“I thought you said a really intelligent thing today.”

“I think you make a really smart point.”

“He’s a really smart guy.”

I hear these phrases and their variants often in statements my peers make. My professors are usually indirect in their pronouncements about how intelligent or smart someone is by making claims about the person’s stupidity. Hearing these statements is not new for me or most of us.  Partly because we hear these statements so often, we do not pause to reflect critically on what the actual concepts they embody mean for us as individuals and for the social structure that we inhabit. Our failure to reflect is not simply a matter of desensitization to the concepts of intelligence and being smart themselves, it may also reflect our agreement with the concepts themselves. I do not think it a stretch to imagine that many of my peers and professors accept these concepts as facially and substantively true.

I internally grimace every time I hear statements such as the ones above. I find troubling the historical foundations of the concepts of intelligence and being smart that underlie them. Moreover, I question the contemporary social deployment of these concepts.

I could provide an extensive overview of the history of these concepts. For example, I could explain how the concern with relative intelligence became of interest in France in the nineteenth century that focused on identifying students with mental retardation in the French education system. I could explain how the tests that were used for this purpose were co-opted by the eugenics movement—a movement that sought to demonstrate the innate intellectual inferiority of non-European racial groups and even differentiate between intelligences of European groups. I could explain how this movement sought to differentiate the intelligence between people based on their wealth and sex, guided by assumptions of innate intelligence. I could explain how intelligence tests, in another departure from their originally intended use, were repackaged to be used by the U.S. military and, later on, colleges and universities.

I could explain how the use of these tests and the increasing importance of intelligence corresponded with changes in dominant political ideologies and technologies during the 18th-20th centuries. All humans became equal from a moral and political standpoint. The ability of the people to demand of their government and as the source of legitimacy revolutionized political philosophy. Programs were developed to educate masses of people. Information became more widely accessible. These changes challenged the status quo of unchecked power and privilege enjoyed by a few. Something beyond notions of divinely granted authority was needed to defend this status quo and to legitimate blatant inequalities among humans that stood in direct opposition to proclamations of equality.

I could explain that we are weaned in an educational system predicated on notions of innate intelligence that intersect with notions of merit. This system exists within a larger societal framework organized on assumptions of the relative intelligence and ability of various social groups. We need only look at how notions of intelligence operate in the contemporary United States to explain differences in outcomes between people and groups. We distinguish between people based on what we perceive to be their capacities, but we use other markers as proxies for what amounts to a merely subjective and self-serving appraisal of the potential of our peers in relation to us.

I could explain all of this in much greater detail, but I would rather have my peers learn about this for themselves. I would rather have others challenge themselves and do their own research in order to learn that much more is implicated in what they may regard as merely praiseworthy comments.

None of what I say is meant to suggest that using some sort of evaluative method to identify mental retardation or learning disorders is wrong. Instead, I think that use of an evaluative method should be limited to simply such identification (if used at all). It should not be used to engender and amplify exaggerated notions of an ill-defined concept that merely serves to entrench the privileged position of those in power, or at least, who enjoy the presumption of intelligence by virtue of wealth, rearing, familial pedigree, educational background, race, gender, and nationality.

It amazes me how quickly tempest waters give to tranquility.

Taken from the perspective of life—at its broadest stretch—days are mere moments. It is true that they are replete with drama and melodrama, of sudden turns and twists that characterize our quotidian melange. Yet, this melange fades into a blurry recollection of its tribulations and treasures. The moments that actually come to define us, even if we remember them only because they make for a more personally pleasant picture, provide the contours of our recollection. The daily tempests we have faced may mean nothing in this grander scheme of contours; often, they are indeed of little significance to the broader vision of our lives.

When I realize that this is the nature of life, I find comfort from what seemed insurmountable barriers—emotional, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, physical maladies bound by a day or a few. At their zenith, they are ominous waves in the ocean of our being. Our psyche becomes anthropomorphized: it is a person in a small vessel on this ocean. These waves may wreak havoc at their first appearance and may drive this vessel far from the shores that are the foundation of our inner strength.

