The "Gifted": Perspective on Race and Class

Recently, someone told me what they thought to be the greatest challenge facing low-income racial minority students in the writing process. The challenge, I was told, is a fear of writing. Specifically, low-income and racial minority students are afraid to write because they do not perceive themselves to be capable writers. I find this claim unsettling.

In responding to this claim, I want to focus on the intersection of low-income and racial minority identities, rather than treat them as separate identities. In particular, I think that the experiences that arise from this intersection undermine the claim  that fear paralyzes low-income racial minority students' writing ability. My experiences are located at this intersection of race and socioeconomic status. 

My high school was a predominantly White middle-class school. Many of the students came from neighborhood elementary schools located in White areas of Grand Rapids. These schools were feeder schools for my high school, a magnet school for "gifted" students. It was the only public school to which one applied for admission. 

I did not attend one of the feeder schools. This was partially due to the fact that I did not live in Grand Rapids until I was 12 years old. It was also due to the fact that the elementary school I attended in Grand Rapids for the sixth grade did not share any information about my future high school with its students. I did not learn about my future high school until middle school.

A student had left the school to attend my middle school, Iroquois Middle School. It was then that I learned that the magnet school was for "smart" students. It was for the best students in the city. Because of my where I lived, I wanted to be one of those students. My schooling became a way to escape the treacherous circumstances of my neighborhood and family. In some way, I knew that my future high school would offer an atmosphere much different from the other public high schools in Grand Rapids. With the support of several teachers in my middle school, I was admitted to my magnet high school.

Indeed, the atmosphere was different. Whereas the schools I had attended from sixth to eighth grade in Grand Rapids were predominantly low-income racial minority schools, my high school was predominantly White and middle-class (as mentioned earlier). For the first time in my education, the mission of the school itself was to prepare all students for college. I distinguish this mission from the previous strategies teachers deployed at my middle school for individual student success. Certain students (i.e., the best and brightest) were prepared for college tracks rather than all students. In contrast, my high school wanted all of its students to attend college.

One inescapable truth about my high school peers was that they had more resources than me. For one, many came from middle class families and had parents with college degrees. Having parents with college degrees a resource that Bourdieu might call "social capital." Many of my peers were socialized to think and to act in ways that would allow them to successfully navigate the academic environment of my high school. Being raised by a parents with more income, wealth, and education is correlated with higher cognitive capacities (Michael, 2003).  This social capital did not need to be explicitly named to me. My experience as the son of a single-mother without a college degree and a father who dropped out of high school allowed me to sense the unspoken.

In addition to this social capital were material resources. Many of my peers had computers or immediate access to computers such that they were able to write extensively for writing assignments. I did not have a computer until I was 18. My ability to write school papers was more a proxy for how much time I had available to stay after school or stay at a public library (miles from my home) to write a paper. Because I did not have a floppy disk or a flash drive, the latter possibility was more so impossible. Thus, my ability to write papers in high school for classes was constrained by the number of hours my high school stayed open after the formal school day ended.

The returns of my lack of resources were low relative to my peers. On numerous assignments that teachers required to be typed,  I could not imbue my writing with the same quality that my peers seemed to possess. The potential was there, but there were few resources to match it.

The relevance of race to this situation arose in the racial composition of my high school. As I discussed earlier,  many of the students in my high school were White. In high school, I did not begin to realize how integral lack of resources were to determining my academic "achievement" (I question the  individualistic notion of achievement) until the middle of my junior year. In the meantime, I recognized the differences in academic output of my peers and myself. Rather than perceive this from a lens of socioeconomic status, I perceived them from the lens of racial differences.  In Grand Rapids, race implied socioeconomic status. In this sense, academic output became racialized and classed. 

If there was fear in this scenario, it was not fear about my capability to write. It was fear about not having sufficient time to write good essays for my teachers. It was fear about not being able to access resources that would enable me to finish my papers.