Journalism Needs Cultural Adjacency

When I was thirteen or fourteen, my best friend, a first-generation Cuban-American kid like me, told me about the weekend he’d spent shooting hoops at his Little League coach’s house. My friend was shocked that his coach had a basketball hoop, and automatically assumed that he was filthy rich. My family wasn’t dirt poor, but we certainly didn’t have a basketball hoop, so I also thought the coach was loaded, some kind of Cuban Rockefeller; if he had a pool, we might’ve assumed he was royalty or a major drug dealer, such was our backward understanding of class and money back then. I know now that the coach was no higher than lower middle class, but my buddy’s frame of reference, just like mine, had been formed in a world in which lousy graphite backboards signified the highest levels of American affluence and luxury.