Time is their greatest enemy. Time weakens their current. Time soothes their impact. It brings countervailing waves of compassion, beauty, confidence, and optimism that drive our vessels toward our shore.

Tranquility reins over the tempest.

I undertook my journey to Connecticut via train nearly two months ago. The train ride was unnecessarily long and physically uncomfortable. One might think that an extended train ride would make for an easier spatial and physical transition in a move such as mine, and it was such a thought that motivated my decision to come to Connecticut via train rather than airplane. I had plans to journal about the transition while on the train, to center myself mentally with regard to my reasons in deciding to attend law school and in the move itself. I had planned to examine them in relation to everything else in my life that brought me here—the circumstances of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The nature of the train ride, as I have already described, made this examination impracticable. 

I arrived in New Haven and attempted an encounter with a journal the night before my Orientation began. I wanted to do what the train ride had prevented me from actualizing. Yet again, this encounter paled in comparison to what I had envisioned for a process of reflection of this nature.

In the past, mainly at my undergrad, I took to writing whenever the psychological and cognitive dissonance I experienced was beyond simple mental resolve. I needed to connect my personal experiences with observations on the sociological processes embedded within them. From a psychological perspective, one might say that doing so functioned to distance myself from the emotional dimensions of my experiences; it was a process of intellectualization. In many ways, writing about the experience lessened the emotional impact of the experiences triggering the sociological analysis I  undertook. However, this reduction was fleeting. The experiences about which I wrote were not singular, but rather were repetitive: dating and sexual interactions as a gay man that operated within a nexus of racism and classism; classist assumptions that structured interpersonal interactions with my peers; racist practices of subtle exclusion in organizations; and the significance of being not only a first generation college student, but one whose admission to privileged social institutions would forever demarcate boundaries between my family and me concerning our respective social positions and their bearing on our futures, both jointly and independently.

Most of this analysis disappeared in my move to Connecticut. It seems that almost overnight, I lost a sense of myself in a very tangible way. Everything that I was at my undergrad became an idea, a concept of my past whose influence on my present was at best uncertain and at worst wholly gone. For nearly a month, I became an empty shell, unable to locate within myself lived experiences that had defined the perspective I exhibited in my everyday life at Michigan. This is not to say that I forgot who I was or that I forgot my passion for social justice. Instead, I was unable to viscerally access the emotional memories of my lived experiences and their relationship to my interpretative schema of the world. In other words, there was form, but no substance. Without this substance, I was unable to reflectively write about my move, goals, ambitions, past, and present.

Of course, the move and the first month of school was not without emotional impact. In light of this and in light of the fact that I have often written as a way to lessen the emotional impact of experiences structured by systems of power, privilege, and oppression, it might seem that I should have had the wherewithal to write reflectively in the manner that I have desperately sought. The only sensible response I can imagine is that I was unable to internally process everything that occurred in the past month and a half. I write as a means for continuing a process of reflection; writing is not the process itself, but rather must be triggered by a previous instance of reflection. Being unable to even begin the process prevented me from deeper examination that went beyond mere illusions of reflective process (i.e., telling people things that aligned in a formal sense with my social justice values, but lacked a substantive foundation).

In the past week, I finally moved beyond my inability to internally process and reflectively write liked I used to at Michigan. I have rediscovered the substantive foundation of my values in a way that feels nearly physical. This is not to say that my transition is complete. I sense that I will be in a perpetual state of transition given my previous lived experiences from birth until I began college—the foundation of and formative power over my interpretative lens concerning daily life—and their distance from my current status. However, I have passed through the most trying of times in the past month and a half, an utter disorientation of my sense of self. I find myself reorientated with my values and my experiences.

Several meal time conversations compel me to wonder about the topics of conversation that prevail among other people my age and younger. Were I to generalize from the conversations that I have overheard and with which I have sometimes become painstakingly involved, I might think that all youth my age garner laughs from making fun of other people or the cultural stereotypes about social identity groups to which they belong. I might think that all youth my age sit around having conversations in which they sexualize food and impose gendered notions of sexuality onto fruits and vegetables. Although these might seem like interesting topics of conversation to some of you who endure mundane and boring work lives and wish for a little excitement in, the content of the conversations is barely a sliver of my overall puzzlement about the topics of conversation among people my age.

