Illustration by Kevin Van Aelst for The Chronicle Review
A young child scribbling on a blackboard perched atop an easel in the hallway of a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment.
That’s one of my earliest memories. I’m writing my ABCs and spelling out three-letter words, fingertips and palms caked white with chalk. For as long as I can remember, probably from about my second birthday, this was my afternoon routine, a ritual mandated by my stepfather, who would periodically make stops at the chalkboard on his way out the front door, or to the bathroom, just to confirm that I was demonstrating the kind of progress that he expected.
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Illustration by Kevin Van Aelst for The Chronicle Review
A young child scribbling on a blackboard perched atop an easel in the hallway of a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment.
That’s one of my earliest memories. I’m writing my ABCs and spelling out three-letter words, fingertips and palms caked white with chalk. For as long as I can remember, probably from about my second birthday, this was my afternoon routine, a ritual mandated by my stepfather, who would periodically make stops at the chalkboard on his way out the front door, or to the bathroom, just to confirm that I was demonstrating the kind of progress that he expected.
He was determined to make sure that I was better prepared for school than all the other kids on the block. More to the point, he had convinced himself that I already was. The man loved to pump me up with positive reinforcement about my intellectual abilities, my God-given gifts—only further enhanced by his judicious enforcement of my daily chalkboard regimen.
John L. Jackson Jr. in elementary schoolCourtesy of John L. Jackson Jr.
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By the time I started kindergarten, I was more than ready for public school. And I did well, both at the original elementary school I attended (with mostly Afro-Caribbean and African-American classmates) in East Flatbush and at the second one (with a majority of Jewish and Italian kids) just a 15-minute drive south in Canarsie. In junior high and high school, I read and read and read. When I scored in the 90s on a test or paper, I would hear tongue-in-cheek (mostly) questions about why I hadn’t gotten the full 100. I got the point. I had to be the best. I needed to outcompete everybody in my classes. “What did the chiney girls get on the test?” my Trinidadian stepfather would ask.
We never really talked about racism in my house, and certainly not as the reason for why I had to do well. In fact, I never heard my parents talk about race at all. When we moved to Canarsie, a lower-middle-class neighborhood, there were ample opportunities for them to wax xenophobic—or at least frustrated and incredulous—about the ethnic whites in our housing project or in the coveted single-family brick houses just across the street. But if they did, I wasn’t within earshot.
Many academics have written about the differences between how African-Americans and black immigrants from the West Indies or Africa deal with racism. They offer various theories for why those differences exist and how they affect black people’s lives. Many of those scholars would find the lack of race-talk in my household predictable, given that my mother and stepfather were both from the Caribbean. But I grew up thinking of myself as an African-American, and not just because my biological father and his family were from the Deep South.
Most of the black kids I went to school with, West Indian or not, were raised on hip-hop. America was our reference point, and though our race-talk generally consisted of little more than retelling Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor jokes about how blacks and whites behaved differently in similar circumstances, we read ourselves quite fully into the saga of America’s sordid racial history.
Although my stepfather didn’t talk about racism per se, he had a kind of natural fearlessness about him, an aura of invincibility, that I believed would have met racism—and any would-be racist—with a swift kick in the ass (or at least a couple of lashes from his belt). But he made it clear to me, even early on, that I didn’t have the luxury of being mediocre. My stepfather couldn’t intimidate some admissions officer into punching my ticket for college, and the strict mandate about studying hard and getting good grades must have been predicated on his assessment of the challenges that growing up a young black man in America would bring.
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Some African-Americans still wax nostalgic about how much harder black people used to work. You know, “back in the day.” It is a subplot in the story about segregation’s golden age of black-on-black harmony and mutual benevolence. Racism was so awful and humiliating, they claim, that blacks had no choice but to stick together and give everything their all, to work as hard as they possibly could. Being unexceptional was the kiss of death for a black person in “a white man’s world.” Those who were exceptional might not get much more than the white world’s castoffs. Still, plodding along in uninspired mediocrity was hardly a fruitful alternative.
Of course, some black people would always be mediocre—and in a white-supremacist state, mediocre blacks “proved” the rule of racial inferiority. They made the race look bad. Mediocre whites were individual underachievers, but racism demanded that mediocre blacks stand in for the inherent, God-given limitations of their entire race. Plus, whites controlled most of the important social and economic institutions in the country, and the weaker members of their social networks could still benefit from those connections. Blacks didn’t have the luxury of being average if they still wanted a chance to succeed.
We had to be—as the elders explained—"twice as good as whites” to get the jobs that whites didn’t even want.
“Twice as good as whites” is about recognizing that America is a place where whites and blacks can do the exact same things and achieve very different results. That is one textbook definition of what racism looks like. “Twice as good” means that “average” portends different things for blacks and whites.
But there has long been another argument afoot in the black community—the “culture of poverty” theory. Some of its biggest proponents include various neo-cons like Thomas Sowell and celebrities like the comedian Bill Cosby, though the latter’s touting of “respectability” seems ironic given the controversy now swirling around “America’s dad.” I hear versions of “the culture of poverty” whenever I speak to audiences about race in America, black or white audiences. The argument is simple and turns “twice as good” on its head.
