Notes on bullshit, trauma, privilege, elites, and...well.

If anyone was able to discover something "hidden" within the curriculum at St. Paul's it was Carla; she was able to understand the unwritten rules of the school, translate her own understanding of things into these rules, and excel. Carla's experience at the school tells us that this is not enough. To her, the mere act of learning the hidden curriculum feels forced; her resistance to the school's lessons is apparent to the faculty and influences her interpersonal relationships. Because she did not believe the curriculum was legitimate - but just a different form of bullshit - she was unable to interact in ways that made the organization of the school, and her success within it, seem natural.

Won't speak for the entire book until I've finished it, but three chapters in, Shamus Khan's Privilege is hitting very close to home, one of the most nuanced yet biting deconstructions of new elite ideology and what it means to attend an elite institution I've ever had the privilege (hah) of reading. On the other hand, there's this piece from Harvard alum Due Quach on being poor and traumatized at the wealthiest, seemingly most well-adjusted undergraduate institution in the nation:

To me, Harvard was a place where people put on a politically correct face. It wasn’t normal to be real or to be vulnerable. Even if you didn’t feel like an overachiever, you still had to fake it because everyone expected you to be one. I learned that if you didn’t fit in, it was up to you to change to adapt to Harvard. Otherwise, the options available to you were to take a year off to think things through, to self-medicate your way through to graduation, or to have a shrink prescribe anti-depressants to numb your disgruntlement.

Quach's experience both mirrors and deepens what Carla (and Khan's interpretation of her words) says: that elite institutions have a persnickety way of making their small world feel like the truest iteration of the world there is, that resisting the conventions and expectations of that world is a numbers game against a population disproportionately inclined towards it, that self-medication is often the only option most have. She also offers some great perspective on the ways in which these institutions fail traumatized students, and perhaps fail to honor the experience of trauma as well:

The most frustrating thing is that the people who treated me didn’t focus on helping me learn effective methods to handle the circumstances causing my high stress: that my family still lived with extreme financial hardship, that I didn’t want to be a burden on them, that I felt responsible for helping them and guilty for not being there to help them, and that going to Harvard did not directly translate into putting me in a better position to financially support them.
What I needed was mentorship and coaching to build the life skills I didn’t learn at home, to address my trigger-defense mechanisms that were locking me in negative spirals, and to become financially secure. Since there was no way that Harvard was going to hand these things to me, I realized I needed to figure out how to do these things on my own.

As somebody who's often heard about how Harvard University Health Services is centered more around helping patients function in the short-term than on the long-term project of healing and reclaiming one's life, Quach's words resonate. I myself realize the tension I feel when imagining my near future. I'm worried about food, housing, and employment, things I can take for granted as a student on full financial aid but need to consider in the next two years. Those questions have no easy answers, but they are not questions anybody - especially not in an educational community - should have to face alone.

To add onto all of this, there's another issue here: the way that the underlying assumptions of the elite institution (and, more broadly speaking, neoliberal capitalism's conception of human worth) depoliticizes the question of trauma, centers all human experience through the lens of productivity, and isolates individuals who need support the most.

I'm trying to argue this in straightforward terms, but...well, look, here's the pithiest way to put it. Somebody at my school just made a potentially game-changing discovery in the cure for cancer (which even Chip here on my shoulder would concur is a fantastic, important thing completely worth celebrating). I know this because there were articles about it. ON THE INTERNET. "Harvard kid makes breakthrough in cancer treatment" is a headline for the ages. "Harvard kid manages to wake up without crying despite recurring nightmares about parents literally slitting his throat upon his coming out" is the title of a poem I needed to write, like, yesterday. (Hilariously, combining the two - Atlas-sized accomplishment meets past personal tragedy - makes for even better neoliberal inspiration porn, porn with titles like "Harvard Prospect Zach Hodges Overcomes His Painful Past," as if one's economic and cultural success was the end-all of one's trauma*.)

