Photo via newschool.edu.

"I was born in Brooklyn. I grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant," Darrick Hamilton recalled recently. "I grew up in New York City's rough times.  I definitely remember the privilege I had getting to go to BFS."

Darrick entered BFS in first grade. His parents liked the school because "BFS wasn't strictly about academics. Its education was laced with values as well," he said.  "And frankly," he added, "with regards to race they thought I would fit best here. They didn't have as good an experience at other elite schools in Brooklyn. I won't call out names."

Yet was this brand new school appealing to him as a seven-year-old? "I loved BFS. It was fun. Punishment for me would be, I won't pay for you to go to BFS. That threat kept me in line," he laughed. "It was a passion for me to go back to school at the end of summer."

Darrick can't point to any one teacher or experience that led him to pursue economics in particular, but the teachers did inspire him to become a scholar. "They were role models. They made the profession very attractive," he said. Still, when he went to Oberlin College after BFS to major in economics, he had no thought of becoming a career academic. "I had intentions of going to law school or business school. I thought economics was a gateway to that." After all, he had in many ways spent his entire life thinking like an economist. "I like the approach to problem-solving. You have objectives, you have constraints, and you have to find a solution."

Halfway through college he decided he wanted to use his economics major to become a professor. He attended grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill, earning his PhD in economics. ”I largely went because of one faculty member in particular," he said of William Darity, who teaches Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics. Ever the scholar, Darrick completed two post-doctoral fellowships: the first was a Ford Foundation post-doc on poverty and the underclass; the second was a Robert Wood Johnson fellowship to study health policy and research.

His mentor Darity's articles and books have spanned the fields of public health, sociology, history, literary criticism and anthropology. It started as a mentor-mentee relationship, but the two recently co-authored an article for MSNBC's theGrio.com website taking Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to task for his seeming ignorance of US racial history while addressing students at Morehouse College (that article can be read here).

Darrick elaborated that the common wisdom about African-Americans is that they used to be victims of racism but now they're victim to their own self-defeating behavior, and if they could only conquer that then their problems would magically go away. "My research shows that the popular discourse isn't correct."

Indeed, like his mentor, Darrick isn't just an economics professor. He is focused on race, wealth and poverty in highly public ways. "I developed a keen sense of fairness, equity and justice, I think, from BFS," he said. "I learned that there's not just one approach to address big problems. I pursue research topics that interest me. And that includes structural barriers that lead to inequality. And I come from a group where I see that the public discourse has failed." 

How does Darrick sum up his career to date? "I've always been a student. There's work involved in being a professor of course but I've always had a love for learning. It's a very privileged life I've lived." 

Aside from sweeping issues such as social justice and equality, have so-called Quaker values influenced him in more personal ways? "I've discovered late in life that I'm pretty self-aware," he said. "And that's led to a lot of psychological health. The silence, being able to listen to your own voice as well as others'. I feel like I'm pretty skilled at that. I would trace that back to BFS."