Transcript: Rob Henderson

An interview with the American writer and commentator

It’s not unusual for well-heeled people to try to imagine what it might be like to grow up without money. But my guest on today’s program says it is uncommon for them to try to imagine what it might be like to grow up without a family. And his new book chronicles exactly that life — his childhood in foster care, but also his journey from a working-class town in California to the military, Yale University and beyond.

Rob Henderson is the American writer who coined the term “luxury beliefs.” His debut book is Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: At the beginning of Troubled, you write, “I've met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it's like to be poor. But I've never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up without your family.” I want to start on that point today because it's such a powerful one. For context, your mother was addicted to drugs. You did not know your father. Take us back to that time in your life with your mother in Los Angeles. What do you remember about it?

RH: In the early chapters of the book, I described my experiences with my mother. My earliest memory of her is being taken from her when I was three years old and placed into foster care. Now I have this very thick file, full of documents from social workers and people who were involved in my case when I was in the Los Angeles County foster care system. I don't have memories of this, but based on these reports, my birth mother and I, we were homeless for a time. We lived in a car and then eventually we settled in this slum apartment in L.A. That was when some neighbours called the police because they heard some kid screaming in this apartment. Police arrived and my mother had been tying me to this chair with a bathrobe belt while she would get high. She would have visitors coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night, trading favours for drugs. She was just extremely neglectful. 

I never met my father. My mother, a forensic psychologist, asked her, “Where is Rob's father? Because you're not in a position to care for him.” She didn't even know who he was. I went my entire life not knowing anything about my father. My mother was from Seoul. She came to the U.S. as a young woman to study. It wasn't until last year, when I took this 23andMe test, I discovered I'm half Hispanic on my father's side. But that was something that I had never really known, or thought that much about. That's the only piece of information I have about him, really. Once I was taken into care, I spent the next just shy of five years in seven different homes all around Los Angeles.

TH: The foster care system is notoriously unstable. For people who are not familiar, what does that instability look like on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis?

RH: It varies based on the particular child and the family and so on. But the experiences that I described, when I speak to other foster kids and other people who've aged out of the system and so on, it's not atypical. Especially in a place like Los Angeles, which is one of the most overburdened foster systems in the country. Some of the homes I lived in had upwards of eight or 10 kids living in them. I remember one home, there were four kids to a room. It was two bunk beds. So two kids on the top bunks, two kids on the bottom bunks. There's just an overwhelming number of children who need placements and not that many parents available to provide care. Essentially, a lot of the decision-makers in the foster care system, there's this kind of tacit acknowledgement that as long as the kid isn't actively being harmed, it's better that he sleeps in a bed somewhere than out on the street. So you have these situations where there's just too many kids living in one space. There were other homes where I was the only child. I write about the final home I lived in when I was the only child. In that case, my foster mother had her own agenda, and she would take boys in and essentially use us for free labour around the house doing chores and maintaining the yard. So each home is different. 

The whole experience was extremely unpleasant. I was changing homes every six months, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. So that cultivates this sense of extreme insecurity and mistrust. I could never feel fully invested in any particular home that I lived in. But it was also difficult because, especially the first few homes I lived in, I would make friends with some of the other kids in the homes. This is natural, you bring a bunch of kids together and they'll start to form friendships. But then one of my foster siblings who I liked would be taken and placed in a different home, or maybe returned to their family of origin. It wasn't just that I didn't know where I would be living day-to-day and week-to-week. But I also wouldn't know if tomorrow would be the day that one of my foster siblings would be placed somewhere else. 

So it was just an extreme level of disorder, uncertainty, and dread. That does take a toll. I write about the first three times that I had to change homes. It was extremely emotionally upsetting. I would just completely lose control of myself and my emotions, and I'd cry. I was four or five years old, and it was just really hard. Then by the fourth placement, the fifth placement, I stopped responding to these experiences and I just kind of blunted my emotions. In hindsight, it was probably a coping response. Even adults in that situation, it would be extremely stressful. But for a little kid, your body probably can't handle that much stress in such short windows of time. In response, I just stopped feeling anything and became very numb. That took a lot of work later to resolve.

TH: At eight years old, you were adopted by the Hendersons. This is a mother, a father, and a sister in Red Bluff, California. And you write very movingly about your first birthday celebration with them and the sort of amazement of being given these gifts. But after that, as you describe in the book, you had a front row seat to the kind of family breakdowns that are happening throughout working-class America. What happened in that family?

RH: I was adopted by this new family. My adoptive mother, my adoptive father, and their birth daughter who became my sister. This was the late 90s. At the time I wasn't aware of this; I was just this unsophisticated little kid. Now that I've read and learned and spoken with demographers and sociologists and people who've been tracking what's been happening to families across the country, the U.S., and in sort of the Western world more generally — there's been this massive divergence in terms of intact family formation. People who go to college, people who are more white collar, upper middle class families are as stable and intact as they've ever been. 

