Soror Moderators, please feel free to combine this. Despite the length, this is a really interesting piece:
Mind Work: How a Ph.D. Affects Black Women
By TRUDIER HARRIS
Education has always played a big role in my family. My mother certainly inspired and encouraged us to achieve, and most of us did relatively well in school. "Get something in your head," my mother used to say. "They can't take that away from you."
It took a couple of decades before I realized that my mother was supporting a moneymaking tradition, not an intellectual one. She, like so many of her peers, believed in education primarily as a key to upward financial mobility, not upward intellectual ability, though that was obviously a natural consequence. We were
certainly supported in learning, and our parents were proud of what we did -- to an extent.
There was a general belief, however, that too much education created problems. Those problems might be manifested at the simple level of a cousin who didn't have any mother wit. Or, more dangerously, they might be manifested in insanity. I remember the first time I asked my mother if I could go to summer school in college; she was concerned that I was "studying too hard." This logic treated the mind as cotton picking was believed to treat the body; too much of it could lead to serious problems.
In retrospect, I think there was a general fear of the unknown. Few people my mother knew had even graduated from high school, let alone attended college and graduate school. There was an invisible wall in studying, beyond which it was believed you shouldn't go. When I was in the ninth grade, my mother was proud because she could call me in to recite the Lord's Prayer in French for the neighbors. That feat was accomplished in
recognizable school, for she herself had gone through the 10th grade.
Once I started talking about attending school year-round or going to graduate school, red flags were raised. I would hurt myself mentally, possibly end up walking around talking to myself.
In terms of attitudes toward education, therefore, there was a sharp division in my community between the practical and the intellectual. There was lots of room for people who wanted to learn to become mechanics or electricians, for those were tangible, practical jobs that existed in the world. Mind work, beyond figuring the price of cotton or how to pay bills or the technicalities of being mechanics or electricians, was troubling, not
well understood, and generally to be feared. There was a strange
inconsistency in that persons educated out of practical usefulness still served as a source of pride to their families. Folks could respect you, for example, for earning a doctoral degree and could exclaim loudly to neighbors about your success; they just had little practical use for you and many times didn't know what to do with you.
To become thus educated is to become a nerd, and black nerds are strange creatures indeed. They are especially strange when their educational pursuits focus on language and literature.
Standard English, after all, was and is something
with which many black folks have difficulty. To voluntarily elect to master that language and the literature produced in it set me further apart. Few people understood the desire, the pursuit, or the outcome. It was not something you could hold in your hand, like a screwdriver or a wrench, or the oil pan with which you changed your oil. But folks were indulgent, and certainly no one ever suggested that I give up the pursuit. What happened
was that family members and men I dated were self-conscious around me. I would meet a new guy and, as soon as it came out that I was an English major, I would be greeted with something like, "I'd better watch what I say around you!"
The pattern was unwaveringly consistent. African-American men are generally painted as being the ones with silver tongues, the ones who seduce women with the power of their voices, with the "lines" they develop in courtship. To meet a woman who specialized in language skills perhaps served to put their skills at risk. So they did the one-upmanship and called out what was a source of disturbance to them. How could they seduce me with words, if I knew the words better than they did? There was little consideration that the arenas of talk were different. Their
seductions did not come from the language of William Shakespeare and Ralph Ellison, and my literary analyses did not contain the lingo of disk jockeys.
Yet to many of these would-be seducers, language was
language, and I was a threat because I was a master of it.
This pattern was particularly noticeable when I was in graduate school. A man I dated in Columbus, Ohio, for a couple of years and to whom I was engaged told me 20 years after our relationship that he felt so intimidated by my course of study that he would go to the public library in his free time and read while I was in class. He said he felt he needed to try to catch up
with me educationally. While self-improvement is definitely admirable, this motivation for it was obviously wrongheaded. Because he had not shared this information with me while we were dating, it's a good thing we didn't get married. What in the world would that have been like? He did have a solution to my "overeducation," however. He said later that he had tried
hard to get me pregnant because, if he had done so, then I would have married him.
Thank goodness for birth-control pills.
This man could level the playing field and bring the nerd back into the recognizable fold of everyday folks only by resorting to basic human procreativity. Anybody could engage in that. No healthy woman needed a Ph.D. to become a mother.
This man, even though college-educated, reflected the attitudes of many in African-American communities. Education for the sake of education was seen as a liability. Folks were not
quite sure what to do with me, so they pushed me back into some
recognizable slot in their minds that fit with popular conceptions of what black people, especially black women, should be and do.
My graduate-school encounters with that ex-fiancé as well as with other men made it clear that nerd-dom is more problematic for black women than for black men.
We admire those college-educated, professional black men who don their suits and march off to the workplace because we stereotypically imagine them married to women who are less
intelligent or at least less well educated than they are. We consider women with comparable educational or professional training to be ball-busting types whose educations and professions frequently exclude them from romantic relationships and marriage.
The opinion that I am too educated for most men, that I have "priced myself out of the market," so to speak, is a sentiment that has occasionally surfaced around the edges of
my family. Few black men, it seems, are comfortable with the idea that their wives or partners make more money than they do. While they can admire their sisters and other female relatives being so endowed with good fortune, they would rather it not reside in their own homes.
