The Miseducation of Ms. M

Since I was a little girl I wanted to be educated. Not just high school diploma educated, but Ivy League, meritocracy educated. I wanted the type of education that would help develop a unified, actualized sense of me--the Paulo Freire type of education that is a practice to freedom. I sought fiercely to align myself with an educational system that would help me understand who I was and what I was growing up into. I got my education alright. I received a quiet, yet frank education on the limited sense of self I was supposed to achieve. I came of age during a decade that seemed to remain in a transitory stage. Growing up in the 1990s made me anxious. I was on the tail end of big hair and spandex, bumper caring my way through grunge, the Spice Girls, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while approaching the beginning of a presumably scientifically frightening millennium. That is a lot of cultural movement for a young girl. Also, I grew up in the South, a region that was slow to change. As an Afro-American youth in the Sunshine state, I was aware that desegregation had not been fully realized. In spite of this ambivalence I was determined to navigate my adolescence. My perception of identity constitution was compartmentalized. I wanted to develop the outwardly recognizable part of myself (i.e., the skater, the punk rocker, the tomboy), before developing the sexual, romantic side of myself. In Generation on Hold: Coming of Age in the Late Twentieth Century, Cote and Allahar (1996) speak of the period of time extended to youth in which they are exempt from engaging in adult responsibilities, a time when they are able to adopt multiple identities and roles that will form the foundation of their adulthood. They call this identity moratorium. According to Cote and Allahar, in theory identity moratorium "can set them [youth] on a life course that is rich and rewarding" (74). My moratorium felt so promising. I kept trying to reinvent myself. Any day now that actualized sense of me was going to emerge and I would be whole. It had too. Each day I moved closer to turning eighteen and it was at that juncture that I would need a strong sense of self in order to make it through college. My moratorium was my performance space. Identities are not static nor are they absolute. I saw the people around me shifting from one identity to another in efforts to understand their subjectivities. I noticed that their moratorium did not appear as interrupted or inaccessible as mine did. we were all young, so wherein lay the difference? Ain't I a Woman? Not when you're a Token "You are so smart." "Isn't she articulate!" "You're going to go far!" I have heard these lines all of my life. It seems like every year since elementary school these types of comments have increased and have become near meaningless. People have made it a point to emphasize my academic abilities. when I was younger I was unaware as to why this was. I thought that most children were smart, that I was not that different. Being smart, articulate, and having potential meant to my educators that I was an anomaly to be monitored. A young Black girl with academic capabilities could be disruptive. In her book, " Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?," Beverly Tatum (2003) explores the identity development process of Black adolescence with the conclusion that "we need to acknowledge that an important part of interrupting the cycle of oppression is constant re-education ...", that teaching self-affirming knowledge will lead to better adolescent development (p.74). Hearing comments like those mentioned above, however, were not self-affirming. It was a way to manipulate who I was and what I should grow up into. I encountered identity manipulation via my educators, my immediate community, and oddly enough my friends. As an adolescent I was vulnerable to multiple types of exploitation which fostered identity manipulation. My academics were one type. …