Whereas for working-class families, non-college educated, more blue collar family breakdown has been growing and increasing. It's pervasive. When people hear about something like 40% out of wedlock birth rates, they see that as an aggregate snapshot statistic, “Oh, four out of 10 kids.” But that's almost entirely concentrated among poor and working-class communities. If you visit upper middle-class neighbourhoods, it's very rare to see someone being raised by a single parent, or by parents who are divorced. It happens, but it's pretty rare. Whereas if you visit more blue collar, working-class areas, that's the norm now. It's very rare to see a kid raised by both of their parents, especially both of their birth parents. 

My adoptive father was a truck driver; he never went to college. My adoptive mother was an assistant social worker, she had a job as a certified nursing assistant. She had different jobs, but she never went to college. That was kind of the norm in Red Bluff. This kind of dusty, working-class town in Northern California. They were together when they adopted me, but then about 18 months later, they divorced. So from there, it was really difficult for me. My adoptive father stopped speaking with me after this. He was upset with my adoptive mother for leaving him, and that was his way of retaliating at her — to just stop speaking with me. So I was raised by my adopted single mother for a time, and that was hard after never knowing my birth father, all of the foster homes and all of the different families I'd lived in. I thought I finally had this family, and then my adoptive father stopped speaking with me. It would be hard in general for any nine-year-old, but I think it was especially hard for me after all of those really upsetting experiences. I used my story and the stories of some of my friends in Red Bluff, who also had broken and unstable family lives. I used these stories to illustrate what's going on more broadly in these communities across the U.S.

TH: In the next chapter of your life, at 17, you enlisted in the military, which gave you the kind of stability that you needed and set you on a good path, after having gotten in some trouble as a teenager. Talk to me about your service in the Air Force and how that period shaped your growth.

RH: Post-divorce, there was a lot of family drama, more separations, more family emergencies, financial catastrophes. There was just a lot of this going on all around me throughout my adolescence. By the time I was 17, my final year of high school, I was just ready to get out of there somehow. My grades were very poor. I graduated with a 2.2 GPA. Bottom third of my class, really unimpressive transcript. And so, I enlisted. It was a half-impulsive decision to get out of there. I had to have my adoptive mother actually sign this permission slip for me, because I was still legally a child. I was 17 when I graduated and fled.

That was a good experience for me. In hindsight, despite it being not maybe the most well thought through choice, it was the right decision for me. To just completely change my circumstances, my surroundings, the people around me.

Being in this really rigid structure, the military, every aspect of life is tightly regulated and controlled. That's not the right environment for everyone. I don't think that it's a fix-all, or this thing that everyone should do. But for someone like me, it was extremely helpful. In the book, I describe how the military contained my impulses and channelled my energy and aggression into something more productive. It is a kind of implicit defence of boundaries, of rules. The “free range childhood” thing of no rules, never say no to the kid — maybe that might work for families in which there's not a lot of danger and there's not a lot of crime and there's not a lot of opportunities for a kid to completely destroy his future. But for a kid in a poor, working-class, low income, high crime area, having rules is actually a good thing. Having boundaries and having caregivers and adults monitor and provide oversight. 

I didn't have that when I was growing up, but I did have it in the military and it was useful for me to just calm myself. I write about the “young male syndrom,” about how across culture, society, historically young men have been the most prone to impulsive and reckless behaviour. It's the demographic more likely to commit crimes, more likely to take extreme risks, harmful actions and so on. The military was a way for that energy to be limited.

TH: As you say in the book, when you were in the military, for those key years before 25, it also just kept you busy. It keeps you totally occupied. You have to be at a certain place at a certain time. There's not that many opportunities to go down that path.

RH: There aren't very many avenues for you. Even just taking up every moment of your time. You're on duty during these hours, but then off-duty you have these other responsibilities. Even the knowledge that violating the guidelines and the rules and regulations will result in very quick and certain penalties. If you fail a drug test — and there's randomised drug tests, you never know when you're going to get drug tested — if you fail a drug test, you can get court-martialed, you'll go to military prison. If you're late to work too many times that can happen. It is just very clear cut. 

Whereas in the real world, if you're an 18 or 19-year-old guy and you're late for work a few times and you do a lot of drugs, you can essentially take a series of irresponsible, impulsive, and reckless actions. It can take years before those consequences catch up to you. Whereas in the military, they make it very clear if you do X, Y will happen. So, you just don't do X. You don't do those things. That was really useful for me. People say, “I read those parts of your book, or I hear about your life when you were a teenager, and I see how you are now. It's really surprising how much you've changed.”On the one hand, people change anyway. People in their thirties are very different than their teenage years anyway. But I did undergo this massive transformation in part because I was enlisted for eight years. I mean, eight years is a long time anyway, but that was during the most formative years of my life — of any young man's life between the late teens and the mid twenties. The fact that I was in that environment and I was being inculcated with certain kinds of habits, norms, customs and so on. It was really helpful for me.

