Intellectual Intransigence

A few days ago, I lamented the state of intellectual bankruptcy in this country and how, rather than reverse the trajectory, many of us have embraced it.

After some reflection, I have to admit I’m part of the problem. To borrow Lupe Fiasco’s line, “the problem is that I’m…smart.“

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being intelligent. But just as the wealth disparity has grown in this country, so has the knowledge disparity. When I talk to my friends, I realize that most of them have advanced degrees. Think about this. The majority of my friends are African-American or some other minority group, and almost every one of them has at least a master’s degree (or an MBA). Statistically, only 3 percent of blacks in this country have advanced degrees, and even fewer  Latinos do.

Now, a degree doesn’t necessarily make you smart, but it does provide you access to knowledge capital that you wouldn’t have had with a bachelor’s degree or a high school diploma.

In May, my friend Jason and I were driving from Houston to Dallas, wondering how Texas could be so anti-intellectual and anti-rational. After all, Austin is one of the most educated cities in the country while Houston is home to a diverse intelligentsia. And yet this is the state that proudly votes for Rick Perry and adopts public school textbooks minimizing the legacy of civil rights and slavery. Both of us came to the conclusion that we are probably out of touch with what most Americans think and care about. And we could only muster one thought after such a conclusion: damn.

Most Americans probably don’t worry about the debt ceiling or the lack of infrastructure investment or the rapidly growing number of people who live below the inflation-adjusted poverty line. And the truth is, up until about five or six years ago, neither did I.

After I left journalism to start my Ph.D, I slowly found myself changing. At first, it was how I used “big” words such as hegemony and discourse in everyday conversations. Then, it was how I would distance myself from people who, in my opinion, didn’t get it. But one thing that kept me from complete isolation was the fact that I had worked in the “real” world for almost a decade before I returned to school. For a number of my grad school peers, there was no real world experience, and as a result, they were continuing their isolation within the so-called Ivory Tower. As some of these folks get older and enter academia as professors or researchers, I think that social isolation will likely only grow.

I think we live in a country where almost everyone wants to get the best education and best opportunities, but both remain hard to reach for most. As a result, those who have been privileged with these opportunities feel they are speaking for everyone else in the room when they are only speaking for themselves.

I stopped reading The Nation because I didn’t want to be patronized by (mostly) middle-aged white liberals. I don’t necessarily like attending academic conferences because there’s an air of snobbery that most attendees are oblivious to. In other words, many of us with really good education credentials don’t think we’re better than others, but we behave as we do. And that generates resentment.

My feeling is that we could have enacted tougher rules on banks, passed a more progressive healthcare reform and created more opportunities for those most hurt by the recession if President Obama didn’t always sound so intellectual and scholarly in his attempts to message these priorities. It’s one thing to be a black man in the highest office in the United States. It’s another to be a super-smart one…for many folks, that’s downright uppity (yes, deep-seeded racial resentment still exists in this country, folks).

The point of this post is that I think too many of us with a certain degree of knowledge capital talk and act as if everyone is on our level, when in fact, most people are not. It’s this attitude that has made us aloof and out of touch with many of our fellow Americans, and it’s our obliviousness to this dynamic that compels us to wring our hands and wonder why no one is listening to us.