Receipt of the Ph.D. is the ultimate admission to nerd-dom. It is also the beginning of a lifetime of "set aside" experiences. Countless black folks who have been introduced to me over the years have immediately resorted to calling me "Doc." From their perspective, "Doc" is a general title of respect, but I would maintain that it is ritual without substance, a game people play to remind you constantly of how different you are. "Doc" works as many of the interactions with black nerds work: It claims and
rejects at the same time. It admits that you are well educated, but it also sets you up -- constantly -- as a noticeably different person precisely because you are well educated. You become the streetlight at the entrance to the community. It's obvious that you're there, and you may be something that no one else in the community is, but who the heck wants to be like you?
Compartmentalized relationships between black nerds and their
communities are the order of the day. Take church, for instance. For those of us who grew up in fundamentalist churches, it is a constant challenge to retain some connection to them in our nerd-certified days. I know of no black church where the entire population is made up of nerds, which means that one or two of us usually end up in any given one of these churches. Immediately the "Doc" thing surfaces. You are first claimed with
pride because you might add something distinctive to the congregation. Then comes the compartmentalization. Yes, you are well educated, but we don't really need your expertise in putting the newsletter together (translation: we really like those grammatical and spelling errors, or we don't even know we're making errors, or we don't want you showing us up
).
Why don't you just sit in the pew and let us point to you as one of our shining lights? Yes, you are well educated, but we're used to doing things our way on the Trustee Board. Why don't you just write a little article for the newsletter? Then comes a nerd standout day, such as Woman's Day or Youth Day, and the nerd is asked to provide the speech. For this set-aside occasion, it is perfectly appropriate for the nerd to have the limelight because this is a one-time affair for which the congregation is seeking
inspiration and words of wisdom that they hope will be derived from sources they do not usually consult, such as history and literary texts. Once the nerd has finished the presentation, he or she is expected to return to the silence of the pew.
Members of such congregations are always careful to be polite and welcoming to the nerd, and the nerd in turn is warm and magnanimous. He or she seldom gets involved in any ugly politics in the church. Instead, when they are there, nerds are the voices of reason in church meetings.
Frequently, however, they are not around because of their professional travel schedules, which means that travel in itself becomes another isolating factor in their relationships to such churches. For most of the members of such congregations, travel is confined to a couple of weeks of summer vacation. For the most part they are in church -- Sunday morning and evening services, Tuesday-night prayer meeting, Wednesday-night Sunday-school-teachers' meeting, Thursday-night choir
rehearsal, Saturday-morning prayer breakfast. To the folks who isolate the nerds, churchgoing is as much a religion as their professed faith is. The nerd not able to comply with that standard of performance simply reinforces the notion of strangeness.
Family environments provide another arena in which the overly educated nerd encounters set-aside situations. Financial advantage does accrue to nerd-dom, and families recognize this even as they simultaneously have no idea why the nerd does what he or she does. Family members come to expect certain things of their nerds. Consider the situation of the Vanessa L. Williams character (Terry) in the movie Soul Food. As a highly
successful lawyer of exceptional financial means, Terry is routinely
expected to cover expenses that her extended family incurs. Yet she is considered too well educated for her own good, as shown in her inability to salvage two marriages and in what others perceive as her general emotional coldness. Although the nerds I know do not have Terry's means, they are nonetheless tapped for a variety of family expenses. One fellow literature Ph.D. recently mentioned to me that she is expected to pay for her nephew's college expenses -- simply because, her brother
asserts, she can afford it and he can't. It's a logic that captures the usual contradictory responses to nerds. Even when you can't easily incorporate nerds -- or reincorporate them after education "separates" them -- into the family, they are nonetheless good for something.
Another Ph.D.-literature friend of mine is the only person in her family with that level of education. Her numerous family members in the Northeast insist that she visit them instead of them visiting her. They insist that she take their kids "down South" during summer vacations, so they can get a break from the little brats. Clearly this dynamic operates because of implied guilt. "You did well and we did not," this scenario might go, "so
you owe something to the family."
It's the mission-versus-money choice that has plagued black communities throughout their existence in America. When you have -- or are believed to have -- money, then your mission should be clear: Give it in support of your family members.
My friends may not like being politely coerced with their finances, but they do not object to sharing with their families. The same is true with me. My mother taught all of her children to remain in touch with and to take care of each other. Anything that any of us can do for the others, we usually do.
And, occasionally, we do it proportionately -- folks who make more money pay for more of what is needed. Voluntarily assuming such responsibilities, however, is a far cry from family insistence on it.
The black female nerds I know are mostly professional single women. Some are single through divorce, and others have never been married. A small percentage of us are married. I do not know that statistics on our marital status differ substantially from those of the general U.S. population, but there is a general assumption that the absence of male partners is more acute for many of us than it is for other groups. (HAS SHE NOT READ NEWSWEEK?
)
I don't think any of us wishes that we were less educated, but I would venture to say that perhaps all of us would like black communities throughout the country to expand a bit more in their receptivity to who we are and what we do.
Are we loved? Yes. Needed? Absolutely. Accepted? Always as intimate strangers.
Trudier Harris is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. This essay is excerpted from Summer Snow: Reflections
From a Black Daughter of the South, published this month by Beacon
Press. Copyright © 2003 by Trudier Harris.
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Yes, I would be employable as an Business major, but ack! It's just not for me.
So true...
, but this does put things in a better perspective. (I later had a miscarraige)
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