment in LA, and when I was three years old, my mother succumbed to drug addiction. She was unable to care for me. Eventually, some neighbors called the police because they noticed she was neglectful and they heard this kid screaming in this other apartment at all hours of the day and night. Clearly, there's a kid here who's not being properly cared for.
So eventually, some social workers and some forensic psychologists and police officers and so forth, they asked her, "Where's this boy's father?" She said she didn't know. And so from there at age three, I was taken into the LA County foster care system because my mother was not in a position to care for me.
And my mother, my middle name, Kim, comes from my birth mother. She came to the US as a young woman from Seoul, from South Korea, and yeah, she came to the US to study, but started partying and doing a lot of drugs, and her life did not go in the direction she or her family, my grandparents on that side, had intended.
I went the first 30-some years of my life, it was only recently that I took this 23andMe genetic ancestry test, just curious about the other side of my family, my paternal side, and I discovered that my father was Mexican, so I'm half-Hispanic on my father's side and I went my whole life not knowing that about myself until recently, and I added that part in the book.
So I spent the next few years at age three, put into the foster care system, spent the next five years bouncing around different homes, seven different homes in total. I spent a good portion of the early chapters of the book dwelling on those experiences. And then I was eventually adopted by this family, and we settled into this working-class town in Red Bluff, California, this dusty, blue-collar town, the Henderson family. And so that's where I got my last name.
And it was very working-class. My adoptive father was a truck driver, my adoptive mother was an assistant social worker. I describe some of the statistics of this town. It's a part of California a lot of people aren't familiar with. At that point in the late '90s, the median household income was about $27,000 a year compared to California overall, which was around $60,000 a year, so it was located in one of the poorest counties in the state. And I talk about some of the fragmenting families and the crime and the vandalism and just the more rural kind of poverty that I think a lot of people don't necessarily assume exists in a state like California because they often just think of places like LA and they think of places like San Francisco. But there's other parts of California too that are often overlooked.
Josh King:
I can't fathom, certainly from where I come from, Rob, the difficulty that you had to have faced revisiting and documenting certain chapters of your life, some of which you just shared with us. But what inspired you to first embark on the journey of writing this memoir, and once you got started, what was it like pulling together these memories and then putting them on paper and turning it into something tangible?
Rob Henderson:
If I had known actually in advance what it was going to be like, I don't know that I would've agreed to do it. It was a lot more exhausting than I expected drawing on those memories. I figured when I started writing the book, I was 30 years old and I figured I'm an adult, I put all that stuff behind me, I can revisit it and put it down on the page and it's fine. I'm comfortable now in my life. I can deal with this. And once I started writing, yeah, it took a lot out of me.
The hardest parts, I think, those early chapters, the feeling of powerlessness, the absence of agency, that was the hardest part, recognizing just how vulnerable I felt when I was a kid at the mercy of these impersonal institutions, these foster parents who some of them were okay, some of them were less than okay, which I talk about in the book too. But that was the hard part was realizing... And now when I think back, when I see small children now and realize that's the size I was, that's the age I was, that was where my mind was at that time and what I was going through, it was really hard to put all those memories down.
The frequent relocations, the dread that I felt, the feelings of detachment because it wasn't just me moving to different homes. It was also my foster siblings who I'd grow close with. I'd go to a new home, make friends with some foster siblings. The next day, one or two of them would be gone because they'd go back to their family of origin or to another home. So it was not just me not knowing where I would be day to day, but I wouldn't know if these kids that I had grown attached to would also be present in the future. So that was really hard.
Josh King:
You used a phrase, "Agreed to do the book." I guess we all have moments where a mentor or someone that you trust or an acquaintance you've made said, "Rob, the life you've lived really should be shared." Just share with us, how did someone say, "Don't just keep this in your head, Rob"?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah. Well, once I got to college, I started to speak more about my life and different people... I recognized just how many of my peers had never heard a story like mine before. I'd always known my story was a little bit unusual, but where I was growing up in Red Bluff, a lot of my friends, which I talk about their lives in the book too, their lives weren't that much different than mine. I mean, they weren't in foster care, but various sort of homes, fragmentation, single parents, raised by grandparents because their parents were addicted to drugs or in prison, those were common stories. So I grew up thinking my life was a little atypical, but not that unusual. Then I get to college and it's like just about everyone had very stable, intact families, and they heard my stories and they were just blown away, like I was an alien from another planet.
And I had conversations with one of my professors at Yale, John Gaddis. He's a pretty well-known historian, and I went to office hours and I'd speak with him and somehow get around to talking about my life a little bit. And he was interested in my background because I'd been in the Air Force. We talked about that. But then eventually, we started to meander toward my early life and he would tell me I should start writing about this. And he teaches a class on biography, and so when I heard that from him of all people, I realized I should start really thinking about writing this.
Josh King:
I mean, I should share with you, I'll share a couple things with you, but at this point just share that my wife is a psychologist as well. When we lived in Hartford, Connecticut, she worked in an orphanage, dealt very closely with the foster care system, and this was your world, seven homes in five years. You talk about overcrowding, scarce resources, instability.