For me, there's a more fundamental frustration at the way in which people are talked about - and valued - within the context of meritocracy. The classmates I've met in college are almost always identified by their best accomplishments (note how Quach, too, centers the overachiever as a hegemonic Harvardian identity): the Olympic-level figure skater, the published author, the mathematics whiz. Even when personality traits come into the picture, they feel positioned in a way suggesting that they are only valuable in relation to aforementioned accomplishments**. (As in: "I can't believe she has a 4.0 and still manages to be so nice!") There is no room for trauma here, unless we're talking about an ~inspirational story~, a story about overcoming great personal hardship against the odds to make it.

Look, I've met some of the most purely good, noble, and respectable people of my entire life at Harvard, only their goodness and nobleness and respectability has jackshit to do with what their GPA is, how many courses they're taking, how much their start-up idea sold for, or how many Forbes' "20 Under 20" lists they've been featured in. It has to do with the way in which they navigate the world with a grace I search for in my own life, a grace that is open to injustice and pain without hardening. If anything, I respect them all the more for the thoughtfulness I see in their approach to school, work, and life: that is not something that comes without a lot of effort, self-awareness, and willpower in being good to others. Many of these people have experienced pain and loss that I cannot fathom the depth of, yet they endure, they survive, they continue to move through the world and fill it with their presence.

But on the whole, I still struggle to reconcile meritocracy and trauma/healing, especially when the former too often refuses space to the latter. Quach, on her end, has founded a business venture to increase access to educational resources and training for traumatized students (and good on her for thinking about socioeconomic inequity in all of this, too). I haven't yet figured out how to work through my own trauma, but I think I need to think first about what all of this means to me. It's a tightrope, being critical about what isn't working without lapsing into bitterness or futility; I am still grateful to be where I am, and I still want to make sure that I leave my school with its arms a little wider than when I entered it. 

Concluding thoughts for today:
1. Trauma prevents people from access to economic opportunities that subsequently connect to systematic power. This is true at elite institutions and probably also true outside elite institutions, too.

2. Yet it's this same trauma that is either denied space to exist - even at the level of helping people function, much less heal - even as it gets fetishized in New York Times rags-to-riches stories and Lifetime movies on the human will to endure (to make lots and lots of money!)

3. One, it's obviously important that people in a just economic system are given equal opportunity to participate, and that equality extends into the ways in which people are and aren't functioning due to their trauma. More importantly, though, trauma survivors are worth more than their salaries, just like all of us; I speak only for myself, but I think there is more worth living for than succeeding in the eyes of my classmates, and I think that those who opt out of a destructive economic system do not deserve to have their political and economic power stripped by the elite, and I think that it is okay that all of us think critically about those things and feel comfortable about asking for what we deserve.

NOTES:
*While I hope I expressed myself clearly there, I'll note that this argument is not about either my classmate or Zach Hodges; their achievements are valuable things. I'm making an argument about seeing humans through the lens of their achievements, especially when it intersects with the experience of trauma in ways that don't quite ring true.

**Worse is when all of this work (not always done by the student but by their wealthy and, ahem, invested parents) that goes into making the perfectly affable, intelligent and interesting wunderkid looks effortless, that this is just the way that these people are - that they were born with a copy of The Economist in their perfect jazz hands and a dream of bringing clean water to Africa, supposedly the biggest country in the world or something. To paraphrase Khan's argument in Privilege, the underlying premise of an elite institution is that where you come from doesn't matter; it's what you do within the ivory walls that make you somebody. Unfortunately, within this framework, "Your past doesn't define you" becomes a trap of sorts (I hear "your abuse doesn't define you" a lot, much to my consternation); noble in intent and expression, it denies the material and psychological inequalities that differentiate people's choices and options from birth. When all that matters is what you do, what has happened to you, shaping you for worse or better, is never acknowledged or honored.

And when, subsequently, our elite end up looking very similar to the elite of 40 years ago, they have been legitimized in a way that the old elite was not. The old elite protected their status through entitlement and exclusionary culture, both things that are rightly pooh-poohed today; the new elite just kind of collected in Harvard Yard like a big slithering mob of snake people and naturally came to be, and if there aren't a lot of women, queer folk, or people of color (tying this back to the first half of this essay, people with traumatic experiences) there, well, they just must not have worked hard enough to deserve power.

Lastly, I acknowledge that I'm mad about all of this, by the way, and that's fine, too. I try not to let it cloud my judgment, at least not any more than these ideologies cloud other people's.