John McWhorter is an unrepentant nerd. It’s one of his finest qualities. He loves nerdy things—Looney Tunes, dinosaurs, show tunes, and probably a dozen other things I don’t even know about—with a sincerity and joy that makes me smile. We argue over major issues, like war and politics, but clips like this one remind me that, as much as he sometimes drives me crazy, John is unique. There’s nobody like him.
Here John recounts an incident from his days at Stanford. He wanted to compete in College Bowl, a trivia competition for university students. But when the other competitors scrambled to form teams, John initially found himself left out and unchosen. He was the only black competitor, and in his telling, it was pretty obvious that he was left out because the others had a sense that a black guy just wouldn’t have the knowledge base required. John’s response was to push his way in anyway and show them that he knew just as much, as he puts it, “stupid stuff” as the rest of them.
That was John’s way of combating prejudice and stigma. What strikes me is that it was effective because it was authentic. He didn’t show up to prove a black person can know just as much about, say, the Teapot-Dome scandal as a white person. He showed up because he really, really wanted to compete, and he knew he could do it. In the course of satisfying his ambitions, he demonstrated that a black person could do what the other white guys assumed he couldn’t. As he says, there was nothing he could do about the other students’ backward ideas, but he wasn’t going to let them stand in his way.
Today’s College Bowl competitors are probably more open-minded than they were when John was in school. Still, stigma exists. But the proper way to combat it is not to wave the antiracist flag. It’s to find your thing and pursue it because you have the drive and the ability. Maybe your success will dispel lingering misconceptions, and maybe not. You can’t control what others believe, you can only show them they might be wrong. The important thing, the thing you can control, is what you do with your own time, energy, and talent. I’m proud of twentysomething John for seeing that, and like present-day John, I believe it should be the norm, not the exception.
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JOHN MCWHORTER: Read that final part where I quote Shelby Steele, because I think people should hear this. If you have it in front of you,
GLENN LOURY: I do have it in front of me. “Shelby Steele, whose classic The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, won a 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award, captured the essence of the matter in a 1989 essay. The increased opportunity of the post civil rights era presented ‘a brutal proposition to black America: if you're not inferior, prove it.’” And you conclude, “Black pride means, at the end of the day, proving it.”
It's important, and a lot of people would tell us we shouldn't have to. No, I can't have that. That's a bad fashion. You do have to prove it. Even if the past and even the present are imperfect, you have to prove it or you haven't made a case.
Here, I think is the key sentence in your piece: “Underestimation must be countered with demonstration, not indignation.”
I must admit I like that one. Yeah, that's true. That's true.
You start with the anecdote of talking about how when you were at Stanford and they were putting together a kind of Jeopardy-like college competition for answering trivia questions, and the white guys kind left you out off the team.
They didn't pick you because they assumed, you being black, you didn't know anything. and you were confronted with a dilemma either to be pissed off and tuck your tail between your legs and go to the corner, injured by the fact that they overlooked you because they had the presupposition that a black guy wasn't a nerd—boo-hoo—to show 'em just how insufferably nerdy you actually are.
I chose the second one. That's right. They all literally huddled over on the other side of the room, left me out. It felt like being left out when they are picking people for sports, which I had of, course, endured as well. Here I am in this nerdy setting, and I'm being treated the same way. And I thought, it's because I'm black. All right. It couldn't be anything else. And I thought, I'll show them, because I know some stupid stuff.
I showed that. I don't think it changed the world, but that was my response. For me to run away saying I feel unwelcome, that would've been the lowliest form. And I thought that somebody needs to show them that black people can know stupid little things. And I'm one of the black people who can. It's not that I turned them upside down, but I thought I was making a little contribution.
And this is a quick codicil about that. One of the guys who ran to the other side of the room, just by chance, at the end of that school year, I met him. I had occasion to know him in a certain setting fairly well. He wasn't the devil. He was actually very open-minded. He was, frankly, a Democrat. He was a good white person.
Nevertheless, that bias clearly affected him that morning when they were very quickly trying to form teams, which shows that human beings are complicated. It wasn't that he was thinking, “Oh, there's that N-word over on the other side of the room.” He wasn't that type. But certainly he did fall under the influence of a certain kind of bias. To show that I understand that in that particular situation, he was a late-twentieth-century, enlightened white person who still wasn't anything like all the way there. But he wasn't a monster. Those guys weren't monsters, but they did read me wrong.