Based on what you've seen, do you believe that the foster system, often lacking so many of the means of support for child growth, is fundamentally broken?
Rob Henderson:
It's broken for a lot of reasons. And I mean, ideally we want to get to a world where fewer kids are in foster care, but really seems to be going in the opposite direction. I read this article pretty recently, which found that the number of foster kids since the year 2000 has doubled. So essentially, since I was in foster care, it's actually increased over time.
And so yeah, it would be nice to have more resources, more social workers, more tailoring each specific child's plan to their situation. So one reason why I was in foster care for so long was because no one recognized that I was never going to be returned to my family of origin, which is usually the goal. You put them with an aunt or a grandmother, someone like that. But in my case, my birth mother was deported back to South Korea, no one could locate my father, and I just got absorbed into this bureaucratic system, this machine of, "Oh, just put him in different homes all the time."
And eventually, one of the doctors that I had to see, he closely read my file and strongly recommended that I be put up for adoption. And it would be nice if we had more of those moments of someone carefully reviewing a child's case and recognizing, given a set of bad circumstances and options, what's the least bad option for this kid.
Josh King:
How did you navigate the transition then, after this doctor had shown the care to read your file so closely, from the foster care system to more security of a permanent family? Did it take a lot of time for you to truly feel at home and believe that you were no longer destined to move to yet another foster home?
Rob Henderson:
Emotionally, it took me quite a while to get there. I think intellectually, I heard, "Oh, this is going to be your new family. This is the Henderson family." I met them.
The first moment I recognized that this was really a different family was when I met them for the first time, and I always referred to my foster parents as "Mrs. So-and-So," "Mr. So-and-So," and I referred to my soon-to-be adoptive mother as, "Mrs. Henderson," and she paused a moment and said, "Oh, you can just call me 'Mom' if you want. That would be... If that's okay." And I had no memory of ever calling anyone "Mom," and so that was a special feeling for me to call her that.
And then when I arrived at their home for the first time and realized I had my own bedroom, I wouldn't be moving, all those kinds of things, it was really... It started to click for me and it was strangely emotionally overpowering, and I talk about that in the book too, that feeling of finally some permanence, some stability.
Josh King:
You'd like to say maybe "happily ever after," but that really wasn't the case because your adoptive parents divorced. I think you got estranged from your adoptive dad, Gary. When that happened, did you again experience fears of relocation? What was going through your head when your sister went to stay with Gary, but you didn't?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah, that was hard for me. I mean, I got adopted at an interesting moment. I mean, this was the late '90s, and of course at the time, I wasn't aware of this, but I got this front-row seat into the ongoing family deterioration that's been happening in working-class and poor communities all across the country. And they were married for, I think, seven or eight years by the time they adopted me, and then about a year and a half after the adoption, they separated.
My adoptive father stopped speaking with me, and it was painful. I mean, I went my whole life not having a father. And then I never met my birth father, went through all the foster homes, and there never really had a father either. Typically, the primary caregiver in foster homes is usually the mother. And so then I'm adopted and I have a father, and then he cuts ties with me. He was upset with my adoptive mother for leaving him, and that was his way of retaliating.
And so by that point, I was raised by this single mom for a time. My mom was working overtime trying to make ends meet. She was very busy and distracted, and by this point, I was nine, almost 10 years old. I was just doing the kinds of things little boys do when they're unsupervised and angry and going through these roiling emotions I didn't understand.
So I hung out with other kids who had somewhat similar family backgrounds, a lot of neglect at home, and tried smoking weed and cigarettes. And I mean, I started drinking beer in the foster homes when I was five, but by the time I was nine, 10 years old, we were drinking tequila and going to the store and seeing how many cold medicine pills we could take before we started to feel funny, those kinds of things. And that's what happens when you leave angry little boys. They hang out together and do stupid things.
Josh King:
So from that angry little boy, I guess when you get to chapter seven in Troubled, you write, "I wanted to build a new life." Yet in the chapter, as you approach the end of high school and think about what's next, you come to the idea of a military career. And then you note, "Until this point, my life had been a series of adults making decisions for me. Now here I was finally making decisions about how life would unfold, and I showed up hungover, exhausted, and hungry."
Now, these feelings are referencing your state when you took the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery, which is like a standardized test like the SAT for recruits.
So Rob, you wanted to build a new life, finally had a chance to do it, yet you showed up to this important test in dire straits. Finish the story for us. How did the exam go and how did the results impact the next couple of years?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah, that was a half-impulsive decision to explore the option of enlisting. I didn't really have any male mentors or father figures in my life, but one of my high school history teachers, he had been in the Air Force and indirectly suggested it. I moved out of my home essentially when I was 16, moved in with my friend and his dad for reasons I explain in the book, and my friend's father had also been in the Air Force, so that was just the branch that people would tell me about it. And so that was the one I chose.