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There may have been a time when blacks championed high achievement, say the “culture of poverty” proponents. Blacks didn’t have what they deserved, so they fought harder to get it. But now African-Americans have grown comfortable with having less, content as second-class citizens, less angry about their social marginalization. They once fought tooth-and-nail for equal rights; now they’re resigned to their own inequality. They once protested and marched and faced down dogs for the right to vote. Now they’ve lost respect for the ballot, even though there are legislators who seem committed to making it harder for them to vote. The recent protests about police violence in Ferguson, New York City, and elsewhere seem like throwbacks to some bygone era, a temporary speed-bump of agitation along a lengthy highway of black apathy.
According to the “culture of poverty” crowd, blacks don’t want to do much of anything. Instead, they think everything should be handed to them. Forget about being “twice as good”; for the 21st-century black person, “half as good” is more than good enough. While “twice as good” thinking is a critique of racism, culture-of-poverty partisans attack any talk of racism as little more than a justification for do-nothingism.
Those who believe that a “twice as good” ethos has been replaced by a “culture of poverty” mentality maintain that many black people are so busy fetishizing race and racism that they don’t pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps and take responsibility for their lives.
Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host, is only the most prominent figure who declares that the real “conversation on race” that liberals are afraid to have is a conversation about blacks being on the lookout for scapegoats, for external forces that explain away their own underachievement: I didn’t get good grades because the test is biased. I didn’t get the job because the employer must be prejudiced. The bank won’t give me a loan because the loan officer is racist. It is raining in my neighborhood because the clouds are bigots. Someone or something is always out to get them.
There are all kinds of statistical regressions demonstrating, other things being equal, the many ways in which racism does account for different social outcomes. Think of the audit studies where identical résumés have black-sounding versus white-sounding names at the top. The Biffs end up getting called in for job interviews much more often than the Leroys.
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This argument—that blacks have gone from promoting the idea of “twice as good” to embracing the idea that something closer to “half as good” is fine—is absurd and strategically brilliant at the same time.
First of all, it sets up a scenario wherein talking about racism at all is only ever a crutch. People who see racism must be the ones looking for handouts and celebrating their victimhood. Critical analysis and social critique be damned: To see race or racism is to be lazy—and racist. Period. It means kicking back on your heels and waiting for “the white man” to give you everything you want. “Why should I have to work hard?” the thought-bubble in black people’s heads is supposed to be saying. “My forefathers built this country. They worked enough for all of their offspring. We are owed our reparations.” They want their bling, the argument goes, and they want it handed to them on a silver platter.
This is exactly why there is such demonization of “the welfare state.” Charles Murray, Lawrence Mead, and other “culture of poverty” theorists have convinced many lawmakers that food stamps and other government handouts are Trojan horses of psychological self-destruction. Here the “culture of poverty” argument closes: If blacks think they can get everything without doing anything and you combine that with Americans’ penchant for lavishing praise on their children for mediocrity, the result is a perfect storm of racial underachievement, lowered expectations, and undeserved entitlement.
As I see it, blacks are not clamoring for half-as-good-opportunities. If anything, they feel like “twice as good” might get them less than it once did.
Take my own tribe: black academics. A few years ago, a series of odd coincidences and scheduling serendipities found me breaking bread with some of the most successful blacks in academe. They have each won all kinds of prestigious awards. Their work has been well cited within their disciplines and beyond. They are tenured at some of the most distinguished institutions in the county. And, down to a person, they felt underappreciated, disrespected, and dismissed as scholars. They had achieved everything, yet they felt that many of their white colleagues treated them with little more than contempt or utter indifference. It was disheartening to hear.
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These senior scholars of color described being ignored by administrators, maligned by others in their fields, and somewhat alienated from the centers of their disciplines—even when they ostensibly constituted, by reasonable criteria, the very centers of those disciplines.
The first time I heard such a tale, over lunch at a coffee shop in California, I tried to dismiss it as an isolated incident, one person’s idiosyncratic experience. Maybe he was hypersensitive. Maybe I had caught him on a bad day. But then I met other senior and very successful scholars (in Michigan and Massachusetts, in New York and North Carolina) with similar stories to tell about humiliating slights that they interpreted as race-based disrespect. I had to admit that something more was going on than thin-skinned bellyaching.
Most of these scholars were sharing their stories with me (their junior colleague) for my own good, in hopes of steeling me for a similar fate. Their point: No amount of publishing productivity or public acclaim will exempt you from the vulnerabilities and burdens that come from being black in the academy. Being “twice as good” wasn’t enough to spare them the sting of race-based stigma.
These scholars weren’t lamenting the stain of “affirmative action,” the fear that people assumed their achievements were based on something other than purely meritocratic deservedness (the Clarence Thomas critique). Rather, they were arguing something close to the opposite: They had succeeded at a game stacked against them—most people in their fields knew and understood that—but the thanks they received were attempts to ignore them, to demean them with cool disinterest and a series of daily exclusions from important departmental discussions or leadership roles at their respective universities.
