Face Of Poverty Has Many Colors
Black Americans and brown ones are born in the shadow of a doubt.
If you are black or brown, you’ve probably known that place, felt a grain of irresolution, a scrap of hesitation, an awful instant of questioning one’s own worth.
It’s hard not to question in a nation that thinks you inferior or, worse, invisible. Hard to avoid that moment where you wonder if maybe, perhaps, conceivably … they are right.
The best of us, the strongest and most tough-minded, shatter the question like glass, rush toward achievement with a pounding need. The rest of us grapple with it, but never quite get past it.
We are born in the shadow of a doubt. Some of us die there.
That’s what lends special cruelty to the things a law professor recently said. Lino Graglia of the University of Texas in Austin spoke at a press conference called to announce the formation of a student group that opposes affirmative action in college admissions. He said blacks and Hispanics “are not academically competitive with whites” and are products of “a culture that seems not to encourage achievement.”
Graglia has denied accusations of racism and, indeed, the facts offer him a fig leaf of sorts.
In the first place, test scores have for years found blacks and Hispanics failing to perform as well as whites.
In the second place, while blacks and Hispanics represent not “a” culture but dozens of them (many of which are obsessed with achievement), let us concede that there are places in each community - as in every community - where aspiration is not valued as it should be.
It is possible to make both those observations and skirt any suggestion of inherent inferiority. Unfortunately, Graglia seems to have no idea what fig leaves are for.
We know this because after promising to clear up any mistaken “impression” he might have given that blacks and browns were unwelcome on campus, Graglia did an interview with The Austin American-Statesman newspaper. In it, he mused that it might not be good “for whites to be with the lower classes” because such people might be an unhealthy influence.
One wonders how it could have escaped the good professor that the vast majority of those in the so-called “lower classes” are themselves white. But of course, the answer is obvious. For him, the face of poverty and ignorance is black or brown, period.
And so his fig leaf shreds, his biases are revealed, and we know beyond doubt what we’re dealing with here. Same thing we’ve been dealing with for so long.
For centuries, academics have postulated black and brown genetic inferiority under the guise of dispassionate scholarship. For centuries, it has turned out that the only thing inferior is the scholarship.
If you want to know who gets hurt here, you must return to the shadow of a doubt. That place has a way of eating away any sense of yourself as achiever, doer, maker, or indeed, anything that is not petty and poor.
So the most troubling aspect of Graglia’s attack is that it has potential to injure most those who can afford it least.
You see, some of us never learn that white people are not inherent intellectual gods, that they are heir to the same failures, frustrations and weaknesses that beset the rest of us. Some of us never understand that in academics, as in athletics, the key to achievement lies in the work you’re willing to put in, the lengths you’re willing to go to. Some of us are never told that our minds are as good as any. That we can compete and win.
These are simple truths and yet, when you are born in the shadow of a doubt, the simple truths are often the hardest to reach. The simple truths are the ones most often obscured by media, forgotten by conventional wisdom, and outright denied by people like Lino Graglia.
But you know what? To hell with Lino Graglia.
It shouldn’t take a man like him to remind us that we have an obligation to shout truth in the face of lies. We should shout truth everyday, because everyday, children come of age in the shadow of a doubt.
And they need to know that a world of light begins right where the shadow ends.
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