I took this ASVAB, the standardized test, completely unprepared. I knew the night before, "Oh, I'm taking this test, so I have a ready-made excuse to not go to school tomorrow, and the test isn't until," I don't know, whatever it was, "10:30 AM," so I stayed up most of the night playing Xbox and drinking malt liquor with my friends and just, "Oh, 10:30, I can make that." And I actually barely made it in time to take the test, and it went surprisingly well.
When I met the Air Force recruiter some weeks later, and we reviewed the results and he told me that I got a really high score, that I qualified for basically every job, and he actually showed me how to convert the scores into SAT results and I noticed that my score, it was the same as one of my classmates who was going off to college. And that was one of the moments where it clicked for me that I probably could have, in different circumstances, I could have gone off to college right away, but as things stood out at that moment, I was barely passing my classes, and I graduated high school with a 2.2 GPA, and so college was not in the cards for me. So I went off to basic training when I was still 17.
Josh King:
Do you regret that at all now?
Rob Henderson:
Oh, no, no, not at all. That was probably the best decision I ever made. That was maybe the first good decision I made was getting out of there. I was surrounded by not-great influences, and I just needed to find a different set of peers. I needed some mentors, I needed some structure. I had way too much freedom all throughout my childhood and adolescence, and so I needed to be in that rigid, structured environment to channel my impulses and whatever potential I had into something more useful.
Josh King:
For our listeners, where were you based, what was your job, and how long were you in?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah, so I was based in a bunch of places. I was in for eight years. It's funny. People will say, they'll read the middle chapters of my book when I'm a teenager, and they're like, "You seem so different now compared to the teenage version." And I'm like, "Yeah, eight years, eight years will do that to anyone, but eight years in the military especially."
And so I was stationed in Washington State. I mean, and went through basic training and a bunch of training programs for my job in Texas. Then official duty, stationed at McChord Air Force Base in Washington State. I was stationed in Ramstein Air Base in Germany. I went to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. I was in Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan. I spent one night in Kandahar, in Afghanistan, in, I don't know, 2012 or something, and just moved all over.
And my job was an electronic warfare technician, and I didn't have any particular reason why I chose it. The reason I chose it was because it had the word warfare in it, and I thought it sounded cool. I was 17, and I'm looking at the list of jobs available that had openings. I'm like, "Electronic warfare, that sounds so cool." And I went in and I was essentially just repairing radars and radios and different kinds of defensive systems on aircraft, so it was kind of a technical job. And so the planes would land and I'd ask them, "Oh, do you have any issues?" Or I'd install software updates on their jets.
Yeah, so it was a fun career, the first four years especially. Towards the end of the enlistment, I was ready to go, but I don't regret any of it. That was a great experience.
Josh King:
The work, maintaining million-dollar systems, talking to extremely well-trained, well-qualified pilots, debriefing them from those missions, getting a sense of what they need to fix their aircraft, I mean, that will make people feel pretty responsible over a short period of time.
But given the limited exposure that you had to the very idea of going to college and how you grew up, what were the pivotal moments or realizations that you had during those eight years that shifted your perception and made you say, "Hey, I may actually be fit for college after all"?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah, I mean, it's funny. Even before I enlisted, the military helped me to recognize my own potential just through taking that test. I hadn't signed any papers yet when I took the test, but that revealed my academic potential to me. And then going through all the training, and I was usually in the top 10% of whatever, whether it was in terms of fitness or in terms of the academic programs and trainings and so forth, and early promotions. And I received just a lot of praise from my superiors, and they recognized... They had more confidence in me than I had in myself when they offered early promotion to me and I, at one point, I did express some reluctance, and I'm like, "I don't know if I'm ready for this." And they're like, "Well, we think you are and that's good enough, so we're putting you up for it." I'm like, "All right."
I did have those moments, like you mentioned. I'd speak to these pilots and somewhere in the back of my mind, especially at first, being 18, 19 years old, by the time I was fully qualified to do this job, I did think to myself, "I'm 19 and you're letting me do this. This is just crazy that you're letting me have this job and I'm doing this," and just blown away by it. So the confidence that they had in me built my own confidence in myself.
And yeah, that was all of those experiences, the mentorship, the camaraderie. I also dwell a little bit in the book about just maturation, the biological maturation of going from being 17 or 18 and being put in a rigid environment where you're not allowed to make too many bad decisions. And so by the time, as a young man, you reach your early 20s, mid-20s, you can arrive at a point where you're a little bit less impulsive and a little bit more sophisticated in your thinking. And I think that played a role too. It was just allowing me to develop and mature.
Josh King:
We could spend a whole podcast talking about the opportunities that the military has for folks who may learn differently, mature differently, and need the kind of structure that it provides, if only sometimes the barriers to entry and the physical screener and the other things that they try to screen out from prevents so many people from serving.
But just to move on the progression and get us from Ramstein to New Haven, in chapter 10, you talk about your time at Yale as surreal, and you talk about moments with esteemed figures on campus, including the late Harold Bloom, the late psychologist Albert Bandura. But among those surreal experiences, you also mentioned a Yale senior offering you Adderall before classes began.
Considering your familiarity with drugs from early experiences in life, why did this incident stand out as such a revelation?
