Gibbs Magazine
Why Brilliance is Not Used to
Describe Black People
Frank A. Jones
9/11/06
I graduated from City College in San Francisco
and transferred on a scholarship to UC Berkeley, majoring in English
Literature. It was the Dorothy Mercer Scholarship. I was a financially poor
student and needed all the financial aid I could get. Although Berkeley is a
public school it was too expensive for this poor student who was already
married and had a wife and young children, having married very early.
The people administering the scholarship at Wells
Fargo Bank interviewed me and were pleased with me as a recipient of the
scholarship. By then I had learned the language well enough to impress
others that I was “smart.” However, it was while I was at City College in
San Francisco, that a white professor of English Literature broke out of the
mold that is common of whites in relationship to Black brilliance. He wrote
on a paper I had handed in, “You are the most brilliant student I have ever
had; a teacher is fortunate to have a student of your intelligence in his
class.” At reading that comment, I could not believe my eyes. Needless to
say, no one, Black or White, had ever said that I was brilliant. In fact, my
brothers and sisters, and parents as well, had all considered me “dumb” and
at best “slow.” That compliment shocked me; I
placed that paper with those comments in some sacred place in my house and
heart. I knew the instructor was mistaken. Maybe he had gotten me confused
with some white student by the name of Jones; after all Jones is a common
name. Maybe he was joking; maybe he was drunk when reading the papers.
In the past, some instructors had skirted about the
idea of my being smart, but I could never hope to actually be considered
smart or brilliant. Those were titles I had never heard as suiting me, and
brilliance was never applied to Blacks.
I had heard of Dubois’s works as being brilliant; his
mind being brilliant; I had heard of Baldwin as a child prodigy; a brilliant
work. But never the person himself as being brilliant. My teachers from time
to time would say such things as, “You could be smart if you tried hard.”
“This is a good paper; good ideas.” So when the word was finally applied to
me as a total person, not just some portion of me, it served initially to
shock me and make me think that I had deceived the teacher or he had
mistaken me for someone else and if he only knew who I was, looking into my
black face, he would take his words back.
Finally, after looking at those comments over and over
again in amazement for weeks, I said, Maybe I can be as brilliant as he
thinks I am. And after a month or so I decided that I would be as brilliant,
even going beyond what that professor stated about me. Thereafter I embarked
on a campaign of becoming brilliant; that campaign required extensive
reading and more reading; taking courses in all fields concerning my major
and fields outside my major; courses that had information intelligent people
knew and should know. It required making myself know and want to know
materials reputed as difficult to understand. In doing this I learned that
learning can become fun and a game.
When I transferred to UC Berkeley, I was more than
prepared to master that institution. And master it I did, taking my junior
and senior years of coursework in one year. At that time, I was not trying
to demonstrate my brilliance by combining course loads; I did not have the
money to spend on two years at an expensive school. To double my course
loads required a number of things: I needed permission from the school. The
first quarter the school monitored me to ensure that I was doing the work at
a university level. After the first quarter, they recognized that there was
no need to monitor me. I had achieved two quarters in one and that with a
GPA of C+/B-. After that my GPA went up, and I graduated with a total GPA of
3.3-3.5, having taken two years of study in one and being totally out of
money.
I received no recognition for that achievement, and
instead of marching in graduation, I asked the school to mail my degree. I
hurriedly moved on to my next educational adventure. But a number of
significant things happened at Berkeley that highlighted the idea that Black
people are denied their brilliance lapels or accolades.
I majored in English Literature because I was going into law. I had been
told that English was a good major to take into law. While at Berkeley I
recognized that English Literature is a needlessly elitist field of study,
and that elitism is self generated from within. However, as I studied in
that major, I also recognized that the supposed elite Berkeley students were
not as smart as announced, but they felt they were anyway. One incident
demonstrated their assumed intelligence was more assumed than it was real
for many.
In certain majors you see some of the same students in
the core group of courses demanded for that major. There was one student
that was particularly memorable to me. I will just call him John. We had
taken Dr. Friedman’s course one of the many needed courses of English
majors. In all of the English courses I had taken with him it, he,
seemingly, was an avid student, asking questions and offering much
discussion on issues that arose in class—and at Berkeley there are many
issues that arise in class. During each quarter, for the first four weeks he
almost dominated class discussions, but a pattern started to develop: after
four weeks he would fall silent, and I would awaken from acquiescence. I
usually sat in the back of the bus (I mean class).
As all things, that class ended and we went our separate ways. But one day I
saw John and we started a conversation about Friedman’s course. He stated
that Friedman was far too brilliant for him, and that he had written his
final paper concentrating too much on style and too little on substance.