I have the luxury of being in the company of other youth who are reaping the benefits of a privileged social position: we are all the recipients of an education at a university that is a household name for many. Moreover, many other privileges intersect with this. The majority of my peers hail from two-parent households with incomes that tower above that of a small minority of low-income students, a minority that includes me. The majority of my peers are carrying on an educational legacy began by their parents or grandparents; they are legacies either to the University of Michigan or are generally the children of college-educated parents.

For all the privilege that ebbs through the lives of my peers and now my life, I shudder to think that the conversations that occur between us lack substantive content. I conceptualize such content as a focus on the social realities of our time, of the U.S. wars and military interventions that continue abroad, of the insulation of higher education from the reach of low-income families, of the persistence of HIV/AIDs in the world, of the global financial crisis, and more. I wonder why our conversations seem to lack a focus on this content because I recognize that my peers and I are not passive participants in the systems and institutions that are the underlying foundations of these social realities. We are persons privileged with the opportunity of a college education at the University of Michigan. What we choose to focus on individually and collectively is of consequence to the fate of the social realities that mar the international and domestic landscape.

A large part of me deeply wishes that my peers and I could engage in substantive conversations about these realities. A large part of me desires to ask my peers and to ask myself, what do we think about these issues? Where do we see ourselves in the effort to improve the circumstances of our historical moment. Our lives will pass in the blink of an eye and posterity will wonder why we did nothing more. 

I loathe intellectual ostentation. I wholesomely despise it. Dare I say that I think the world would be a better place if this phenomenon—perhaps, lifestyle for some—had never existed? One can guess how I would be inclined to respond. 

Intellectual ostentation is something with which I think many people are familiar. To me, the underlying idea is that a person approaches something with an analytic demeanor that is highly academic. Of course, this is not something that is intrinsically problematic. The academic enterprise and its analytic demeanor have contributed greatly to social development. The analytic demeanor of academia becomes problematic when it is applied to situations in which its use does not correspond to the exigencies of the situation. This is intellectual ostentation described at its broadest level.

There are at least two forms of intellectual ostentation I can think of at the level of the particular: (1) pseudo-intellectual ostentation and (2) intellectual ostentation of the highly learned. The defining difference between these two forms rests with the person who says them. The second form occurs if the speaker is pursuing or already has an academic career. In this instance, the speaker either is developing or has already developed an analytic demeanor that is highly academic and applies this demeanor across academic and non-academic situations. The first form occurs when the speaker does not have this sort of relationship with academia, but rather develops an academic-like analytic demeanor via experiences outside of the Academic Establishment. These experiences can include and are not limited to: reading periodicals such as The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, reading literature that is deemed to be highly cultured, and listening to radio stations with programs that are deemed to be intellectually centered, such as NPR or classical music stations. Having explained the primary difference between the two forms of intellectual ostentation, I proceed to describe pseudo-intellectual ostentation and intellectual ostentation by the highly learned.

First, I describe intellectual ostentation by the highly learned. I can think of at least two forms that this ostentation takes. One form is classroom ostentation. This occurs in classrooms or similar academic settings. The speaker will attempt to show off the gamut of their intellectual prowess beyond what is necessary for the task or intellectual conversation at hand. I can think of many examples from my time at the University of Michigan, examples that would require a more fleshed out memory to recall in their totality. Even without providing explicit examples, I think many people are familiar with this type of intellectual ostentation. I think the danger of this form of intellectual ostentation is that it occurs at the expense of productive intellectual inquiry that involves all persons in a given academic setting. Such ostentation will stop others from sharing their opinions on subjects for a variety of reasons. In my experiences, this form of ostentation has derailed intellectual inquiry from a position of collective venture between all students and professor to a performance by only a small number of students. 

