Anti-Intellectualism: An African American Problem
by Guest Contributor Merq
They are proud of their ignorance.
They equate getting an education to “acting white.”
Inner-city students have to decide between being smart and being “cool.”
I’m sure you’ve read at least one of the above statements at some point over the course of the last five years. Like the “down low” frenzy of yesteryear, it’s the pummeled dead horse du jour of African-American narratives.
As a student of propaganda, its uses, and its effects, one thing that has always intrigued and sickened me about American discourse (as typified by its mainstream media) is its ability to make a phenomenon untrue or non-existent by simply ignoring it. When Paris Hilton bares her lady parts for what must be the thirtieth time, it’s still considered newsworthy. But her continued pattern of “n*gger”-calling has gone so roundly ignored that only a fraction of a population inundated with her very presence is aware that she’s done this even once. I mean, Dog the friggin’ Bounty Hunter got more column inches for his idiocy (and he genuinely thought he was black) while Hilton never even needed to roll out the standard Non-Apology Apology! I, as a black man, speak for my race (as we always seem to do in the media) when I say we wuz robbed!
In a similar vein, it tickles me to no end (or inasmuch as an assault on the ribs can be considered tickling) that America can really create this whole “Crisis in Black America” phenomenon over something as essentially American as anti-intellectualism – and get “black leaders” to cluck their tongues and rhapsodize on how “we got to do better,” even!
Yes, In case you’re wondering, I watched CNN’s “Black in America” series. Yes, I saw black folk say the same thing, and wallow in self-validating self-pity as they recall past (and present) experiences with those who deemed them “too white.” I don’t know why people hold up these folk as some sort of proof that this “tryna ack’ all white” phenomenon is actually real – there are multitudes of black males who will also tell you that black men can only aspire to being ballers or rappers, or that they have no business wearing flip-flops. Do we take them at their word simply because they’re black?
The fact is, that line of bullshit rhetoric has existed since the fight to keep the segregated Jim Crow school system intact. But as is the case with basically any stereotype that exists to denigrate black people, there will be a class of blacks only too happy to declare the validity of that message at the top of their lungs in some sadly misguided effort to prove to everyone in the (almost entirely non-black) room that they’re “not like those blacks.” I know them because I once was them.
So tell me, people, did the term “teacher’s pet” originate in black inner-city schools? How about “bookworm?” “Know-it-all,” maybe? Or “brainiac?” For decades, these words have been America’s way of shaming youngsters who express an interest in learning. I hear studies repeat, ad nauseum, that in white social groups, higher grades mean greater popularity, and I wonder where in June Cleaver’s America they conducted that study, ‘cause that isn’t the America I know.
It doesn’t end in the schoolyard, either — you want to know what epithets these kids switch to when barbs like “brainiac” start to clash with their beer guts and facial hair? Try “latte liberal.”
That’s right. A country in which “too learned to be a good leader” has become a legitimate political critique, has the nerve to accuse a single marginalized population of its society of imbibing the very poison it has spoon-fed its young for centuries.
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