As one of her six children, the greatest gift I received from my dearly departed mother was to value education and lifelong learning. This helped me rise from our poor surroundings in inner-city Cleveland, OH to become the successful black professional that I am today.
Heeding this lesson, however, was also the genesis of years of verbal abuse, ostracism and criticism I was forced to endure from other black people – from elementary school through graduate school. During these years, I was accused by my black brethren of “acting white” for using correct English, for making good grades and for having a sincere love of learning for learning’s sake.
I could not understand why this happened until, over a decade ago, I read John McWhorter’s book Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. As the Bible tells us in John 9:25, Where once I was blind, now I see.
In Losing the Race, Professor McWhorter outlines in surgical detail three aspects of a modern day black sub-culture that hold us back as a people. First is the “Cult of Victimology,” where victimhood is not seen as a problem to be overcome but an identity to be nurtured. In the “Cult of Separatism,” the uniqueness of our history is used as a justification to exempt us from the rules that govern the rest of American society. Lastly, in the “Cult of Anti-Intellectualism,” an affinity toward education is seen as running counter to an “authentic” black identity.
The anti-intellectualism cult really hit home with me, and McWhorter’s book let me know that I was not the problem.
This reminds me of an experience from graduate school. While enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University, I always actively and enthusiastically engaged in my own learning process: asking questions and engaging professors and other students on various topics. One of my fellow graduate students, a black woman from New York City, felt it necessary to talk to me about my behavior.
I was told of her concern that white students in our program who hadn’t grown up around blacks and who were not used to being around “intelligent, articulate black men” like me would be “intimidated.” She felt they might “try to use that against me in the future.” In other words, white students might discriminate against me because of my love of scholarship! Thus, she advised, I should basically tone down my intellectual zeal.
I never forgot that conversation. After reading Losing the Race some time later, I realized that this woman’s “concern” for my well-being was merely her own anti-intellectual attitude toward me – cloaked à la “whitey.” In other words, this culturally – and thus, authentically – “down” sister was dumping her own academic insecurity on me through the specter of supposedly socially ignorant white students who would supposedly retaliate against me for supposedly making them feel mentally inadequate. How lame is that!
Losing the Race opened my eyes to the three cancerous aspects of black American cultural groupthink. It also rekindled a love of learning and self-improvement, which enabled me to graduate high school Valedictorian, become my family’s first college graduate, earn a master’s degree, and lead a successful and fulfilling life as a loving husband, father and all-around good citizen. There is no way I would sacrifice that just to gain the myopically fleeting acceptance of my “peers.”
This is a race that I plan to win.