Gratuitously, he stated, “That’s what I wanted to do; I don’t do anything I
don’t want to do.” I casually commented, since he had the floor again, “How
luxurious!” At his own mouth he had admitted a mistake, and he was now
hoping for a “C” grade for the course. Justifying himself for such a low
grade, he said, “I was taking 15 units and working 15 hours. That was too
much for me!” I said that I understood. But he, assuming my sympathy was
empathy and that I had done as poorly as he, he asked my grade. I said, “An
A, of course.”
Maybe it was my “Of course” that offended him, but he
stressed all the units he had taken and that he was working fifteen hours a
week besides. Again making assumptions about me to assure his own
intelligence, he knew, or thought he knew, that I could not have been doing
such a fete as working 15 hours and taking 15 units and making an A. Being
beyond his ability, he limited me by his limitations. And I, willing to
humor him as I baited him on, I said, “No, I wasn’t.” So he ventured to
inquire, “How many units were you taking?” When I said that I was taking 32
units and working 40 hours a week, his response was guttural and offensive:
John looked at me and said, “You must be a fool; I value my education more
than that!” Being an English major, I had learned the instant comeback and
banter of that field, so I responded, “I don’t think so; I got the A and you
are hoping for a C; explain how you assumed that I didn’t value my education
and you did.” And, of course, no logical explanation was likely from him to
one who had taken all the same courses that he had taken but had learned
more than he had learned. There were so many other things he could have and
should have said, but he didn’t. And what he said was illogical, but it was
quite reflective of the disposition of America toward Black brilliance.
He could have said and possibly should have said, “You
must be brilliant,” to call it as it was; “You probably don’t get any sleep,
have no social life,” etc., to say nothing positive about my accomplishment.
Instead, he denied my brilliance—after all, Blacks are not brilliant, and,
in spite of his poor grade showing, he was by nature smarter than me, wasn’t
he? He was white and everyone knows that English Literature is a white
sport. This experience stayed with me all these years, as it has been
compounded by other similar experiences of mine and a thousand other Black
people.
When I interviewed for acceptance at Boalt Hall, UC
Berkeley’s law school, the dean of the school looked at my transcript and
saw the number of units I had taken and the grades I had made in those
courses and asked, “You took all these units in one year? English is a hard
major at Berkeley.” As I listened to him I recalled a principle learned in
English—an enthymeme: a missing proposition of an argument that is assumed
but goes unspoken. I assumed his missing proposition/premise was this:
“English is a hard major at Berkeley for Black people.” And working on the
idea that Black men are arrogant whenever they are competent, I replied, “So
they tell me.”
Both the dean of Boalt Hall and John, my fellow
student, were surprised at my studies, but they would not allow themselves
to compliment of my intelligence. Were John to have been the all American
brilliant white boy with his 15 units and 15 hours of work as he fancied
himself to be, he would have expected me to cite his brilliance favorably.
And had his achievement paralleled mine, he would have expected the title
of brilliance conferred on him by all others. But Black people are usually
not accorded brilliance as an attribute or title that is conferred upon them
with ease.
This denial is not incidental. It is purposefully
so. Over and over again, I have seen this truth in education and throughout
society. That is why we must constantly assure our children that they are
brilliant. Children, however, often ignore parental accolades of their
brilliance because they feel that parents are obligated to say good things
to them; after all, they reason, they are our parents and that’s what
parents do. But to overcome their children’s disregard, a parent should not
stop telling their children they are brilliant, but other strategies must be
employed also.
Black parents need to become cabals of intellectual
self esteem builders for their children, since this is so important to
achievement in their children. A recent study out of Harvard showed was that
to affirm brilliance in Black students early on in a semester will elevate
their achievement levels greatly. This has been commonly shared knowledge
for many years, but sadly, that is not knowledge America applies to many
nonwhite students. The nation’s educational professionals talk about wanting
to improve Black achievement levels, but they will do nothing concrete to
achieve it. Furthermore, America through its media and it educational
process have distorted the achievements of Black America and has used war
imaging against Black America.
War imaging--as discussed elsewhere in this book, is
negative imaging of others--retards our students and distorts the truth
about their brilliance so that it almost does not exist in the eyes of many.
The unwillingness of America to freely urge and acclaim “brilliance” to
Blacks as easily as is done to Whites is seemingly intentional. Maybe to the
average American it may not be intentional, it may simply be just a
longstanding convention, tradition, a legacy of slavery, etc., that has
built itself into the ethos of the nation and as it continues a gestalt of
behavior forms in the American psyche.
Regardless of its origin, its continuity is harming a major swath of the
American population, namely nonwhites. And this nation can no longer afford
to deny such a large segment of its natural resources to go untapped and
underdeveloped, especially when there are things that can be done to change
this situation.