Rob Henderson:
I kind of thought I was past that. I thought I was past the phase of people offering drugs, and these were prescription drugs. These weren't street drugs, or I'm sure this Yale student, this senior, she had a prescription and it was all above board, but she still offered to sell it.
Yeah, it just was a moment of like, oh, I thought I had escaped the recreational drug use part of life and a part of society, I guess, and no, it was still rampant. It was different kinds of drugs of course. Adderall is this productivity-enhancing drug, but no, it still exists even at elite college campuses.
So yeah, that was surprising to me, especially so early on. I mean, I think that was just a couple days before classes were due to start, and right away drugs are available.
Josh King:
I mean, initially you attributed drug use to poverty as you talk about in the book, but how did the experience of being offered by a senior at Yale reshape your understanding of the underlying reasons of substance abuse?
Rob Henderson:
Right, yeah. Well, people make that, "Oh, if you're poor and your life is full of suffering, then you see drugs as an outlet," and people chalk up addiction to those factors. And now I learned that drug use is... It appeared to me to be at least as rampant, if not more so, among elite college students and elite graduates as well, young professionals. It's not uncommon to see.
And so that was one moment among many that I would later have where I'd start to rethink some of these assumptions and recognize that this idea of poverty as the be-all-end-all explanation for every form of misconduct or every transgression or quasi-transgression that people get involved with, it doesn't make sense entirely. I delve into this distinction between childhood poverty versus childhood instability and how those two things can be separated and have different predictive power in terms of life outcomes, such that it's actually instability that has a much stronger effect on life outcomes than poverty alone.
And so that was one moment, and yet, I think that was the drugs, but there was plenty of alcohol abuse on campus as well. It was something else I had experienced with myself, but then I witnessed a lot of it too when I was in the military and realized like, "Oh, just substance abuse is not isolated to any one particular social class."
Josh King:
We had Yale's now-outgoing president Peter Salovey on the podcast maybe a year and a half ago or so. Talk about another incident and formative moment for you at Yale. You talk about an incident involving one of its professors, Erika Christakis, where her concerns about Halloween costumes and freedom of expression led to really demonstrations all over the quad and left you, I think, perplexed.
I want to take a listen to a report from WTNH News in New Haven covering the story eight years ago. Let's listen.
AUDIO:
We out here, we in here.
We didn't need it, we are [Inaudible 00:29:00].
Students called it a march, not a protest, when they gathered last month to say they didn't feel safe on the Yale campus after an email went out from Associate Master Erika Christakis. It was a war of words of sorts. Cultural Affairs asked students to pick Halloween costumes respectfully. Christakis wrote back, "Let the kids have fun."
And that students should be able to make mistakes and to wear offensive costumes if they want to, which a lot of people found very offensive.
Josh King:
You talked about your confusion about this outrage that fellow students had, and in response, you were labeled privileged for having that view.
What was your initial reaction and what insights, thoughts did being called privileged give you regarding the dynamics of judgment and perception within the campus?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah. Well, I would ask students, "Why was what this professor said offensive?" I mean, from my perspective, she was defending freedom of expression and essentially telling the students, "You're all adults. You don't need the university bureaucracy telling you how to live your lives or what Halloween costumes to wear." And students would respond.
Yeah, one student said I was too privileged to understand, and this student went to Exeter and came from a pretty upscale family. And I just, in the moment, I was so shocked that I didn't know what to say because she knew nothing about me or my life. And later, I came to get some familiarity because that was my first semester at Yale. I had no grasp of the language of identity politics and the sophisticated or pseudo-sophisticated ideas that were being bandied about on campus. But later, I came to, oh, she looked at me and figured, "Oh, he's cisgendered Asian Latino male," or something, and made a series of... And I'm at Yale, so therefore I must have come from a very privileged background.
And then I would learn more about these ideas. And then they would also say things like, "Lived experience is also important," but these seem to be contradictory to me. What's more important, how you look and the categories of your identity or the experiences you've actually had in your life? But the more I spoke to students, the more I realized that this kind of performative victimhood, this kind of accentuating one's marginalized identity was often... It's a marker for one sense of belonging for the future ruling class. It's like a way to communicate your own sophistication. It's also a way to ground your opinions in a way that people will take seriously. And I think we're seeing a lot of it now on campus.
I just saw this story, one of the students who was suspended at Penn, who comes from a very privileged family, she was suspended and announced that now she was homeless because they were removed her from campus. And it's ridiculous. If you're a rich Ivy League student and you get suspended and now you announced that you're homeless, to me, that's like a rich guy at a Michelin Star restaurant getting thrown out and then announcing that he survived a famine. That doesn't make any sense at all, just because you are removed somewhere for violating the guidelines of that institution.
So the professors, many of them are supporting this. I don't want to give this impression that it was just the students at Yale. A lot of the professors were participating in this. Famously at Yale, a lot of the professors either supported this kind of mobbing of the Christakises or they held back. Privately, they maybe felt that they should support them, but they just didn't, so there was a lot of cowardice. And the administrators too. I mean, it wasn't just the "kids." It's also adults as well.