The second form of intellectual ostentation by the highly learned is what I call non-academic ostentation. This occurs in non-academic situations, specifically everyday settings (i.e., Facebook or social conversations). In these situations, the speaker invokes the highly academic analytic demeanor even in the most mundane conversations. This demeanor is entirely unsuited for non-academic conversations. The situation does not necessitate the use of academic inquiry. I can think of fellow students attempting to give what I will call ‘lessons’ about their studies (or random information they know) and professors who cannot set aside their academic mindset at the door of their office or classroom. In my experiences, these conversations are more so endless monologues instead of genuine conversation between two people.

Now, I describe pseudo-intellectual ostentation. As I discussed earlier, the type of intellectual ostentation is different from intellectual ostentation by the highly learned because the speaker does not have an extensive relationship with the intellectualism that characterizes the Academic Establishment. Instead, the speaker has developed an academic-like analytic demeanor from experiences outside of this establishment. The speaker may have gained knowledge from reading certain newspapers and books, watching certain television shows, or listening to certain radio programs. I think the most pervasive form of pseudo-intellectual ostentation is what I call dictional ostentation. Dictional ostentation concerns the words choices one makes to convey a thought. In dictional ostentation, a person will use a ‘fifty cent’ word or phrase where that person could have used a ‘two cent’ word or phrase. Rather than use the simplest and most accessible words and phrases possible, the person who engages in dictional ostentation will speak in such a way that eliminates certain hearers from accessing the meaning of the speaker’s words. I think that this issue of accessibility for hearers is one of the dangers of this form of ostentation. Beyond this danger, I think dictional ostentation is simply a waste of intellectual energy. I have had many experiences that would fall within the bounds of dictional ostentation. I am inclined to think that it occurs so often that it is not necessary to give an example here.

A second form of pseudo-intellectual ostentation is what I call informational ostentation. Informational ostentation is when the speaker needlessly interjects random knowledge about various subjects into conversation. This knowledge is typically gained from one of the formats I described earlier. I am not certain that there is some sort of danger accompanying this form of ostentation. If anything, this form of ostentation represents a desperate call on the part of the speaker to be recognized by the hearer as a bearer of information not known to the hearer. I am inclined to believe that the speaker sees such recognition as justly affirmative of their intellectual capacities. When informational ostentation abounds, I believe the most immediate effect is that the hearer is annoyed.

I think one of the roots causes of intellectual ostentation is the culture of intellectual competition that predominates in the United States. In our universities, students are by and large not taught to see their education as a joint venture with other students. Instead, students are encouraged explicitly by grading systems and implicitly by intellectual insecurities to outperform other students. In such a culture, students lose sight of the fact that what is of value is that we are all engaging in intellectual inquiry. We are all attempting to edify our intellectual processes for the benefit of our personal development as well as for the benefit of society overall. Outside of our universities, in the non-academic world, we are taught that the person with the most ornamental words and esoteric information is “smart.” Popular culture is riddled with examples that exemplify this cultural obsession with constructing the appearance of intellectual superiority. To me, this is one of several contemporary manifestations of racist, classist, and sexist measures of intelligence that pervade the U.S. social psyche.  

I do not plan to propose a solution to intellectual ostentation or what I perceive to be its root causes. Instead, this entry has allowed me to articulate some of my frustrations. I hope that the reader may feel similarly, but I do not need such a reaction.  

It amazes me how much we, as people, do not reflect on how we interact with others. Before I describe what I mean, I will be the first to take personal ownership over my lack of reflection despite all of my experiences facilitating dialogues with the Program on Inter-group Relations (IGR). I reference these experiences in case the reader is not familiar with the fact that IGR usually cultivates in its dialogue facilitators and the students who take dialogue courses a sense of self-awareness, whereby people are able to understand how their communication style, their conflict style, their personal experiences, their social identities, and their intersections impact the ways in which they interact with other people. I would think that a course (and in my case several courses with IGR) would enable a person with the skills necessary to reflect on and process their interactions with other people. I can say that IGR has enabled me to do so, yet no one is perfect. I find myself falling into bouts of personal interactions with a lack of reflection on my impact. I also find that there are moments—slivers of time—when I can feel my social justice conscience fade away and I am simply interacting without simultaneous reflection. Nonetheless, I believe myself to be someone who is able to reflect more on my impact in interpersonal and group settings relative to many people I know who have never taken IGR, who do not have a vocalized passion for social justice, or who hold privileged social identities (across social identity categories).