They were bitter and disheartened. Was I doomed for the same fate?
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Illustration by Kevin Van Aelst for The Chronicle Review
My stepfather might have given me my early taste of academic success, but my mother gave me my temperament. I have always tried to be a generous and empathetic interlocutor. I don’t always succeed, but I try. Many faculty members reserve their empathy for students and colleagues who are just like them, based on ethnic affiliation, regional background, or any number of factors. They see themselves in those individuals and are, therefore, more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, in subtle ways, maybe without even realizing it. I have seen that at every place I’ve ever taught. It doesn’t matter if the scholars are left-leaning or right-leaning, male or female, black or white. Everyone does it.
But only a small subset of scholars musters the same kind of empathy for (and investment in) people who differ from them in some substantial way. Clearly, race is one of those rubrics, but not the only one. Certain professors are less likely to go the extra mile for colleagues who are different from them, doing things “by the book” instead of thinking off-script in more humane and creative ways about what these people need—something they would be more likely to do with folks “just like them.”
What modicum of professional success I might have is almost exclusively a function of the fact that I try (though don’t always succeed) to take everyone I meet very seriously. It is an ethnographic disposition, I tell myself. Everyone is a more than adequate ambassador of his or her cultural world. It doesn’t matter how educated people are; if you listen long enough and carefully enough, a good ethnographer can always learn something important. If not, the failure is the ethnographer’s, nobody else’s. And often people respond generously to just being listened to.
I smile too much. I’m working on that. I wish I had more of my stepfather’s cold stare. But I also realize that smiling, genuinely and warmly smiling, is a kind of magic bullet, especially for black men in the academy.
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Not too long ago, I did a kind of experiment. I am constantly telling students that “everything is ethnography,” that an anthropologist is always on the clock, seeking out new ways of spying on and interpreting cultural practices and processes. So as a kind of ethnographic investigation, I went against the grain of my general tendencies and tried not to smile. I wanted to see how it would affect my social interactions.
I conducted this little test as part of a job interview. I didn’t really know anyone on the search committee, at least not very well, and I decided that I would actively try not to over-smile during my interview. I wasn’t going to scowl, but I would stay, as much as I could, emotionally (and facially) neutral. I couldn’t stop a smile from breaking out across my face for a few fleeting seconds at least once, but I tried to suppress it immediately. I did all I could to look “serious.” I crossed my right leg over my left. I sat back calmly. I answered their questions soberly but substantively (I thought), and then I left.
I don’t know how I was read, but I fear that I might have come across as arrogant. Maybe even a little standoffish and “uppity.” Who knows?
It wasn’t a controlled scientific experiment, so I can’t isolate all the variables and search for some statistically significant correlation between my demeanor and the committee’s decision that I wasn’t a good “fit” for the job. But I imagined that I could feel their coolness during our conversation, and I wish that I had been able to go back into the interview room and test that first response against the one that my more smiley self might have garnered.
I want to think about my smiling as a sign of empathy and generosity, but maybe I am reading myself too kindly. At my most cynical and self-critical, I call it a postmodern version of “shucking and jiving": my trying to do whatever I can to put people at ease, to listen to what they have to say, to shower them with inviting (and unselfconscious) smiles. Is this the 21st-century equivalent of the yes man?
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I must not have wanted that job if I was willing to do my little experiment during the interview. But it still stung when I didn’t get the nod. When I was told that I wasn’t right for the post, I thought of my senior black colleagues and the disrespect they’d talked about.
Like everyone else, regardless of race, my world is full of tiny and not-so-tiny slights, major and minor humiliations every single day: a barrage of looks, comments, emails, reactions, decisions, and personal or professional rejections—intended and inadvertent—that seem to belittle at every turn. At least it feels that way, as if my daily life is organized around the reeling dash from one disrespectful dismissal to another.
The world’s playlist constantly ends on a version of the same tune: “John, don’t believe your own hype. You’re not as good as people pretend you are. And don’t you ever forget it.” That little ditty does battle with my stepfather’s earlier accolades. It is probably an outgrowth of those very accolades, nurtured by my nasty little subconscious, my own idiosyncratic version of academic impostor syndrome.
I spent my 20s and 30s hoping that I could credentialize myself into a kind of protective cocoon against such onslaughts, the ones I try to deflect from others and the many more I inflict upon myself. I may not have been “twice as good” as anybody, but I was going to try my damnedest to reach my goals: B.A. M.A. Ph.D. Tenure. Named professorship.
None of it is foolproof though. And at the end of the day, success might simply be based on how often and easily one smiles, on whether someone is twice or half as good at that—yet another example of something universal that might be felt a little more acutely from a perch on one side of the racial tracks that divide us.
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John L. Jackson Jr. is dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and a professor of communication and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of several books, including Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013). A version of this essay appears in The Trouble With Post-Blackness, edited by Houston A. Baker and K. Merinda Simmons (Columbia University Press, 2015).