Honestly Accomplished

I recounted to a friend strange instances where potential employers made offhand comments about how they could “tell” that I was a hard worker. “How would they know?” I remarked, annoyed. “I don’t even work that hard.” My friend, who is black, paused, then said, “That”—the unearned assumption that I’m a hard worker— “sounds like the kind of thing that would get you a job.”

It’s a fair point. Being in the good graces of white people helped me win plum housing deals. It helped bring me pay raises and perhaps even jobs themselves. This isn’t to say that I haven’t come by my accomplishments honestly.
Iris Kuo “The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans”

Ms. Kuo’s assertion that she has come by her accomplishments honestly is an interesting one, in that if delves to the heart of what I understand racism, and the accusation of racism, to be about. She goes on to say “But I do not fear for my life when the police are around. No one has ever crossed the street when I’ve approached or followed me around a store. For the most part, I do not believe I am negatively racially profiled by law enforcement, in housing opportunities or at retail stores.” I’ve had, on rare occasions, people cross the street when I’ve approached them. This is, at heart, an indication that they did not believe that I would come by accomplishments honestly; instead, I would seek to rob them of theirs; never mind that it was broad daylight. The same when people follow me around a store. The presumption is that I intend to enrich myself by theft, rather than the honest trade of money for goods. (Interestingly, you can also see a presumption of dishonesty when store clerks studiously ignore my presence. Rather than being there as an honest signal of a desire to purchase something, I am simply window shopping, with every intent on exiting empty-handed.) And while I do not routinely “fear for my life when the police are around,” I understand that they are less likely to see me as honest then they are other people, and that this is what leads to higher rates of violent encounters; the understanding that even an outwardly placid demeanor may hide malicious intent, and therefore it may be better to adopt an aggressive stance, and to shoot first and ask questions later, than to not be around long enough to be concerned with the answers.

On the broader question of policies like Affirmative Action, the assumption of dishonest accomplishment aligns more closely with Ms. Kuo’s. I have, at several points in my academic and professional life, been accused of having come by my accomplishments dishonestly, colluding with white race-traitors to achieve things that rightfully belonged to harder-working White people in exchange for emotional, and in some cases material, remuneration. The seat of the alleged dishonesty varies from person to person, but I tend to see it break down in one of two ways. Either I am capable of doing the hard work that is required for genuine success, and have simply opted for a life of ease through treachery (my own and/or that of others); or I am incapable of attaining honest accomplishment, and rely on theft from the more deserving as my only recourse. In either event, any assertion on my part that I have honestly achieved what I have through merit is usually discounted. Surely, goes the reasoning, if people like me had merit, then we would be more broadly successful.

And this is where racism parts company from simple jackassery. Any jackass can assert that a given individual is fraudulent. Many (but not all) racists assert that a person is fraudulent specifically because they depart from what they insist is true about the race to which that person belongs. (Interestingly, the people who have openly identified themselves in conversation with me as White supremacists were much more likely to concede my personal merit; I became their exception that proved their rules.) So I have been identified as a fraud by people for a failure to admit that I am no different from all of the other Black people they imagine, plagued by a laziness, ineptitude and/or mendacity that is inextricably bound up in the same genes that code for curly black hair and a lack of concern for sunburn. Unwilling to admit to either the existence of outliers or the dubiousness of their stereotypes, they instead cast me as a fake, and therefore unworthy in spite of anything else.

I, for my part, however, tend not to think that I have come by my accomplishments honestly, but rather, fortunately. As a child, I did well in the parenting lottery, something that was driven home to me first when I worked with children and again when my father died and I learned that had the proverbial toss of a coin gone the other way, I would have been the child of a single mother. And while I may have missed a few times when Opportunity knocked, when it kicked in my door and invited itself in, I scrambled to be a gracious host. But this leaves me with the understanding that, fundamentally, my accomplishments are only partly due to my own merit. Opportunities are both a finite resource and distributed unequally; those that were available for me to take advantage of were therefore inaccessible to others who may have been able to do as well or better than I did.

And I believe that the accusation of racism stings in the same way that being its target does, in that it presupposes that one’s accomplishments are fraudulent. While the observation by Ms. Kou’s Black friend that “[The unearned assumption that one is a hard worker] sounds like the kind of thing that would get you a job,” rankles me in that it signals an acceptance that we can only have what other allow us, I find Ms. Kou’s need to state that a plum housing deal, job or raise obtained by being in someone's good graces still counts as an honest accomplishment, rather than simply a gift, to be interesting. It speaks to a need for people to themselves as making their own ways in the world, regardless of the fact that to do so is nearly impossible as a practical matter. People exist in an endless churn of events which have rich existences independently of them. While I believe that I have made contributions to each and every place that I have worked during my career, the fact of the matter remains that none of them would be any different had I never been there. While I have had “honest” accomplishments in my life, all of them were built on foundations that had nothing to do with me, having been laid long before I came on the scene. While it may be true that there was no deceit or guile involved on my part, had I needed to build all of these things from literally the naked Earth, I would have been at a loss.

But this understanding seems rarer than I would expect. Instead the perception seems to be that acknowledging the role of chance and other’s choices on one’s own life outcomes undermines any claim that a person has at merit. Or, perhaps more accurately, any claim that a person has as deserving, by rights, what they have. I do not see myself as the rightful owner of the things that have come to be, only someone who was in the right place at the right time, and was on the ball enough to grab them. To others, I am not the rightful owner, because I have fraudulently dispossessed the person who is. Which does not bother me as much it used to, because I am at peace with the idea that “deserving” is simply a word, and not a genuine quality of reality. But that is the minority view, and its opposite, that breaks down success into only the fairly or fraudulently gained currently holds sway.