I seem to think and talk a lot about articles I see in the Washington Post. This is because I use the paper as my primary news source, although not as the only or final source. So anyway, I have some thoughts about yet another piece from the Post, in this case from the Opinion section last Sunday.
One of the Metro section reporters wrote a long essay on being a black professional woman, attending an Ivy League college, how her education has affected the perception that other Americans have of her, and how her experience has been quite similar to Michelle Obama's (she thinks). This is the passage that caught my eye:
Some blacks have asked why I didn't go to Howard or another historically black college... In some instances, the choice between Harvard and Hampton can be seen as choosing to accept or reject your race. That can make an Ivy League acceptance letter seem more like a burden than a break.
But some of us still decide to go to "white" schools -- because it's a glittering line on a résumé, because we're compelled to try to own something that was once denied us, and because we hope that an Ivy League education may act as a kind of academic armor against misperceptions, assumptions and plain old bigotry. Like every other meritocrat, we're looking for an advantage, and we have particular reason to think that we may need one.
I found this immediately annoying, but had to think about why for some minutes. My usual antipathy toward this sort of thing is part of my annoyance, in that I don't understand and generally have contempt for people who define themselves by race or ethnicity. You are what you are, and you can no more "accept or reject your race" than you can your body or your soul. You've been issued one by the lottery of life, and you just get on with your life without making something so ineffable your primary focus. (Many simmering thoughts here about transgenders, but aside from noting that an operation can't change you from XX to XY, I'll leave it for another time.) However, the majority of the trouble is her list of reasons that a black person might choose to attend a white school:
1. prestige
2. barrier breaking
3. a launchpad past bigotry and assumptions of mediocrity.
Nowhere does this woman mention the primary reason that any scientist or engineer chooses a school: choice and quality of major. I feel really strongly about this, so strongly that I was angry for hours after I read the essay. I didn't choose a primarily white college for prestige or any other of her lame reasons. I chose my college because of the major that I wanted to study!
!!
!!!!
I didn't consider the demographics of the place until late in the admissions process, and then the only thing that occurred to me was that women composed less than 25% of the student body (a lot less). It wasn't until I started classes that I realized I was the only black person in the school, and I would become the first to graduate from the college. (I'll grant you that this college is where I learned that the stereotype of black people had us eating watermelon and fried chicken (thanks Bobby B. !), and that there was a certain unseemly interest in my sex life, but I forgive the second, given my own youthful indiscretions and that the same prurience extended to all the other women.)
The same consideration held for my first round of grad school, and was only slightly modified for the current go-round by geography. So it occurs to me that perhaps all the navel gazing the author indulges in is a consequence of her own field of study, that being Liberal Arts (faint horror). Maybe that tribe is predisposed to consider the culture of a school first, and the specific fields of study second. Perhaps that is logical, seeing as how an important part of what they do is think and talk and feel (stronger horror). My own people, those who think and talk and derive and leave the feelings for spare time (after drinking, gaming and sleeping), don't pick a college based on the type of people who might attend. This is a thought that just doesn't make any sense. I'm going/have gone to school to learn something specific, and so choose the school based on its ability to offer that knowledge. The race of the people teaching and learning is completely irrelevant.
So now I realize that my annoyance isn't just because this Journalism person has ignored the importance of major when choosing a college, but has presumed to speak for black professional women all over the country, and has been given a national soapbox to do so. I hate to think that any past, present or future colleague of mine might think that my choice of college was influenced primarily by the reasons she listed, or might think that my mind works like hers. I hope any that happened to read the essay understand the essential divide between her motivations (and those of her liberal arts brethren) and mine.
For most things, anyway. Did I mention I have a degree from MIT?
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6 comments:
Well, as one of the liberal arts tribe, I agree that we may be "predisposed to consider the culture of a school first, and the specific fields of study second" but not because we are overly navel-gazing. It's just that the liberal arts are almost omni-present - we don't have to consider whether a school will offer it because it almost certainly will. I knew I wanted to major in English - heck you can even do that at MIT, if not every technical school (though I imagine it's not very popular at MIT).
As I recall, you were going for a much more specialized degree, and availablity of that degree would of course have to be the primary concern.
Heh, sort of. My bachelors was certainly specialized, but... even if I had been going for MechE or CivE, the two most common engineering disciplines, I still would have focused on the major first, and the school second.
I have to concede a little though, because those two majors are so commonly available that I'm certain that other factors have to be considered when selecting the school. Quality would have been first for me, then cost, then perhaps demographics would have started to matter. Knowing myself, geography would have greater weight, but that is a quibble.
Still, I maintain that it is odd for the quality and choice of major not to be at the top of the list of reasons to pick a school. If you are pursuing an education, the number of people at that school who are exactly like yourself should be a minor consideration, surely? (Maybe an exemption for the blind or deaf, whose accomodations improve with numbers.) Allowing yourself to be scared off, or persuaded away from a school because it has no tradition of graduating students like you just leaves old prejudices to stand.
Oh I forgot to say- the thing is that for some liberal arts people, the reasons listed are not only rational, but would seem admirable. But in the technical world, I have found so far that lending weight to these things isn't considered admirable, and might be seen as distasteful (except for the prestige part). So my angst in part is that some engineers might read this and think it applied to the broad category of black professional women, when I think the author's reasoning is definitely biased by her "liberal arts" mindset (for lack of a better descriptor). Of course, I also suspect that someone who invests so much thought and passion into racial identity is more likely to study liberal arts than engineering anyway.
Hello, this is Bobby B. Mat directed me to your blog, and I'm drawing a blank as to how I got mentioned in this post. Would you please remind me of the circumstances where I revealed that the stereotypical black person loves fried chicken and watermelon? I can only remember us conversing once or twice in school, but I can't recall that subject ever coming up.
Oh my goodness, hello! It was at that no good, horrible sensitivity training, where they told us to write down all the stereotypes we could think of for certain groups of people. It was the most misguided exercise ever, in my opinion, given that I was the only black person there, there were a couple jewish people, and a couple asians vs the remaining 60 or 70 white people. That was an eye-opener, as some of us had never even heard some of the things that came up.
I've tried to block most of it out, as it was semi-traumatic, but I do remember thinking that as I loved watermelon and hated fried chicken, maybe the stereotypes got blurred a little for multi-racial people like me.
Wow, I had completely blocked that out. As for me, I love fried chicken enough for the both of us. Next time we're together at a picnic, I'll eat your chicken and you can have my watermelon.
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