Josh King:
Toward the end of the book, Rob, you reflect on the fates of your high school friends and how their lives have diverged from yours. What, at the end of the book, do you believe enabled you to overcome the hardships that might've otherwise defined your path?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I'm the only one of my friends from high school... There was a group of six of us in total that we hung out, and I spent a good bit of time describing their lives and their outcomes too, because I didn't want this book to just be that conventional, oh, bootstraps narrative. You just work really hard and anyone can get into Yale because it's not true.
And so I think one important factor was making that half-impulsive decision to just join the military and just get out of there. As soon as I graduated high school, even before my 18th birthday, before I was even old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, I just completely transformed my environment and my peer group.
And there were some other factors as well I think. I was always a curious kid. I liked to read, I liked to do those kinds of things. I was more academically inclined all throughout school compared to my friends. But one point I wanted to make in the book is that it shouldn't matter how academically inclined a kid is. Every kid deserves to have a stable and warm and loving childhood regardless of what their future looks like.
And so it's all well and good to promote social mobility by way of higher education, but ultimately, I think it's more important to focus on what happens before the age of 18 than what happens after. We should be focusing more on how to support families, how to support kids, how to ensure that those early years that have such an outsized impact on the rest of our lives, that those years are focused on, and that we do more to support them compared to this conventional ideal of educational mobility.
Josh King:
Supporting families and supporting kids. After the break, Rob Henderson and I are going to dive deep into his recent Wall Street Journal essay titled, "Luxury Beliefs That Only the Privileged Can Afford."
All that and more coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. If you're enjoying this conversation and want to hear more from guests like Rob Henderson, author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, please remember to subscribe to Inside the ICE House Podcast wherever you listen to your pods and give us a five-star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.
Before the break, Rob and I were talking about his youth and the foster care system, his military experience, and then his journey to Yale. Rob, in February, you wrote this essay, which in some ways you do as a companion to a book launch. A lot of people don't know your story up until that point. When it shows up in the pages of the Journal, that's when my ears perk up. My wife's ears perk up. She's often reading the Journal before I am, and she says, "You got to read this." That headline of that piece, "Luxury Beliefs That Only the Privileged Can Afford."
I said earlier, my wife's a psychologist who once worked with kids in the foster care system. She now works at the NYPD screening their recruits, and we as a family might be seen as capable of having luxury beliefs, but also have a son in the military at the Naval Academy where you won't find many protests going on about the war in Gaza.
Before delving into your writing, how would you describe the term luxury beliefs?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah. So luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper classes while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. And the idea originally started to take shape in my mind when I arrived at Yale and I was seeing those protests, I was seeing these students express very unconventional ideas. I'd hear them from professors and I'd hear them from administrators, just ideas that I'd never heard before.
And then by the time I got to Cambridge for my PhD, finally I had the right term for it. And during those intervening years, I was reading a lot of classic sociological texts on class, on status, on social rank throughout history. And a lot of this starts with Thorsten Veblen who wrote this book, A Theory of the Leisure Class, in 1899. And his core point was that people used to exhibit their status back in Veblen's day with luxury goods, with their material possessions, expensive clothes, tuxedos, top hats, evening gowns, pocket watches, and monocles. And people today still exhibit status through material goods, but goods have become a noisier signal of one's status. So if you travel back to 1899, you could tell immediately just by looking at someone who was rich and who was poor, whereas today, that's less true.
And so my claim here is that now the most fortunate and affluent members of society, not all of them, but a subsection within them, a segment of upper-class people and upper-middle-class people exhibit their social rank through these luxury beliefs. And these are a way to demonstrate that they have expensive educations and they have the kinds of jobs where they are exposed to novel and interesting ideas.
I cite a book, I think I cited it in Troubled, but there was a great book a few years ago called WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy about WASPs, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the American ruling class during the early 20th century. And one of the points that the author of that book makes, this guy Michael Beran, he points out that, and what he calls them, the high WASPs, the upper crust of WASP high society, that they would often support movements and causes because this would upset the Bulgarians.
Basically, if the unwashed masses believe something, then in order to signal that you're a member of the sophisticated upper crust, you take the opposite stance and enjoy, you get a bit of a thrill out of seeing how much it irritates everyone else. And I don't think much has changed since that point 100-plus years ago. People today still adopt certain causes, certain movements. I just gave it this new name, this luxury beliefs idea, but it's been around for a while.
Josh King:
So before we reference examples of luxury beliefs that you write about, I want to discuss the more recent protests on college campuses. I want to take a listen to an ABC7 eyewitness news report here in New York on the recent protests at Columbia.
AUDIO:
It happened in the middle of the night, protesters smashed windows and stormed the building. They barricaded themselves inside using locks and furniture after allowing three university staffers to leave. No one was injured.
Jessica Schwab is a student journalist who was there.
There were students who made it onto the outer balcony of Hamilton Hall and hung a flag through one of the windows, playing music, and singing chants like, "Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel will fall," or, "Glory to our martyrs."
