Giants Among Us: First-Generation College Graduates Who Lead Activist Lives

Preface

ix Preface In my youth I suspected that if I thought too much about the plight of the poor, uneducated, and powerless, I would become dangerously militant, a young Angela Davis probably facing jail time. I was wary of committing, like Rosa Parks, so stunningly simple an act of civil disobedience in so decisive and irrevocable a manner as to take the nation’s breath away, bringing unimaginable retaliation upon my family. Because I was raised in the south where civil disobedience was a sure route to uncivilized punishment, in my pragmatic view the most acceptable means of combatting discrimination and poverty appeared, and still appears, to be education. I dare say that even today, few among the thinking would disagree. The belief that education is key to American democracy is as old as the nation. It was articulated in Thomas Jefferson’s 1786 call to establish and improve the law for educating the common people (Ravitch 1983). But education lies near the bottom of the enfranchisement pyramid, below economic and political power, though each influences access to its apex, the democratic pursuit of a good life. As bulwarks protecting American democracy, the triumvirate of educational, economic, and political power has also served the contradictory purpose of walling out “undesirables.” The most intangible of the three powers, education is also the most irreducible and has frequently proved a prerequisite to economic and political parity. Thus, education is a pressure point around which the nation has historically managed privilege. A challenge for many in positions of political power has been balancing the nation’s inclusionary rhetoric with the simultaneous practice of exclusion. As one of the excluded, I have struggled to keep the seeds of bitterness from sprouting in my heart. My struggles against bitterness notwithstanding, I have spent much of my life thinking about issues of economic, social, and political inequality, so beginning a study of first-generation college graduates from low socioeconomicstatus (SES) backgrounds was more akin to accessorizing a favorite outfit than x Preface to breaking in new shoes. Still, the process was fraught with uncertainty. Would I become enraged as I scrutinized the educational histories of the study’s participants ? Even more problematic, I knew, would be finding my own place as researcher and first-generation college graduate within the spectrum of themes bridging the participants’ lives. Although I was not the first person in my family to go to college (my older sister preceded me), in most other respects I fit the stringent criteria for the study, defined in Chapter 1. I was an insider by origin and by life experience, a factor that could impinge upon the study whether or not I tried to suppress it. In addition to worrying about taking an appropriately objective approach to the study, I was concerned that my identity as a first-generation college graduate from a poor family might lessen the validity of my research in the eyes of potential publishers and readers. Studies of culture, and ethnography in particular, have often been conducted by people of comparative privilege among those considered different or exotic. From Margaret Mead and before to Mama Lola and beyond, anthropologists have entered different cultures and, over a period of years, transformed their own and their readers’ understanding of others’ lives. Besides being written by a non-established writer and a non-anthropologist, my identity places this book even further outside ethnography’s traditional realm. I decided to position my experience as a first-generation college graduate within the context of the study by using my own life-history data as a corollary to—even a reflection of—the excerpts and examples included from the participants ’ lives. Each of the book’s chapters begins with a segment of thematically corresponding data from my life history, so in an important way the book is about my journey toward self-discovery. I leave points of analysis about my own story to the reader’s discretion. What will you find in this book? In Chapter 1 I explain why I think firstgeneration college graduates from low SES backgrounds who became social or educational activists are worth studying. Chapter 2 contains a selection of five stories culled from the interviews of five of the study’s participants. These narratives offer unique but representative examples of the rich details comprising the participants’ lives. Chapter 3, along with Chapters 4 and 5, is devoted to analysis of the study’s data. In Chapter 3 I examine how the participants...