Every time I speak in a classroom here on campus, I feel a pressure similar to the one Greek Titan Atlas must have felt.
For those of us who are not classics majors, Atlas was a Titan whose punishment after losing the war against Zeus was to hold Uranus on his shoulders. Obviously, I don’t feel like I have an entire planet on my back, but I do feel like I have the weight of the entire black race on my back.
Let me explain. I am not suggesting that I have the weight of the black race on my back because I’m special or anything. But rather, I understand the pervasiveness of group identity and how some individuals take the actions of one individual and apply them to an entire race. I am cognizant that not everyone feels this way, but I have had several conversations with other black people who feel a similar pressure.
I guess some of you could be thinking that this way of thinking is ludicrous. But recent events certainly lend some credence to this outlook. For example, after Richard Sherman’s post-game rant, Golden State Warriors forward Andre Iguodala tweeted, “We just got set back 500 years …” Of course I cannot definitively say that Iguodala specifically meant black people when he said “we”; I just strongly infer that is what he meant.
Yes, I understand that Iguodala is a professional basketball player and not a scholar of sociology or African American studies (as far as I know), but his comment illuminates the notion that other black people recognize the perception and consequences of group identity.
To be fair, there are some “good” (and I say that very loosely) aspects of group identity. Some individuals postulate that black people are good at sports simply because they are black. Others assume that Asian people are smart simply because they are Asian. Though these perceptions are “positive,” they are still essentialist ideas.
In sociology, essentialism is the idea that individuals have certain characteristics solely based on their association with a race or specific group. The problem with essentialist thinking is the fact that it omits the possibility of individual agency and could lead to a dangerous slippery slope of assumptions.
I wish we lived in a society in which all people were treated as individuals, but sadly that is not reality. The pressure that some black people feel, or any other member of a minority group, is quite taxing. However, I welcome this inequality with a positive attitude.
Since some individuals ardently subscribe to essentialist ideology, I use it to my advantage and strive to always put my best foot forward. Not simply for my own sake but for the sake of the black people as a whole.
Tim Abram is a senior public policy leadership major from Horn Lake.