TH: Then you arrive at Yale, and this is the moment when the campuses were just starting to explode with some of these massive controversies. We talked about this last time that you were on the podcast. One of the standout moments in the book is when a classmate tells you that you are too privileged to understand the harm inflicted by an email about Halloween costumes. What did you make of that moment?

RH: At the time, it was just completely mystifying. I started at Yale in 2015. It was really the birth of when wokeness spilled out of the universities. Jonathan Haidt and other scholars have traced the origins of this new wave of political correctness to maybe 2011, 2012. But 2015 is when it caught national attention. Suddenly, other elite institutions began speaking about it and communicating about it. It became a topic of broader conversation and discourse. But I was unfamiliar with all of this. I'd grown up in foster homes, in this working-class area, and was in the military. Then I set foot on campus in 2015, completely removed from any discussions around higher ed, free speech, and academic freedom, and all of that stuff. It was just not on my radar.

So I saw students claim to be oppressed, marginalized — or they felt unsafe on campus because professors would write an email, or they heard an offensive opinion, or someone said they used a word that was outdated or something like that. And to me, it was just strange to hear students claim that an email could cause harm. These were the sons and daughters of millionaires, in one of the wealthiest universities in the world. In this bubble, they were indulging in this kind of emotional choreography of just being so put-upon, so beleaguered. 

The university in many cases would amplify it. The presidents, administrators, professors, the adults. Now, the students are adults too. I write about that, too, about what the definition of an adult is, depending on how much money your parents have and how old you are and whether you go to college or not. For me, a 20-year-old in the military was an adult. But then on campus, a 20-year-old was just a kid. I just found it interesting how if your family has a lot of money, you can be a kid until your 27th birthday and you graduate from law school.

Finally, I asked one student about this email these professors had written and how she claimed it was offensive and harmful. I asked her, “What was it about it that was so offensive?” And she responded that I was too privileged to understand it. I knew this female student. She grew up in Greenwich, went to Exeter. That's a very common background for students at Yale and other Ivy League universities. It's funny, she didn't know anything about me, other than I guess the way I look. She knew a little bit about how I was in the Air Force before, but she didn't really know how I'd grown up. At the time, I was just kind of shocked that she would say that to me. But then I came to realise that they had developed this quasi-sophisticated, weird intellectual acrobatics around, “Okay, well, if you're a member of this category or that category, then by definition you've lived a privileged life.” And so for me, mixed race, with an Asian/Latino background, I'm [still] a cisgendered, heterosexual male. Therefore, I must have had a very privileged life and I must not have had much hardship. So of course I wouldn't understand why an email could cause harm. I've just been oblivious to harm my whole life.

Eventually I would ask students about this strange logic that some of them would invoke. Sometimes they would say, “Yeah, of course, the way that you look, your categories, your sexuality, your orientation, your ethnicity — all of those things determine the life that you have and the experiences that you undergo.” But then other times students would talk about “lived experience.” How lived experience was a valuable justification for expounding on social ills, remedies, and how to resolve the challenges in society. This was strange to me, because on the one hand, if you check these boxes of identity, then therefore we already know everything about you that there is to know and how your life has gone. But then on the other hand, they're talking about lived experience as if actually it's not the identity boxes you check, it's actually what you experience in your life.

I've had some unusual experiences in my life. I would bring this up with students and try to identify what's going on with that contradiction. One student told me it's dangerous to ask that question. Another student told me, “Your identity determines your lived experience.” And at that point,  I realised a lot of this is just nonsense. A lot of it was just invoked for one of two reasons. Either it was intentionally manipulative, and students would invoke it as a way to shut down debate or to advance their own agenda. Then, I think other students were less calculating. They were just saying the things that they had sort of absorbed through osmosis. And those were the things you needed to say to maintain your reputation, and to avoid being ostracized.

TH: It's interesting how oblivious to social class that whole milieu is. And this is something I really wanted to try and unpack with you. Your story is remarkable, in that you are one of the rare people who has had an intimate experience with all our society's classes. The poor and the working-class, during your upbringing, the middle-class, during your time in the military. And the One Percent, the wealthy elites that you encountered at university. This is something that has always fascinated me. I spent the first years of my career as a music critic, interviewing rappers, and some of them had had that experience of jumping from poor, inner-city neighbourhoods, and sometimes even prison, into elite spaces with a lot of wealth and influence. It is an incredibly rare experience. It’s something, on a vastly different scale, I have felt a bit myself. When I was in high school, my mum was a single mum, she was a house cleaner. She eventually went back to school, got a Bachelor's, a Master's, PhD, and ended up being a professor in my adulthood. So, I have just a tiny inkling about this. I really want to talk about what this means. Broadly speaking, what did that mean to move between those different worlds?