Abstract
“An important aspect of the lived experience of being gifted and not being thought of as boushie was that being gifted means one has a responsibility to help others.”
I began my career 32 years ago by interviewing hundreds of gifted students attending the nascent Tennessee Governor’s Schools Program. I was part of a two-person evaluation team, along with the late Dr. Laurence J. Coleman. For 4 years, we evaluated the programs by using a combination of observations, document reviews, surveys, and interviews with students, teachers, administrators, counselors, and parents. In one location, we also assessed the degree of academic gain in science. From these studies, we published an article on program evaluation (Coleman & Cross, 1993). We also published articles (e.g., Coleman & Cross, 1988) in which we attempted to investigate the “stigma of giftedness,” that Larry had hypothesized in 1985, and an early effort to study social cognition among gifted students (T. L. Cross, Coleman, & Terhaar-Yonkers, 1991). In total, we published a dozen articles and a couple of books that represented our passion about the lived experience of continuing. We knew that our theories were helpful but not equally applicable across settings and contexts.
Thirty years and hundreds of articles, chapters, columns, and books later, my colleagues and I from the Center for Gifted Education at William & Mary (Center) set out to investigate the lives of gifted students in secondary schools from varied backgrounds in Virginia and cross-culturally. Several studies to those ends are in various stages of completion. In one example, we use interviews as part of a large-scale international study comparing the lives of gifted adolescents in the United States, Ireland, Korea, France, Turkey, and England. When reading across these studies, I noticed similar patterns in the experiences of some of the female African American gifted students. Our findings in early years have not reflected these patterns, nor have I read or heard about them in lectures by experts in diversity and social justice.
In a previous Gifted Child Today (GCT) column (T. L. Cross, 2012), I discussed personal narratives, which are stories individuals develop, which help provide emotional stability and are used in the formation and maintenance of identity. In another column (Cross, 2009), I examined societal conventions that can obstruct gifted students’ development. Neither of these columns reflected the more recent observations from the interviews conducted by my William & Mary Center team.
Over the past 4 years, my colleagues and I have been studying the lives of students attending Camp Launch, a Center program. These students are rising seventh, eighth, and ninth graders from financially impoverished families. In one study with Camp Launch students, we compared our students with a second group of same-aged gifted students from middle- to high-income families in the same regions of the state attending a different Center program. My colleagues, Drs. Jennifer Riedl Cross and Dawn Frazier are focusing this study on perceived barriers to the gifted students’ lives. The results of this study are fascinating and quite informative.
In my quest to understand more fully the lives of African American gifted students, recently I attended a lecture by Dr. Lisa D. Delpit from Southern University. She spoke on the topic of disrupting narratives. Her examples were large-scale and culturally informed stories that affect the belief systems, aspirations, and so forth, of people within a community. For example, she mentioned the adage that “White men can’t jump” and the pernicious assumption that African Americans are naturally less intelligent than White people. This latter example she traced back as far as to statements made by Thomas Jefferson, who insisted that a formal education would be wasted on African Americans. She quoted also a much more recent statement by William Bennett, former Secretary of Education under President Reagan, which still expressed the narrative that African Americans are inferior and even problematic for society. During a call-in talk radio show in 2005, Bennett said, “If you want to reduce crime, you could . . . abort every Black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down.” Very recently, our most famous Supreme Court Justice, the late Antonin Scalia, also was criticized for remarks that were interpreted to support William Bennett’s and Thomas Jefferson’s assessments that African American students are inherently less able than White students. These are very powerful and pervasive cultural narratives.
Dr. Delpit also used Steele and Aronson’s (1995) research on “stereotype threat” to provide examples for ways in which specific groups of people can be affected by these societal narratives. Her main concern is this: How would African American students’ lives be different if the prevailing narratives had begun with the positive examples of intelligence and accomplishment, rather than the prejudicial ones so prevalent in American culture? Dr. Delpit’s talk provided the missing piece for the puzzle, which I had been struggling to understand.
An Exemplary Conversation With a Gifted Female African American
Occasionally, one single interview makes a big impact on a researcher. In this section, I draw together conversations with female African Americans about their lives as gifted students. I do so by forwarding the comments and description of one student.
This gifted student was a junior in a large urban high school in the southern part of Virginia. She described her life in school in positive terms. She liked her school, despite some relative difficulties getting to and from it. She believed that the school experience was preparing her for college opportunities that would help her become a productive citizen. While she gave a few examples of other students not being very supportive of her, she indicated feeling generally supported by most students and teachers alike.
When we spoke about her personal goals for their futures, she described a few professions that she hoped and planned to pursue. It was important to her to stay close to her immediate and extended family. Her larger community, including her church, was also very important to her.
Personal and cultural narratives, Stigma of Giftedness, lived experience, and so forth, came together as parts of an experiential puzzle that was her life. It could all be characterized by her use of the term “boushie” to describe being a gifted student. (There are various spellings of this word; I use this spelling as it is how she wrote it for me.) While this term has been around for years, generally considered a derivative of “bourgeois,” it is used in a variety of ways with differing nuances across the United States. After she used it to describe her life, we talked at length about her understanding of the term and what it meant to her. In essence, the term boushie means “pretending to be or act (or be seen as acting) in a station above your normal group,” normal group meaning immediate and extended family. When she described her future, she noted not wanting to be thought of as boushie and mentioned conscious decisions she would make to avoid being so.
An important aspect of the lived experience of being gifted and not being thought of as boushie was that being gifted means one has a responsibility to help others. This could mean helping others specifically in an academic subject wherein the gifted student is especially strong, or it can mean helping in general: looking after children, volunteering to help in church, and so forth. Most students in our programs did not seem to think of boushieness and the responsibility of others as common to the lives of gifted and talented students. The programs offered by the Center for Gifted Education are made up of students from the middle- and upper-middle socioeconomic classes. When we interviewed them, they gave more individualistic feedback and expressed no concern about being seen as boushie or needing to help others per se. I believe that the societal narratives Dr. Delpit describes have influenced the gifted students from differing socioeconomic groups of gifted children. As a consequence, these two groups of gifted students have somewhat differing motivations and goals for their educations. While both are perfectly acceptable and even laudable, the fact that they are different has ramifications for them as individuals, as well as for society in general.
Research has demonstrated that there is considerable variation among the metaphors for education used by supporters of gifted education (J. R. Cross, Cross, & Finch, 2010). Some see education as a means to an end, the end generally leading to a high-paying job or profession. This metaphor tends to emphasize the role of the individual. Others see education as the essential ingredient needed to become an educated citizen who can help communities thrive. This metaphor situates the individual within a community context. We need to be aware of the pernicious nature of certain ever-present cultural narratives, as they can have strong and lasting effects on the dreams of our children. As Paulo Freire (1970) noted in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, for students to experience freedom, they must become informed. To do so, one has to see what is possible, and not be limited by an education that has political goals or that have been influenced by the extant cultural narratives that disempower certain groups of people. Clearly, many of the current cultural narratives, including those prevalent during Thomas Jefferson’s era, represent political agenda. We must be vigilant to help our children transcend the prejudices that hold them back. As Dr. Delpit and others have said, we have a responsibility to disrupt the cultural narratives that keep some groups of people in society in a relatively powerless position.
Footnotes
Conflict of Interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Bio
Tracy L. Cross, PhD, is the Jody and Layton Smith Professor of Psychology and Gifted Education and serves as the executive director of the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William & Mary. He is the current editor of the Journal for the Education of the Gifted.