Although I would never trade my ability to think reflexively about my communication style, conflict style, personal experiences, and social identities, I believe that one downfall is that I am incessantly analyzing social situations. This incessant analysis is what leads me to the notion of how bizarre it is that we do not reflect on our interactions with others. In recent weeks, I have found myself in lunch and dinner conversations where I feel mentally absent because of the group dynamics. People do not see their White privilege or their heterosexual privilege or the male privilege or their socioeconomic privilege in the space. They are not cognizant of how their overpowering influence in the group space or interpersonal interactions suppresses substantive interactions. Instead, the interaction is conceptualized as one that is entirely individualistic and as one that occurs within a vacuum bereft of the social and historical context of group dynamics in the United States. Being in spaces such as these causes me to become silent. I do not mean a simple vocal silence, although this has occurred. I mean a silence, wherein my substantive concerns cannot be shared because they are unintelligible in such spaces.

Not only do I feel silenced, I am angered in such spaces. Why would I want to be in space where people exercise the confluence of their heterosexual and male privilege to structure conversations that leave me marginalized and distant from its content? Why would I want to be in a space where people exercise the confluence of their White privilege and socioeconomic privilege to speak the loudest and the longest to the point where others cannot meaningfully share? I think it is important to recognize that although I identify confluences of privileged social identities in these questions, my experiences in the past few weeks have been with people who have non-privileged racial identities in the first question and people who have non-privileged gender identities with the second question. In other words, my sense of being silenced and sense of being angered do not arise from the same standard slew of privileged social identities embodied in one person. My experiences are about people with a mixture of privileged and non-privileged social identities—a situation in which we all find ourselves. Additionally, my experiences are not reducible to people without a social justice background. I have seen countless people with a social justice background perpetuate the dynamics I have discussed, during the past few weeks and in past years.

I do not want to physically or mentally be in spaces where I feel silenced. Yet, this desire is problematized by the existence of other power structures that overlay onto the roles in which I find myself. Choosing not to interact with certain people is not a realistic option in these roles. This is the difficulty of interacting with people who severely lack personal awareness beyond who they are as an individual—that is  awareness about the impact of their social identities. Because these people are ubiquitous; there is no way around them.

My message is simple: please THINK about and REFLECT on how you interact with other people. Think about how much you speak within a group setting. Think about your social identities and how they alter the dynamics within a group. CHALLENGE yourself to think beyond the lens of the social identities in which you are non-privileged (i.e., White women not reflecting on only being women, but also about how their Whiteness does privilege them greatly within many social situations). For me, the latter would be about looking beyond sexual orientation, race, and class to think about my male privilege and my ability status privilege. Thinking, reflecting, and challenging are not enough to bring about sustainable change within oneself. I suggest ALTERING your behavior and your default ways of interacting with others. For me, I have decided to assume a more reserved demeanor over the next few days; I want to observe and reflect. In sum:

THINK

REFLECT

CHALLENGE

ALTER

I cannot recall another moment of my life such as the one in which I currently find myself. I am bombarded by statements and remarks about my future. Telling another person who I have hardly known for seconds that I am attending a certain law school this coming autumn usually elicits a gleam in their eyes and some “congratulations.” It is amazing to see this reaction.

As someone who studied sociology as an undergraduate, I dissect the meaning of such an action with a conceptual scalpel. Within nanoseconds, I tell myself that their reaction reflects how the system of classism calls on those without access to elite institutions to support narratives of elitism. I tell myself that the person who has such a reaction has instantly constructed some tale about who I am and where I come from.