Josh King:
That's the scene at Hamilton Hall with smashing windows, storming the building. Do you think these protests are manifestations in some way of luxury beliefs? What are your perspectives on the current situation that we're seeing?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah. Well, if you look at some of the interviews of some of these students and the backgrounds of some of the demonstrators, you can see that almost none of them seem to come from downtrodden backgrounds. Most of these students do seem to be relatively privileged, very affluent themselves. There was a story, one of the leaders of the protest movement at Columbia that was vandalizing the buildings was the son of millionaire parents. His name escapes me, but he was famously in that image.
So there's the Columbia janitor who was trying to escape this building that they had barricaded, and they were attempting to not allow anyone to leave, including this Columbia janitor. And the guy who clashed with him who was trying to prevent him from leaving was, the guy was like 40 years old, this son of millionaire parents but he decided to go back to the campus and lead this movement. And to me, that was just emblematic over the whole thing. Here you have this very wealthy guy breaking windows and barricading buildings, and then you have this blue-collar janitor whose job is essentially to clean up after these people.
You also see these images. There was a story out of UCLA. All these students created this encampment. They had these tents and garbage and food and all this stuff strewn about the campus, and they left. They left the mess behind. And who's cleaning it up? It's the custodial staff. It's the janitors, blue-collar workers.
So to me, this is like the modern day version of a bunch of aristocrats trashing the castle, and then having the peasants and the hired help clean everything up.
Josh King:
Talking about the folks who have to do so much of the cleanup for those types of activities, in referencing the Defund the Police movement in your book, you talked about a survey that found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for that movement while the poorest Americans reported lowest support. You write about, "The luxury belief class appears to sympathize more with criminals than their victims."
So Rob, in your opinion, why does wealth factor so much into supporting or being against a movement like this?
Rob Henderson:
I mentioned my professor before, John Gaddis. One of his favorite phrases he liked to invoke was that, "Common sense is like air. The higher you go, the thinner it gets." And at a certain point, I think once you reach a certain level of affluence and distance from reality and not a lot of everyday hardship, when you've never lived in a low-income or high-crime area, your experience with crime is just secondhand, it's through what you see on images and screens or through pop culture or through media, not recognizing that it's true that the vast majority of criminal perpetrators are poor, but so are their victims.
Criminals aren't... They don't travel far and wide to commit their crimes. They usually just inflict crimes on people around them in their own neighborhoods. And so this is why the Defund the Police movement was the least supported by the lowest-income Americans and the most supported by the highest-income Americans.
And I do think it has something to do with that desire for distinction, that if the middle and lower classes believe one thing, then one way to show your sophistication and your level of education and your social rank is to essentially take the opposite stance. Defund the Police, it initially started as Abolish the Police. It sounds edgy and interesting and shocking, but if you live in a gated community and you don't have to deal with crime, you can do the mental gymnastics necessary to find rationalizations and justifications for that idea.
Josh King:
In that Wall Street Journal piece, you noted that more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%. You were talking earlier about the distinction between poverty and instability, and we talked about the foster care system and its challenges, but considering the vast socioeconomic disparity in college admissions, some of those people who may come from those gated communities, do you think that the admissions process is fundamentally broken in terms of who they scan and bring into our university system?
Rob Henderson:
I don't know what... I guess it would depend on what the aim of these institutions is. So if we take them at their word because they announce that they're all about equity and diversity and assisting with social mobility and all those kinds of things, then clearly something has gone awry in their admissions programs when, yeah, you're taking more students from the top 1% than the entire bottom 60%. You're clearly not as interested as you claim in equity or assisting marginalized and dispossessed people.
But I don't think much has changed with these elite institutions in the last few centuries. Their implicit job, even if they wouldn't admit it, it would be nice if they would, is to recruit and shape elites. I mean, that is what they do. And naturally, there's going to be this kind of overlap between socioeconomic status and family wealth and geographic location and legacy status and all those kinds of things.
And I think sometimes in my most cynical moments, I think that is why they go so hard the other way in terms of the lip service because they're trying to distance themselves from what they actually do, making and shaping elites. So they have to double down on this idea of making everything equal, promoting this vision of compassion and helping the marginalized.
Josh King:
We had Robert Putnam on the show a couple of years ago when his book, The Upswing, came out. He told a Senate hearing in 2017, "Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas." Break down those separate Americas by the numbers as you've evaluated it.
Rob Henderson:
I cite this figure in Troubled. If you go back to 1960 in the US, 95% of American children were born to two-parent families, two married parents, 95%, regardless of class, rich or poor. And if you fast-forward to 2005, for the upper class, some people refer to this as the new upper class, these are essentially people, college graduates who earn six-figures who work white-collar jobs, comfortable lives, for these families in 2005, it was 85%, so it dropped slightly from 95% in 1960 to 85% in 2005. But for working-class and poor families, it plummeted from 95% in 1960 to 30% by 2005 and those are the two Americas that Robert Putnam is describing there. These are essentially the two Americas that I saw when I compare Red Bluff, California to college campuses of Yale and Cambridge and others.
