While perusing YouTube the other night, a video that claimed to be the perfect metaphor for white privilege appeared on my feed. The video shows a group of people of different races, ages, and backgrounds about to compete in a footrace for $100. Before they can begin, however, the race official asks the participants a series of questions. If the answer is yes, the racer takes a step forward.
As the questions go on, it becomes apparent that the white runners do indeed have a huge handicap, while the black runners have to start from all the way at the back of the line. Perhaps to the college sophomore who wrote the script, this seems like a terrific metaphor for privilege. In many ways, it is; it's no secret that people of color are statistically disadvantaged. We can sit here and debate forever about these numbers, but that would distract from my main point.
And my point is this: life is not a race.
It's true that many people of color often have to start from the bottom. From my experience growing up in a 6,000 population town, that's probably true of many Caucasian folks too. But when did life become a race to the top?
Ultimately, the problem I had with this video was not the message, but the metaphor itself. There's a great saying among writers that all of the media we consume, all of those movies, books, and video games we gobble up, started as a blank document. An empty slate soon to be filled with drafts, rewrites, eraser scribbles, tracked changes, blood, sweat, and tears, all for the sake of making it the thing you rave about to your friends.
Incidentally, this applies to humans as well. Regardless of who we are born to, we begin life as empty slates. Sure, we inherit certain traits from our parents, but its ultimately our settings, interests, and relationships we pack into those opening paragraphs that ultimately influence the novel of our lives.
That doesn't have to be a bad thing. Doesn't have to be a good thing either. It's just a fact of life; your experiences and your background play a big role in who you become. In many cases, they also influence how long it takes to get where you want to be. But in the end, who cares how long it takes if you know in your heart you will get there someday anyway?
We live in a world of hares. This is never more true than in college, a time when I judged myself the harshest. College was the hardest adjustment I ever had to make. I had moved six hours away from my blue-collar hometown to a largely white-collar New England city. The topics of conversation matured, and I longed for those days of small-town gossip as the people around me threw around euphemisms for sex and weed. Everyone else managed to shed the final vestiges of their grade school years with ease, trading in their soccer warmups and black socks giving way to suit jackets and Croft and Barrow shoes. I convinced myself that I was way behind everyone else, to the point where I would never be able to catch up.
I spent many a weekday night in the shower, close to breaking out in tears, as visions of homelessness, serving up Slurpees at 7-Eleven in some nameless suburb, and curling up in blankets alone every night haunted me. Everything was a competition in college, and I never seemed to finish first. Aside from a few Dean's List appearances, my defeatist mentality kept me from making the most of the college experience. I never ran for student or club offices, never participated in mock interviews or the annual Elevator Pitch competitions, never shared my writing in poetry readings and campus publications.
In the back of my mind, I told myself that I would always finish last.
My parents told me that my autism would always shave a few years off my mental age, but I never knew what that meant until college. I didn't feel like a young adult. I didn't want to dress up and spew a rehearsed pitch at job fairs. I didn't want to go to the bar after class and network. I wanted to play Super Smash Bros. with my roommate.
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| The world is more interconnected than ever, and it makes us focus on the people in front of us rather than ourselves. |
My experience was relatively tame compared to some of my friends, who experienced a far wider range of emotions in their college years. Some were apathetic, electing to stay in their dorm rooms or apartments all day and sleep through class. They would end up dropping out of college, and returning home to live with their folks.
Others became obsessed with success, the illusion of having the perfect life. They withdrew into their resumes and LinkedIn accounts, and shelled out untold amounts of money to attend leadership seminars and join "exclusive" campus organizations (I have my own experiences with leadership organizations, see here). Failure was not an option for them, and I had to help them weather the storm a fair amount of times.
I've even had to talk people off the edge.
In the world of first or bust, life takes a backseat. There's a reason depression is statistically higher in younger people than ever before. Life isn't as simple as a bike ride with friends anymore. Soon, there will be bills to pay. Home isn't really home anymore. The friends you thought you'd never lose find their own calling, and leave you out to dry. Being good at something isn't optional anymore: you can't just play on a baseball team because you can stand in the outfield and swat at butterflies like you could in Little League.
Today, however, I have a mortgage. I hold a sturdy 9-5 job, and still have time and money for hobbies, travel, and other pursuits. Here's a secret your peers, teachers, and career counselors don't want you to know: there is no universal definition of success.
People like to say there is. A two-story house, nuclear family, a couple of pets, a six-figure income, weekends playing guitar for a local cover band...this is probably the closest thing we can get to what society defines as successful. Dovetailing back into the race mentality, many of these young people consider what major will get them there the quickest rather than the major they would really like to pursue. Politicians always say we need more engineers and scientists. Those big dollar signs are hard to ignore, despite the fact that the Congressional Research Service discovered that unemployment is higher among science and engineering professionals than in other, similar areas.
Not all visions of success are the same, but many probably seek at least one of the elements of societal success. Aside from the nuclear family (and playing the guitar), this was my vision in my early college years. I had made the conscious decision to follow my dreams in high school when I decided to study writing, but even then I couldn't shake the many internal and external voices telling me what success was supposed to look like.
In my sophomore year, I finally threw my hands up. Why compete in a race I had no chance of winning? I had gone through a long bout with depression, and was ready to focus on what really made me happy.
Creative writing professors convinced everyone into trying to write the next great American novel, but I had worked up the confidence to write the sci-fi/fantasy stories that I'd always wanted to. Instead of doing the standard marketing internship, I spent the summer writing for my hometown newspaper and learned a surprising amount about the place I'd grown up in. I was called unprofessional, childish, but I ignored it all. I was happy, and if there was one thing I learned from my simple upbringing, it's that success is as simple as loving what you're doing. Perhaps it wasn't the ideal college experience, but it was mine, and I wouldn't have taken it back for anything.
Then came May, 2017. After only three years in college, I would be graduating with my B.S in Professional Writing. Everyone I knew reiterated to me what a big deal this was. How far ahead I was of everyone else. But how could that be? I'd taken the exact same number of credits as everyone else, and many of them got better grades than I had.
The concept of success has sown sinister seeds in the subconscious of young Americans. It's the God we all worship, the thing we are willing to sacrifice everything to get. We perceive it as gracing the few and throwing everyone else to the wolves.
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| Every one of these drivers has a different finish line, so how do we know who wins? |
It took me years to realize that success is not universal; it's personal. NASCAR is back, so let's envision this imaginary race to success as an actual stock car race. As soon as the green flag waves, some of the drivers will turn around and go in the opposite direction. Some drive onto the infield grass, and some of these drivers stop to do donuts. Some head down pit road at full speed. Every one of these drivers has a different finish line, so how do we know who wins?
In the age of social media, it's so easy to get absorbed into the lives of others. To desire the successes and riches they've amassed, the achievements they've unlocked. It's when we take a step back, look inside ourselves, and find what it is that we really want that we are truly happy. It may take a day, it may take several decades, but no matter how long it takes, it truly is the journey, not the destination, that we'll remember.
What I'm saying is, you don't have to be a hare, you don't have to be the tortoise. Just be yourself.
