The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
by Jeff Hobbs
Robert Peace was a natural genius born into the post-industrial wasteland of Newark, New Jersey. Despite a tough upbringing, Peace made it out of Newark and got accepted to a private school. His talents caught the eye of a wealthy benefactor who paid for him to get a full ride to Yale University, where he graduated with a degree in molecular biology. Peace’s life was a modern fairytale that sadly ended as absurdist tragedy. The petty criminal underworld of Newark drew him back years after he graduated from the Ivy League. At the age of thirty, he was murdered in Newark in what was believed to have been a drug deal gone wrong. Peace somehow had gone from a Yale graduate in life sciences to running a basement grow-op and selling weed in New Jersey.
It’s easy to be exasperated at the futility implied by this true story. A lot of people – the guy who paid for Peace’s scholarship likely among them – are going to come away feeling like trying to uplift people is just a hopeless endeavor. Given the sectarian undertones of Peace’s story, not a few will also feel like their ethnic stereotypes have been validated. I think that response misses something very important, though, which is that Peace never really had it as easy as it looked on paper. Even people who win the lottery sometimes end up broke and in jail. And why is that? The truth is that money or a job is on its own not enough for a person to make it. You also need a community that gives you a sense of identity and pulls you along towards success. Peace came from Newark and that became a core part of his identity. His origins exerted a magnetic force on his life, and counted a lot more than the four years he spent at Yale.
This book was written by Peace’s former college roommate, a young man from an upper-class white family with whom he became unlikely friends. As the author observed, although Peace made it to Yale, he never really felt like he fit in there. Peace came from a world where people were easygoing, had low expectations of each other, and for whom going to an Ivy League school was as unthinkable as becoming an astronaut. He still made it to Yale because he was a naturally gifted student and also got a few lucky breaks. People in college generally liked him, but he never really felt at ease with himself. Peace did well enough in his classes and graduated on time. Yet he also sold marijuana on the side, and even found random people to hang out with on the streets of New Haven. He clearly felt like an alien at Yale, living among people who frankly are often pretty alienating.
People often want to help others who come from different walks of life, yet they don’t really know how to do it. Handing someone a good job, a scholarship, or a stack of money often seems like its solving all their problems. Yet without a broader context of psychological support it’s often just setting them up for a fall. When Peace got to Yale he didn’t have any older people around him who came from a similar background, shared a relatable identity, or who could give him any advice that made any sense based on his own background. He got a degree nonetheless because he was intelligent, but he never gained a new identity in college. When he graduated, Peace drifted back to his childhood friends from Newark. As troublesome or underachieving as they may have been, he felt at home among them. Over time he eased into a life of menial work and small-time criminality common to many young men from Newark. By the time he was murdered, the fact that he had been a Yale graduate was just a curious detail in his obituary.
I’m not going to get preachy about the importance of not being judgemental because there’s clearly more than enough of that in the media and everyone is tired of it. People are responsible for their own actions at the end of the day, and Peace did have something of a victim complex that impeded his success. But don’t judge him too harshly. There are a lot of people like him who are smart and capable, but who lack role models and an upwardly-mobile social network that makes them feel in their heart that success must be their natural destiny. Without that powerful psychological anchor it is very easy to go adrift. I’ve actually seen it happen several times with people I’ve known from humble backgrounds who achieved success but then felt like they didn’t fit in and self-sabotaged. Deep down they wanted to go home to where they felt socially at ease, and people were at least comprehensible. I can understand the sentiment. If you’re ever gonna help someone out, if you really want to help them, make sure you have a plan to give them a solid sense of identity along with whichever job or scholarship you may have in mind.