My Final Paper

I am an African American, upper-middle class male, who has spent most of my life in challenging, elite academic institutions. I am the youngest of four children; two of my siblings went to Harvard, and the other is a senior at Swarthmore.  For many years I was an academic underachiever.  Most of my teachers, and at times even my parents, labeled me as a spoiled, entitled kid who was not interested in doing well in school.  They said I needed to work and try harder.  When I was in tenth grade, my mom, who is a psychiatrist, had me tested, and it was discovered that I had Attention Deficit Disorder.  With this diagnosis I was given extra time to take tests. Even with the said diagnosis, however, there were some teachers who refused to believe there was a biological basis for my academic problems.    The reaction I got from some of my high school teachers was extreme skepticism.  In fact one of them told me that if I worked harder, I would not need extra time to take tests. This summer at MSI, when I told one of the instructors about my ADD, she said I the school could not allow extra time to take exams and that I “needed to be better organized.” Hancock’s chapter on “Intersectionality,” in conjunction with Anzaldua’s piece on “hybridity” offer insight into their reaction. In this essay, I will argue that my race and economic privilege lead people in society to engage in “Willful Blindness” and “Defiant Ignorance,” by refusing to acknowledge biological disadvantages posed by ADD.

Both authors deal with the fact that people are made up of different social categories, i.e. cultural, biological, and sexual.  Anzaldua suggests that these differences result in a kind of hybrid personality. She postulates that disparate elements result in a new and different category, one that is somehow different from its constituent elements. Furthermore, she posits for example that the mestiza is “ a mixture of  races…a hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool”  (77).  On the other hand, Hancock suggests that different elements of one’s identity coexist, but at the same time are discrete and separate.  He says “intersectionality theory uses Categorical Multiplicity as a way to recognize that race, class, gender and sexual orientation all can represent equal but not identical threats to the values of freedom and equality embraced by all Americans” (6).

Societal assumptions about African Americans contributed immensely to my teachers’ perception of my academic performance. Society expects African Americans to perform poorly in the classroom. African Americans are more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be placed in low-performing academic tracks and to drop out of high school. This being said, those who perform well are considered extraordinary. Whenever I performed poorly, I was another example of the paradigm. I was reading from the script that society had written for me (Wideman). The fact that my siblings had not performed poorly simply meant they were exceptional.  I was performing the way I was expected to.  The fact that I was a good basketball player only reinforced the perception that I was a prototypical black male.

Once I was diagnosed with ADD, many, but not all, of my teachers refused to believe it could have affected my academic performance.  Despite the scientific documentation I presented, they engaged in what Hancock calls “Willful Blindness” meaning denial of others oppression and of your own privilege, and “Defiant Ignorance”, meaning refusing to acknowledge or learn about another’s oppression. To them it was not my ADD that led to me performing poorly in school, but rather my race and ethnicity. Because I am member of the subaltern group in the White/ non-white binary, my failure to succeed could only be explained by my membership in the group, not any other factor.

Another element cited by Hancock that might have also been present was Movement Backlash. As I mentioned, I went to an elite private school where admission was very competitive.  There was a presumption that black students who were there were not really qualified. Thus we were there based on privilege. For many teachers, allowing me extra time on tests was simply another privilege that I did not deserve. Their reaction to me was that it was difficult to believe that an African American kid from a privileged background could also have a disability that would entitle him to what they would think of as additional privileges.  At the same time, privilege did play some role in my situation, because my parents had the resources to get me the diagnosis, which afforded me the opportunity to mitigate my disability.

Both the hybrid and the imbricated analyses offer insight into my unique situation.  From my perspective, I view myself as a hybrid.  I am an integrated black male, from an upper middle class background with ADD.  I am all of these things at the same time. These characteristics make me sympathetic to those with disadvantages but they also make me know that people can, if given the right opportunities, overcome disadvantages.  Just because one has what others view as a disadvantage does not make one a victim. I also recognize that different aspects of my being intersect with each other. These truths make me feel as if I occupy the liminal space between binaries. While I am the hegemon in some binaries, I am the subaltern in others.

Moving forward, progress will not be made unless I can learn to deconstruct the binary. While talking about how the binary can be deconstructed, Anzaldua writes, At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two moral combatats somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent eagle eyes” (78). Through these words, Anzaldua imparts that we must be able to see, understand, and accept both sides of the binary to reach new consciousness.