It's always challenging to articulate the issues I've had in my experiences in education. On one hand, I was the "perfect student" in my early education. I was so well-behaved and studious that my seventh grade social studies teacher told me he wanted to clone me. It was in my youth a moment of pride. There were few moments of my childhood where I received recognition outside of my academic achievements. I was shy, had weak social connections, and was mediocre at best at the things that I enjoyed outside of academia: art, music, creative writing, dance, tennis.
But the secret was that I wasn't even trying hard and I found that out in high school. In a highly competitive setting where students were almost expected to become engineers, doctors, lawyers, and successful business leaders and one-upped each other on the number of AP classes they could take per year, I floated my way through sometimes with straight 85-percents in a whole year. At the same time, I was entering the rebellious phase that most adolescents go through. While I saw posts of my peers partying and drinking on a primitive version of Facebook, my version of rebellion included writing a thesis against standardized testing, refusing to apply to any Ivy League schools out of principle, and dreaming of an anti-prom that I never had the social capital to carry out.
The shell I had protected myself in was at last beginning to crack and this was the beginning of the ongoing journey of returning to myself. When I went to college, I resorted to my state's public university which actually felt like such a failure compared to the peers I went to high school with. I intended to major in engineering, but switched to business (yet another failure). However, I excelled in my business classes and I once again returned to that experience of succeeding without trying. At the same time, I started taking history and political science classes for my minor and getting involved in student leadership and activism which excited me. While I wasn't as shy as I was when I was 10 years old, I was still not as outspoken as I am now. My sources of education particularly around social justice started to expand beyond the classroom to conferences, panels, self-directed reading, online forums, and my experiences in leadership positions. I started to get frustrated by being confined to a higher education institution. By the time I graduated I couldn't wait to be doing things in "the real world" and never wanted to go back to school again.
Fast-forward a few years and now I have had various types of activism, organizing, and political education experiences in professional and non-professional spaces. And I decide I am going to go to grad school to become a social worker.
When I started my grad school journey I felt wholly unprepared and doubted my knowledge. Yes, I knew about history (I think), and political economy (I think), and Critical Race Theory (I think), and intersectionality (I think), and anti-blackness (I think), and imperialism (I think), and anarchism (I think) but I was a home-grown, DIY academic that learned everything I ever thought was important about social change in community with others, Google, and podcasts. Although I have my go-to texts, I am barely a reader. I don't have the attention span for it. My perception was that in the conversations and spaces that I wanted to be in, my education would pale in comparison to other more "well-read" and liberal arts educated individuals.
The thing is, I never saw anyone like me, a suburban-born-and-raised second-generation Vietnamese girl of refugees being the voice of revolution in academia. So I always second guessed my intuition of knowing something without ever having read it because I've observed it in the world. Sometimes when I am at home thinking about questions I have about society I think I am going mad because I wonder why something I just realized is not talked about more, especially in so-called progressive and leftist spaces, and conclude that it's because I'm wrong and actually not that smart. I have to convince and reason with myself that no, that's not true, and I do have some intellectual capabilities and eventually find out that someone has written about that thing I just realized somewhere. But the thing is I didn't have to read about it to realize it and I shouldn't have doubted myself if I believed in my reasoning capabilities. We need to stop valorizing traditional forms of education because it is undermining the real wealth of knowledge and value of people who don't experience academia.
Now I return again to the subject of my identities and the reason why I started to write this reflection. It's the third week of my last year of grad school. I am taking a class on social movements taught by a white male instructor. During the first week, a classmate of color and I discussed a section of a reading about a predominantly white social movement glossing over and dismissing the fact that people of color had criticized them for not having representative leadership. We both agreed that the way we navigate race in multiracial movements is crucial to its success. When the topic was brought up for the whole class, it was swiftly redirected towards the intended lecture slides.
I went home thinking about this. My thoughts were that race was always present to the way we move in movement spaces and the core of being able to be "called in" was relationships and healing. We hold on to so much stuff about our identities that will show up in our interactions with others if we are not aware of it, especially if we are strangers and there is no trust or rapport. We all have our biases. Whenever I meet someone new, I tend to evaluate how much I can trust someone based on what I know about their identities simply because it gives me insight on how much we have potentially in common. After spending the last few years working in and socializing in predominantly Asian American spaces, I rarely interacted with white men in professional or movement settings. During that first week of class, I reflected on how on guard I would be if I were to be tasked to work with a white man on an aspect of organizing without any trust present.
It seems I have fulfilled my own prophecy as I think back to this past week and my interactions with this white male instructor. I had an issue with a reading, essentially that it replicated the very harmful ideology that supposedly this course was attempting to address through social movements and that this invalidated the author's arguments. Plus the author had a questionable history with aiding movement destabilization in the global south. Anyway this was not simply a reading that I disagreed with. It shook me to my core and I felt it in my body how much this logic was not sitting well with me. If I could put a label to it, it would be disgust. I ranted and raved, and even the next day while spacing out at my retail gig I kept going back to it and got angry all over again. So I went to the instructor and voiced my critiques. We had a lengthy conversation that kind of went no where and the next day I went to class. He presents the slides, and unlike 10 year old me I will raise any and every point to poke holes in his lecture. Although I disagreed with the reading, I don't necessarily disagree with what my instructor is presenting. However, my questions and critiques feel like they exist on a different plane when he dismisses them or tries to prove his own point.
White supremacy is believing that the predominant worldview and its logic are sound. So when I say my professor and I were talking on separate planes what I mean is that my whole life I have operated in his. I understand the logic of white supremacy because I grew up in it, but I am unlearning it. My cognition now operates with a different set of core values and priorities that are not visible in the plane of white supremacy. I am very familiar with his plane but he refuses to step into mine, and that is his privilege.
After class, I spoke to a few friends about these exchanges and was able to name in my conversation with my trusted people how insecure I feel in academia in moments like these. Deep down I always feel inadequate, incompetent, and not intelligent because I do not engage in the learning process through traditional means and there is no one like me who I can look up to as a reference point in academia. That is who is going up against a white man who was traditionally educated and employed at a higher learning institution. As these dialogues become more involved, in my body these interactions feel adversarial and antagonistic. I feel like I am fighting for my life for my worldview to be acknowledged. They are triggering stress responses. It is emotionally exhausting to try to have something recognized that is a given in my plane of existence.
The thing is that I'm good at grad school. I manage my time as well as I can and write quality assignments because I enjoy the rigor of the intellectual process. But in the times that I choose to abide by my own values and beliefs I make it so much harder for myself because I always feel like I am fighting for my life with my academic output. It's simultaneously the only thing that keeps me from becoming bored by traditional education and what stresses me out the most about it.
It's only been in recent years that I've realized what my struggle has been with traditional education. Traditional education has hierarchies and certain forms, methods, and subject areas are more respected and viewed as more intellectual than others. We are molded to think a certain way, even in the most progressive institutions of academia, such as social work. The experiences and collective knowledges of black, indigenous, and formerly colonized people are not recognized as valid compared to the written word of western philosophers. It can be harmful, even traumatizing to navigate education in unconventional ways. My question now, after this reflection is where do I go from here? How can I get further free, mentally and emotionally, from these confines while accepting it as reality? Because that is always the goal: freedom!