![]() ![]() Smart is only a construct of correspondence, between one’s abilities, one’s environment, and one’s moment in history. In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act. The personal essay was an economic problem and a social problem dressed up as a cultural taste problem. The essays in this volume dance along the line of the dreaded “first-person essay.” Dreaded beacuse the genre has become identified with so many people and things that our culture loves to hate: women, people of color, queer people, young people, and the internet. We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome. That is not the same thing as causing problems. (8)īlack girls and black women are problems. In the academic hierarchy, graduate students are units of labors. Personality” and it did not feel like superlative. Thick where I should have been thin, more when I should have been less, a high school teacher nicknamed me “Ms. I was, like many black children, too much for white teachers and white classrooms and white study groups and white Girl Scout troops and so on. ![]() When I would not or could not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred. ![]() I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine. Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. ![]()
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