And when I think back to my early life, I thought 30% was actually remarkably high. I knew one kid who had married parents, he was on the periphery of our friend group, but it was rare. It was very rare to see it. Among my close friend group, none of us were raised by both of our birth parents, and that was very much the norm. There was me raised in foster homes. I had two friends raised by single moms, one friend raised by a single dad, one friend raised by his grandmother because his mom was on drugs and his dad was in prison.
And that is a very common picture of what communities look like in blue-collar, working-class communities now, not just in urban areas or inner city, but also just in the rural poverty of places like Northern California or famously in Appalachia and other places as well.
Josh King:
You recounted a conversation when you did get to Yale with a classmate who said, "Monogamy is kind of outdated," and after asking about her background and plans to marry, she adds that she's from a stable two-parent home and that she of course plans to have a monogamous marriage.
Given your first-hand experiences witnessing the struggles of children in unstable home environments, how challenging was it for you to hear that and then restrain yourself from reacting strongly to the assertion that she was making about monogamy?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah. Well, it was a strange response. I mean, she told me that monogamy is this outdated, oppressive institution, yet she, herself was raised by two parents, two married parents, and she planned to do that herself for her own kids in the future. And so what I heard essentially was, "I benefited from this age-old institution, and I planned to carry that benefit forward for my own kids," but her official public position was, "people shouldn't do this thing," this thing that almost certainly played some nontrivial role in arriving at a place like Yale, just like so many of the other students who also came from married, two-parent families who prioritize education and so on.
And so the first time I heard that, I was just... I'd never heard anything like that before. Despite a lot of the failed relationships and marriages and divorces and so on that I witnessed growing up, a committed relationship was still an ideal. It was still something that people aspired to, even if they didn't always match that ideal, even if they failed along the way, it was still something people wanted for their lives. And yet here were these people who almost took it for granted for themselves and their own families. "Of course we're going to get married. Of course we're going to do this thing," but then denigrating it, downplaying it, casting it aside as something almost embarrassing that we'd want to do, and that ultimately, the goal of society is to get beyond it.
I was pretty good by that point of not getting emotionally rattled or something, but it did just get me thinking and started to put me in that direction of coming up with the luxury beliefs idea.
Josh King:
In both the memoir of Troubled and the essay that we read in the Journal, you talk about the concept of status symbols, and you highlight Broadway's Hamilton and Canada Goose jackets, for example. And these items were once exclusive and challenging for individuals outside the upper classes to obtain. You don't easily go to a Broadway show or throw on a Canada Goose jacket.
As they became more mainstream and accessible, how did the perception of these symbols begin to evolve?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah, well, yeah. I used the example of Hamilton, which actually that part of the book originated in another essay I wrote in the Journal in 2020, which when I arrived at Yale in 2015, everyone was talking about the Hamilton musical. And I looked up online how much the cheapest tickets were. It was something like $300. I was living on a GI Bill stipend, barely able to cover my rent, so that was not a possibility for me.
But then by 2020, Hamilton was made available to stream on Disney+. And I just found this very interesting that when it was exclusive, when only high-income people were able to afford it, it was lauded by critics, and it was all anyone could talk about. Five years later, now that you could afford to stream it for whatever it was, $9.95 a month, people turned their back on it. There were these articles, "It's time to reevaluate Hamilton." The creator himself said that he had failed in his creation of it, and just a lot of this... Suddenly it was uncool to like.
And the same thing with Canada Goose jackets. Those became gauche. In the winter of 2015, 2016, Canada Goose jackets were $900 to $1,000, and five years later, you could find them at some secondhand stores for $150, something like that. And you don't really see those jackets on Ivy League campuses anymore.
And it's the same with luxury beliefs. They are very expensive. When they are very expensive to acquire, they hold this unique and exclusive status as a symbol. And then once the idea percolates throughout society and people gain familiarity with it, learn how to express it, then it becomes gauche. And I think this happened with the defund the police idea. In 2020, it was the shocking, interesting idea that a lot of elite institutions were supporting, or at least not challenging. And four years later, I think it's embarrassing to talk about it. To be an open supporter of it, it's kind of, "Let's not talk about that anymore. We don't wear Canada Goose anymore."
Josh King:
Of all the luxury beliefs that we've talked about in our conversation today, Rob, perhaps the luxury belief that's most personal to you discusses the insignificance of family and the idea that children thrive equally in all family structures. Of course, you recognize this to be untrue from your own upbringing, but how does this luxury belief reflect broader societal attitudes toward family dynamics and approaches to child-rearing?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah, well, it's the luxury belief I think that has been the most destructive. People will cite economic factors in the deterioration of families, the fragmentation, and I have no doubt that plays some role. But again, those figures I cited before, 95% of children in the US were born and raised by two married parents in 1960. There were poor people in 1960. Some of them were... Arguably the poorest of the poor in 1960 were poorer than our poor today. And yet, when people got married, they tended to stick together and raise their kids. So clearly, economics can't be all of it. There has to be a cultural component here to explain it.
And who drives the culture? Who wields outsized influence in terms of our priorities, in terms of the aspirations that we tend to move toward, the life scripts that we tend to adhere to? A lot of these are elites. These are the people who write articles and create motion pictures and movies and TV shows, and just the images that we're exposed to.