I decided I'm damn-well gonna show them. And I did. I wish all of us had that orientation. “I feel unwelcome.” Why don't you show them that they should have welcomed you more? A kind of person says I shouldn't have to. And yes, that's true, but you have to anyway because there's no other way for them to know. You have to anyway. That's the thing.
That's a heavy thing to actually accept. I have something to prove. They doubt my competency, and the burden is on me. It is so seductively inviting to see it as a microaggression. They doubt my competency here. Yet, again, to feel oneself burdened. Now I have to prove to these motherfuckers that I can actually do it. And to ball up into a defensive crouch or storm off angrily or reject or to take oneself out of the mix—it's them and me—instead of saying, “Okay. However reasonable or unreasonable their doubts might be, I'm confident about my own capacities.”
And that's an important provision. Do you have something to prove to yourself? It's the proving, not just to them, but also to me. When I say I don't have to prove it to them, am I taking the weight off of myself because I'm now rejecting the entire enterprise, and I never have to face up to my own doubts about my own? You know that, that kind of thing.
That's the other thing. It was interesting that morning, though I'm looking back, reconstructing my feelings. I thought, that wasn't nice, but I wanna do the College Bowl. I'd always wanted to try something like that, and I thought the only way I'm gonna try it is if I just deal with this.
And I thought, you know what? In a way, there's a novelty for me, because when I participate, when I answer a question correctly, everybody's gonna be surprised. I'm gonna feel a little bit special. And that's exactly what happened. I just thought to myself, I wanna do it. This world is imperfect. There wasn't gonna be a warm, friendly, all-black College Bowl. This was my one chance, and you can get hit by a bus the next day. I thought, if I'm gonna do College Bowl, they're gonna ask me these stupid questions. It's gonna be like on Jeopardy. I wish to do this. Okay, something imperfect happened. I can't fix it. I'm gonna go do my thing. Deal me in, is how I felt.
I think that should be a norm. Some people are gonna listen to this and think I'm saying, “Why can't you be like me?” But no, I didn't feel like this. I felt normal. I think that other black people are taught to be abnormal and think it's more important to decry the racism and run away crying than to just pitch in and show that you can do what they don't think you can.
Glenn, your conversation with John was entertaining, and some of it resonated with me. But what I heard was two exceptional black men talking about the importance of leveraging their exceptional brilliance to secure the opportunities they deserve. I see you. I recognize you. Because I am in that club of exceptional black men too. My resume would confirm my membership--not because academic credentials make me exceptional--but credentials can serve to validate that, given opportunity, I was successful in leveraging my abilities to realize achievements in the academic space that some people find noteworthy.
Which is my point. The System which is American Society is biased, expects less of black people, and puts obstacles in our way. Obstacles which can be overcome, and which should be overcome. But the obstacles should never have existed, and this Society penalizes itself by unreasonably (and also unfairly, but "fairness" isn't the point of my message) singling out some identities to carry additional burdens and to face additional obstacles.
Rather than normalizing this dysfunctional behavior and patting ourselves on the back for having achieved a measure of success for having overcome those obstacles, we who are in that exclusive club of exceptional black men who have overcome obstacles to realize success should be the loudest voices for those obstacles to be removed. Not (simply) as a matter of fairness. But because we, more than most, understand the reality of those obstacles. Because we, more than most, have the platform, and the ability to articulate the reality of those obstacles, so that others less gifted, as well as those who might think they are well served by a system that places obstacles on some, based on identity, ** can understand what Society loses when its systems disadvantage some, based on identity. **
Because we, more than most, can imagine how all of society can benefit when those identity-based obstacles are removed, and not only exceptional black men and women, but even average black men and women, are able to access the opportunities and resources that can allow them to realize their potential.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk <wink>. And for sharing your powerful platform with me.
The need to prove oneself worthy, despite somebody else's doubts, has been part of the human dynamic across many cultures over millennia, in may domains of life. It could involve "race" but it could involved hundreds of other disctincions. In some sense, one could say that it's never "fair", but it comes up anyway. The ONLY real solution is to show that one can, any other response fails to satisfy.
I think that Asian-Americans (a term I use reluctantly, given the wide diversity of peoples being deceptively lumped under 'Asian') have gained a lot of respect by demonstrating that they can earn it, rather than by avoiding and deflecting, saying that they should not need to do so.