Swagger in the academy

I remember when I really started latching onto the idea that being smart is cool. The more I bit into this concept, the greater the search for an adjective to describe how awesome I found this idea to be. It happened sometime between my sophomore and junior year at Hampton University. Somehow, some way my intellectual faculties were jarred awake and heightened. They had lain dormant in a passive state and at most times were an external reference only to be accessed on very rare occasions. In high school I never saw myself as an intellectual and thought my contributions to classroom discussion were not to of value. In retrospect I wished that I could have been or made myself smarter. More intellectual. More challenging. More out spoken and less accommodating. Not that I may outdo or prove anything to anyone but for myself.  It didn't help that my predominantly white high school presented me with a narrow, nil, and at most times absent figure of what a black intellectual looked like.


In reflection I think it would have been impossible for me to blossom there because at that time I perceived the environment to not be intellectually nurturing nor calling forth my greatest good as a student. Probably because I found myself in defense and survival mode as I tersed the landscape.

So fast forward to HIU. There I was; right in the middle history, heritage, pride, tradition, and scholarship. Suffice it to say that Hampton was my dream school and lived up to the menagerie of embedded images in my mind posited by School Daze and A Different World. Little did i know that this impression would have profound implications for future academic success.

Being a first generation student, college was very new to me. I drunk in every experience presented as a nursing babe desperate for a bottle. There came a point when those nutrients transformed into intellectual capital/muscle and I found myself articulate and was able to see myself outside of myself waxing strong in logic, reason, deduction, and scholarship. I found myself being immersed in conversation able to retort and sift through sensation to find substance which produced a confidence not attainted before. I was most amused with the command of vocabulary that I was acquiring and my inclination to dispense it at will. I mostly saw this occurrence happening in either the classroom and in my peer interaction. It was healthy for me that this experience was coated in black for it enabled me to have a deep appreciation for academics because no longer was the concept of a black intellectual foreign, it was internalized.

I write this post so as not to attract attention to myself or so that people can laude me. It is far from that. I invite you to this narrative intending to call attention to an experience that I believe should be happening in the academy, home, and in daily life. Being a graduate student has made me to think how I might be better able to encourage, cultivate, and impart this skill to others. More personally I thought about my younger sister and how growing up I wished I had expressed more often that it’s ok to be smart and intellectual. Heck it even looks good on you. But then I jumped back to the time in my memory when being smart wasn't so cool. When using words such as 'deft' and 'adept' would garner strange looks of bewilderment. And I thought. I thought.

Who was the person who made it 'uncool' to be smart?

Why is the problem pervasive in the black community and often manifests itself in a negative aspirations to post-secondary education?

Then I got it. Through observation of interactions, media, and conversations I'm repeatedly told that it’s preferred and more cool to live out the stereotypes often found on the local 3 letter cable station and 3 letter athletic association. But, allow me if you will to present you with this thrill, I guarantee you will have greater time dismantling, escaping, and breaking stereotypical limitations while creating new knowledge in the process.

I'm beyond convinced that TV, internet, video games, etc. lulls youth into stupor and distraction. But they aren't solely to blame. We who have been educated have a duty that we aren't living up to which is to call the younger generation to their greater good. The key is engagement, not a dumbing down to make something relevant. I ask you, how do we engage our youth and also one another so as to make scholarship relevant again? How do we imbue them with a sense of aspiration that translates into intellectual swagger in the academy? We have to go back to creating cultures of literacy. It’s easier said than done and at best a far off wishful thought. I know such an idea is unfathomable today because instantaneous gratification rules our society. This short sightedness tells people what to think as opposed to how to think.

I move that we become more outcome oriented. Be intentional and nurture potential. Suggest a book to a youth that you've read and are familiar with.

But FYP (for your polishing), I would be remiss if I didn't leave you with this: Go get lost. Yeh. Go get lost in a library.

When is the last you've been to the library strictly for recreational purposes?

-WAC, III-