So the family has been this... It's been cast aside as unimportant. Marriage, monogamy, commitment, all of these things, they require constant upkeep as an ideal to cultivate and to strive toward. And over time, I think we've lost the will to uphold that as a norm. I'm talking specifically among elites.
And if you are the kind of person who has high levels of economic capital, high levels of education, you were raised yourself by two married parents, you have all of these advantages going for you. So by the time you're an adult and interested in getting married or interested in relationships, marriage is a part of your life script and the kinds of things that you want to do. Whereas if you grew up the way that I did where you weren't raised by married parents and you don't have much in the way of money or education or opportunity and so on, marriage is just not... Maybe it's an ideal for you, but you actually have never... I've never, and none of my friends ever saw what an actual healthy, committed marriage looks like. And so it becomes that much harder, I think, to create one for yourself.
Josh King:
So in your essay, you contend that certain choices such as single parenthood, substance abuse, and crime should not be normalized, particularly as they've been embraced by those with luxury beliefs. Why do you believe that society has shifted towards endorsing actions like these, despite conventional wisdom recognizing the potential consequences associated with them?
Rob Henderson:
Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. I mean, I cite some statistics in the book, survey data indicating that if you ask Americans, break it down by education level, the Americans with the highest levels of education are the least likely to say that it's important for a child to be raised by two married parents, and yet they're the most likely to actually do so in their own lives. Divorce and single parenthood and unmarried parenting, it's pretty rare in upper and upper-middle-class families in the US. And yet, these are the people who, when it comes to their public opinion and what they say, they'll say, "Oh, it's not an important thing to do." But again, this is the segment of society that has the most influence in terms of the norms that we follow and the ideals that we aspire to. And yeah, it has detrimental effects on society.
And I like to draw an analogy here to other causes and other movements because sometimes people will challenge me on this point that, "Oh, it doesn't really matter what ideals that this segment of society, it doesn't matter what thinks that they champion or espouse," but if members of the upper and upper-middle class suddenly adopted permissive attitudes around racism or sexism or misogyny, homophobia, et cetera, et cetera, I think a lot of people would be alarmed by this. It's good that they've supported these norms against those things. I support it. I think it's a good thing that they support gay rights and stigma and taboo around these kind of hostile attitudes. And it works. It's effective. A lot of those movements started with elites.
I didn't want to make this book like a screed against it. Sometimes elite movements can be good. They do support good causes sometimes. Those aren't luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs are specifically the ones that damage and inflict costs on marginalized members of society.
So likewise, I think that if you are a fortunate member of society, you have a duty and a responsibility of course to support those aforementioned taboos and stigmas, but you could also support norms and cultural guardrails around other choices in people's lives, around marriage, around commitment, around integrity, hard work, respect, punctuality, all of those kinds of things too. And I think a lot of members of what I call the luxury belief class, they've abandoned those duties.
Josh King:
One might, at this point, given all of your extensive accomplishments, including your military career, your degrees from Yale and Cambridge, your success as a writer, as now perhaps a fortunate member of society, Rob. Do you think of yourself as part of the upper class now, or does your upbringing lead you to feel that you still don't quite fit in?
Rob Henderson:
I cite some sociologists and some other thinkers in the book challenging this idea of true upward mobility within an individual's lifetime. I think intergenerational mobility is possible. So plainly, my kids will probably be members of the upper or upper-middle class. As for me, it's hard to truly bridge those class divides. The tastes that I... I grew up drinking Pepsi and eating Pop Tarts, and watching sitcoms. These are not the habits that a lot of my peers grew up with. I went to this rough public school. All those experiences imprint on you over time. So I can pass for a while, but eventually people notice over time. Eventually, they notice.
But I make this point in the book too, that I'm pointing out these flaws, I'm making some critiques. And sometimes people will challenge me on this saying, "Well, you went to Yale, you went to these fancy schools. Aren't you a hypocrite for doing this?" And my response to that is it's a "heads, I win, tails, you lose" strategy that elites have set up for themselves because if you are not a member or an aspiring member of this class, then they won't take you seriously. When I was washing dishes or when I was enlisted and if I had made these same critiques, they wouldn't have engaged with me at all. They would've just ignored it. But now that I have some credentials and some influence, now they can dismiss my arguments by saying, "Oh, well, you're just a hypocrite."
And so either way, there's this sort of self-protective mechanisms in place. But I'm hoping that through discussing this, I think a lot of people are coming to recognize a lot of the same patterns that I've been describing.
Josh King:
A lot of people are coming to recognize them indeed. Rob Henderson, thank you so much for sharing some of those patterns with us today and having this conversation about your incredible book.
Rob Henderson:
Thank you, Josh.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Rob Henderson, author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class out now from Gallery Books.
If you like what you heard, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show or to hear from a guest like Rob Henderson, please make sure to leave a review. Email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast.
Our show is produced by Lance Glynn with production assistance, editing, and engineering from Ken Abel, Pete Ash is the Director of Programming and Production at ICE, and I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
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