I fear that the tale people tell themselves is far from the truth of my life. From this fear, arise questions: What are people thinking about my background? Are they imaging some quaint upper-middle class life with two supportive and college-educated parents? What are they thinking about my capabilities? Do they now see myself as someone who is “smart” or do they believe that this was some sort of fluke? How is this knowledge altering how they will interact with me and I with them? Am I now someone that they should get to know because I am “cool” or someone who is full of himself?

Sometimes, I am lost in these questions. I begin to wonder about who I really am and whether or not this—this future—is something I really want. As I write this, I realize that I might call this my ever looming existential crisis.

For once, I feel like I am in a position to be vocal and be truly heard at the same time. Yet, this new-found receptivity in others seems to be too informed by a certain knowledge about my future. This is not something that sits well with me. To me, this experience is reminiscent of the social power exerted by persons in privileged social institutions. It is because of this that I wonder if I have been fighting to enter a world where power is currency. Part of me knows this to be true to some degree. I come from low-income communities, from a single-parent household, and from a non-privileged sexual orientation and racial background. Those of us with these backgrounds often find ourselves without the social power to be vocal and be heard at the same time. I welcome some of the social power I now feel because of this. I feel like I can speak truth.

Nonetheless, I am weary of what may come. I am weary of power that emanates from unjust social institutions and systems. The experiences of my family suffice to show me that this sort of power is also a power that is oppressive. I am weary of becoming collusive.

At the University of Michigan, it is not hard to find someone who calls hirself a feminist. Including myself, there are many people who gladly deploy this term and its ideological underpinnings without any serious consideration of the stigma and stereotypes associated with being feminist (serious here means consideration that would dignify the baseless negative notions about feminism). Although I gladly identify with the term and philosophy of feminism, I am greatly disgruntled with dominant forms of feminism. These forms are White-centric, Heterocentric, Middle-Upper Class, Ableist, Sizist, and U.S.-centric. To me, these most prolific form is White-centric feminism.

In my experiences at the University of Michigan, White-centric feminism is the status quo on this campus. I have encountered countless persons who identify as feminists and yet in their feminist critique of society, they obscure and/or ignore the profound impact of race. A common feminist analysis I encounter about micro-social interactions focuses on the dominant role men take in social settings. I do not deny the validity of this analysis. I know that I have assumed this role in many settings whether intentionally and unintentionally. I see many men assume this role everyday. When this feminist analysis of micro-interactions is not expanded to look at other oppressions, it becomes a one-dimensional, ignorant view of the world around us. White women who dominate and/or feel entitled to dominate a social space where there are people of color is just as oppressive as a space where men dominate. I often encounter White women who vehemently argue against patriarchy and rightly so, but go silent or ignore how they perpetuate racism when they assume a dominant role in social settings.

Women of color have fought for a voice within the feminist movement since its inception and yet many White women continue to further a one-dimensional feminist analysis. One explanation for this is that White privilege blinds White people from understanding the impact of race. While I appreciate this explanation, I think that it loses its potential explanatory power in the context of the history of feminism. As I wrote earlier, women of color have written continually about how White-centric dominant ideas of feminism are.

A feminist who subscribes to White-centric feminism would be hard-pressed to say ze does not know that dominant forms of feminism ignore other oppressions. One does not have to be a person of color to understand the salience of race. One does not have to be a person of color to further a feminist analysis that does not ignore, devalue, or distort the fact that race continues to play a central role in structuring everyday interactions and the larger social structures which influence those interactions. I believe that being a person of color will [often] allow for a different perspective on race that is not blinded by privilege, but being a person of color is not a prerequisite for understanding the role of race. It just might make it easier. Likewise, being a woman might make understanding sexism easier, but being a woman is not a prerequisite for understanding feminism or sexism.

I strongly encourage those who subscribe to a White-centric feminism to reflect on how they understand feminism and how they understand race. I would hope that such reflection would lead them to a different understanding about feminism as well as racism.

Lmao!

The Shirley Sherrod fiasco (background here) is regrettable for a number of reasons, but one consequence that’s stood out in my mind is a particularly disingenuous new meme being promulgated by defenders of the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative factions and figureheads…

After somewhat of an unintentional hiatus from Tumblr, I return with this AMAZING video and song.