20140118.0827

Some years ago, I picked up and read a copy of Donna Dunbar-Odom's Defying the Odds, a book with expresses and investigates the difficulties attendant upon coming from a working-class background and going into academia.  I confess that as I read the book, I read affectively, finding myself identifying with Dunbar-Odom's narrative voice because I found many parts of myself in the text.  (I am supposed to know better than to lose myself in a text in such a way, supposed to be more disciplined than to allow it to happen, but I remain human after all.  Whether that means I am a bad scholar or a good one, I am still not sure.)

I might have discussed the issue in this webspace before, that I come from a solidly working-class background and have as a result faced some...difficulty in negotiating the culture of the academy, particularly that of the academic humanities.  I have in the course of my studies been obliged to question and reconsider most of what my upbringing leads me to call virtues.  Common practices--the "way things are done" and "the way things are"--have faced similar investigation and analysis.  And in doing so, I feel that I have been made distant from the family of my birth even as I have found and grown close to my family of choice.  (I do not mean by this to say that I do not love the people from whom I sprang, but I feel no shame in saying that my wife and child receive more of my love and affection than do my parents and brother.  It is as it should be.)

As I have worked in the academy, I have felt very much as though I am obliged to do through raw power what others, whose backgrounds are more suited to work in the collegiate environment, are able to do through finesse and panache.  I feel that I have to stake my claim by force, that I still have to prove through my efforts that I deserve the place and position I occupy, and that I have to prove it to myself as much as I do to other people.  I am the intellectual version of the nouveau riche, spending conspicuously and gratuitously to assert that I have the stuff to spend, marking myself as a newcomer (and probably making myself unwelcome) as I do so, knowing it and being unable to stop.  For I have the fear that, although I may be making an ass of myself through what I am doing, as an ass I at least have a place, and that if I stop, that place will be taken from me and no other will be forthcoming.

There is some comfort in knowing that I am not the only one who has such feelings of unfittedness and being outside even among the outside (for the intellectual is very much on the outside, as McWhorter notes in Doing Our Own Thing).  For that knowledge, I thank Dunbar-Odom.  But the knowledge of how to get away from such feelings would be far more welcome.