Dragged Down by the Voluntarily Ignorant — Does the Mediocrity Suck-Down Phenomenon Act More Aggressively among African-American and Hispanic Students?

28 March 2011

Curtis Valentine is troubled by the possibility that self-defeating cultural perspectives toward academic achievement exist among African-Americans and Hispanics

He wrote:

In a country aiming to compete with the world for the future, what impact does being called an "Uncle Tom" or "white boy/girl" has on academic achievement in America?

For those minorities who have reached some level of academic achievement, there is a chance they have been ridiculed by someone at least once.

[T]he stigma associated of high achievement is intergenerational. I can remember sharing my acceptance letter to the U.S. Peace Corps with an older family friend. I was surprised when he commented, "Oh, so you going to do that white stuff."

Valentine pointed out that comparative cultural data exists regarding this phenomenon:

[Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Harvard University] said "Among whites, higher grades yield higher popularity."

Fryer reported that for Blacks and Hispanics, higher achievement was associated with modestly higher popularity until a grade point average of 3.5 and 2.5.

In other words, a Hispanic student with a 4.0 GPA is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and has 3 fewer friends than a typical white student with at 4.0 GPA.

For Black Americans, the number of friends they have increases as their GPA increases until it exceeds 3.5 when he/she begins to lose friends.

There are many theories that may explain away the drop off, but the idea that the number of friends continues to increase for whites until they reach 4.0 can not be overlooked.

The Suck-Down Trait is human

Mr. Valentine has a point. Battling a constructive ethos of the dominant culture is probably a losing proposition for people who have suffered at its hands.

But given the way anger works, it seems a natural response.

And I do not think the (temporary) white majority culture is as healthily rewarding of achievement as Professor Fryer’s inquiry seems to indicate. As a white guy, I remember deliberately adopting a low school profile so as to escape the contempt classmates sent the way of their academically smarter peers.

American culture appears to me to prize athletic endeavors and money above brain and intelligent inquiry under most circumstances. Mind-mediocrities don’t take well to being, even unintentionally, shown to be such. Hence, the Mediocrity Suck-Down phenomenon.

We like to think we’re above average mentally. Which, in itself, shows how mathematically ignorant we mostly are.

Intellectual inferiority is also not as visible to us as athletic or social inferiority

There is a deeper explanation to academic performance suck-down.

Intellectually-not-gifted people cannot follow trains of thought far enough to recognize that they are not Michael Jordans of the mind. This inability to see even the outlines of the court makes contempt and resentment of intellectual achievements easier.

Getting thumped in athletics and physically-based endeavors is fairly definitive. Most of us can recall how it feels when someone athletically more gifted than we are crushes us so casually that we recognize that they are operating on another plane of human ability. The same is true of performing arts and of the social acumen that goes into the popularity contests that so dominate much of school.

On the other hand, watching a geek-nerd outperform us academically, under what appear to be subjectively-graded circumstances, is not an automatic pecking-order delineator.

If we are too lost or unmotivated to recognize the intellectual permutations that the nerd did in order to get where he or she wound up, we are also going to be too intellectually lackluster to recognize, much less acknowledge, our shortcomings.

Metaphorically, if we can’t even see the bread crumb trail, how can we expect to understand how we fell short of following it? From our limited perspective, there was no trail. Some kind of unfairness had to account for the nerd’s ability to follow what we could not see.

Part of this blindness is due to the fact that we are still, first, physical and social beings. The cortical brain is an evolutionarily late add-on. It is not surprising that our species has yet to value it.

That said, Mr. Valentine’s point is worth thinking about

From a getting-ahead standpoint, it very likely is a bad idea to refuse to participate in the one constructive attribute the dominant culture displays which got “them” where “they” are. I don’t see any signs that the skillful manipulation of knowledge is going to become less economically or militarily valuable tomorrow than it was in the past.

To the extent that Curtis Valentine’s hypothesis is correct, American minorities who drag their brighter members down are doing themselves and the nation no favors.

The next step is daunting — cultivating awareness

If Curtis Valentine is correct about self-defeating cultural attributes among two large minority groups, how is anyone going to fix it?

That would mean taking responsibility for our personal destinies in a world that is psychologically booby-trapped and, more often than not, profoundly unfair.

Mindful awareness usually helps on the personal scale. Would cultivating cultural awareness help?

Hopefully so. This website is predicated on the utility of enhancing personal and cultural self-awareness.

PeteFree.com

Dragged Down by the Voluntarily Ignorant — Does the Mediocrity Suck-Down Phenomenon Act More Aggressively among African-American and Hispanic Students?