You Need to Try Harder (word count: 1556)
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 (ADD). 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 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 Anzaldúa’s piece on “hybridity” offer insight into their reaction. I believe that the nature of my African American identity coupled with my economic privilege have led people in society to engage in “Willful Blindness,” “Defiant Ignorance,” and “Compassion Deficit Disorder,” by refusing to acknowledge biological disadvantages posed by ADD.
Both Anzaldúa and Hanckock assert that people are made up of different social categories; cultural, biological, and sexual. Anzaldúa 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. For example, she posits that the mestiza is “a mixture of races…a hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool” (77). Through these words, Anzaldúa conveys that through our intersecting identities, we occupy multiple spaces simultaneously. Contrastingly, Hancock suggests that different elements of one’s identity coexist, but at the same time are discrete and separate. She 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). Through these words, Hancock imparts that multiple identity characteristics intersect with one another. One cannot just talk about single aspect of his or her being, because different aspects of one’s being are constantly crossing with each other intersectionally, just as my African American identity and my socioeconomic status intersect to form a separate, unique identity.
Societal assumptions about African Americans contributed immensely to my teachers’ perception of my academic performance. Popular media has played and will continue to play a pivotal role in the negative perception of African Americans in society. Deleterious depictions seen in literature, magazines, television, and movies create indelible impressions. In Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions, Riggs investigates the ingrained negative stereotypes that have afflicted African Americans for centuries. Through these insidious stereotypes, viewers comprehend how white people have characterized black Americans and how these stereotypes have served to justify the continued oppression of black people. These troubling images apply to many members of the subaltern group in the White/non-white binary. The depictions are all about keeping the hegemon or “white man” on top, and keeping those underneath “him” below. The specific images about African-Americans serve a particular purpose. African-Americans were chattel property in this country. Showing slaves as happy leads one to believe that being a slave was a good thing. Depicting the happy Sambo is meant to give the impression that the plantation was a utopia or a paradise, and thereby justify the condition whites forced blacks to assume.
Moreover, society expects African Americans to perform poorly in the classroom, and this expectation has alarming repercussions: 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. Given this reality, those who perform well are often considered extraordinary, an exception to the rule. Whenever I performed poorly, I was another example of this 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.
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,” a denial of other’s oppression and of one’s own privilege, and “Defiant Ignorance,” a refusal to acknowledge or learn about another’s oppression. To them it was not my ADD that led me to perform 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 by any other factor. This failure of acceptance based solely on a biological factor such as race closely connects to the turmoil homosexuals face with regards to issues involving equal rights. Just as African Americans have been marginalized, criticized, and scrutinized for not conforming to societal norms, the same can be said about the LGBT community. Furthermore, the triumph of both groups to overcome the unlikely and untimely circumstances they faced evokes even more similarities. Although full liberation for the LGBT community has not been accomplished yet, the job is not finished. Through the African American experience, history teaches us that with enough courage and determination, justice will reign supreme in the end. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” For just to be achieved, the LGBT community, in congruence with numerous other oppressed groups preceding them, must keep pushing for equality.
While my teachers and those around me engaged in Willful Blindness and Defiant Ignorance, Compassion Deficit Disorder (CDD) was also present. Being at an elite private school where admission was very competitive, there was a presumption that black students were not really qualified. Our acceptance and presence in the school was thus viewed as an undeserved or perhaps unearned 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.
Concepts of both hybridity and intersectionality offer insight into my unique situation. From my perspective, I view myself as a hybrid. I am a dynamic 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, Anzaldúa 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 combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent eagle eyes” (78). Through these words, Anzaldúa imparts that we must be able to see, understand, and accept both sides of the binary to reach new consciousness – a journey that will undoubtedly stretch beyond my four years here at Occidental College.
Work Cited
1. Anzaldúa, Gloria. "La conciencia de la mestiza." Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press. 1987. 77-91
2. Hancock, Ange-Marie. "Intersectionality to the Rescue." Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics. 2011. 1-32
3. Miller, Neil. "Stonewall and the Birth of Gay and Lesbian Liberation." Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 365-387.
4. Miller, Neil. "The 1970s: The Times of Harvey Milk and Anita Bryant." Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 395-421.
5. Wideman, Daniel. "Free Papers." Outside the Law: Narratives on Justice in America. Eds. Susan Richards Shreve and Porter Shreve. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. 173
(Kevin Wiggins)
