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Originally posted by RACooper
I gotta ask though... as seen other threads; ie. the too 'white' too 'black' thread; do you see the anti-intellectualism issue as solely a 'black' vs 'white' issue? Or as an issue of people getting upset because they think someone is acting superior?
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I see it as a global issue (which is what I said in an earlier post). Perhaps global is the wrong word -- universal might be more appropriate. One only needs to look at who currently occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to see evidence of it.
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The reason I ask - somewhat inelegantly - is that I'm wondering how much of the "better" man is based on a 'white american' ideal - ie. the "melting-pot"; and how much is predicated by some level of envy of any "success"?
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I think I see what you're getting at... and I think there might be a nugget of truth to your question. I think there is a certain amount of nihilism at play in disenfranchised communities as well, and I think that when a person has reduced or non-existent expectations for achievement that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You see someone striving while you're standing still, and your envy makes you want to tear that other person down instead of pulling them aside and asking "Hey, how did you make it? And how can I?" If one is envious of the "haves", then getting depressed and failing to achieve doesn't seem like the right answer, IMO. I understand how difficult and demoralizing it can be - I lived that reality for most of my life - but simply giving up and failing to "check in" is not the way to go about this.
The key is to challenge those diminished expectations and, perhaps, to develop a different definition of what it means to succeed. Condoleeza Rice might not have Oprah's money, but she's a success. Marva Collins was a school teacher/school administrator, but she was a success. The doctor down the street who had to work several jobs to put himself through undergraduate and medical school is a success, not simply because he's a doctor, but because he challenged people's expectations and beat them.
The American Dream is unfairly stacked against a number of minority communities, primarily because people in these communities have been denied access to things like wealth or the ability to accumulate financial capital, or the access to cultural capital that opens doors. What needs to happen - and what used to happen in the past - was that we created our own networks, had our own systems of cultural capital and used them to our advantage. But somewhere we became derailed from these systems and ended up where we are now. I look at the circumstances AKA_Monet was describing and that seems like evidence of this - people tearing the other down instead of trying to find a workable solution that benefits everyone.
Maybe competing on "the man's" turf using "the man's" rules isn't the best way to negotiate these spaces. Maybe what we need is some sort of hybridized rules to that addresses our particular situation as 'hybridized' people.
It's early and I'm not awake yet so I don't know how much of this is gibberish.
