The Truth About Being "Marginalized"

wherein I say the quiet part out loud

In October 2021, a black woman Harvard pre-med student resigned from her pre-med program, citing white supremacy as the reason. Taking inorganic chemistry exams when racism was alive in the world was too stressful. She claimed that white supremacy caused a steric hindrance (literally, a slowing down of chemical reactions) within her. It’s not that she couldn’t handle the work of a pre-med course at Harvard! It’s the gosh-darn white supremacist power structure and the oppression of being an American.

The irony of writing this missive from the campus of Harvard appears to have escaped her entirely.

This is a beautiful example of the real-life consequences of the Woke narrative of “marginalization” and “oppression,” a narrative that is doing far more harm than good. This narrative sets up all women in STEM, every member of a racial minority, and all other “marginalized” people to fail by designing a situation where realistic assessment of success prospects is nearly impossible.

It ultimately serves no one but the “cishet white men” whose privilege it purports to attack.

Fail? Not Your Fault. Succeed? You’re A Hero!

The Leftist narrative in general, and the university-pushed points of emphasis in particular (especially about women and racial minorities in STEM), allow an ideal situation free from risk to self-esteem, self-worth, or having to change one’s self-image.

If a “minoritized” person has a successful career, she is not just a good mathematician/engineer/scientist who does good work. Oh, no! She is far more than that. She is a success in spite of “oppression” and “systemic obstacles”, worthy of being celebrated and feted.

If she fails? It’s not her fault. My god, don’t you know the statistics for women in STEM? Such a tiny, marginalized, oppressed minority. The misogynist/white supremacist/ableist/heteronormative/cisnormative/other Woke adjective systemic inequities set up to keep women out of STEM were just too much.

It wasn’t that multivariate statistical modeling, or inorganic chemistry, or learning to code in javascript was too hard/took too much work. No way. It was those steric hindrances caused by the patriarchy that held her down!

This Applies to More than Just STEM Careers

Ask yourself what else this applies to, and the answer is immediately obvious. The Woke narrative of systemic inequity makes this sickening situation apply across the board of life outcomes, to basically everyone except heterosexual white guys.

Gosh, I wonder why so many of them are pronouncing themselves “non-binary” and switching to they/them pronouns? Whatever could it be?

The ones who avoid the temptation to jump on the victim bandwagon are the only victors in this scenario. If they get hired, they can be damn sure they were the very best. When every job listing begs for women, racial minorities, the disabled, and all other marginalized identities to please please please apply, a white guy who gets hired can be, quite realistically, totally confident that his success prospects are terrific. No imposter syndrome for him!

Why Is This Mindset So Tempting?

I have written before, both on twitter and here, about the victim mindset that such intersectionality/Wokeness/CRT style indoctrination entrenches in those exposed to it.

I believe I know why this mindset is so tempting—so easy to fall into and so hard to let go of once it’s adopted—and especially so to those of us who might be considered “marginalized.”

The false sense that there’s no way to have failure be your own fault, that is enabled by Wokism and its reliance on narratives of “marginalization” — the way it offers a built-in excuse for failure and mediocrity while making any success far more dramatic and laudable than just being the predictable result of merit and hard work — offers freedom from responsibility, which is a temptation every adult must strive to resist.

This sense of freedom from responsibility is false and it’s far more tempting to people with real challenges, just like the risk of opioid addiction is very high in people with real injuries that cause chronic pain.

What Am I Saying?

Am I asserting that the victim mindset exploits a weakness of character? Yes.

Am I asserting that the victim mindset, including the part of me that still clings to it (as I sit here preaching to a choir comprised of me), evidences that weakness of character as a personal, moral failing, and that this matters a lot more than the (few) remaining structural/societal issues in need of addressing? Yes.

Am I asserting that the “marginalized groups in STEM are horribly oppressed” narrative that universities promote makes it far more likely for members of these groups to fail, to capitulate to weakness of character, and ultimately ill-serves most those that it purports to help? Yes.

I am confident in saying these things because I fell for it, for a time, and because so many of my friends still believe it. This is 100% a case of “if you spot it, you got it.”

This argument risks my being accused of failure to appreciate that different types of privilege, life experiences, and other obstacles can cause real and serious roadblocks for different people. None of that is true.

How I Came to My Point of View

My first Diversity Issues course (of three mandatory ones) was taught by a woman who holds a PhD in chemical engineering. Rather than do any chemical engineering, she researched on, and taught, Diversity Issues courses. The main focus of my DI-1 class was the terrible oppression of women in STEM, to the point that my (hilariously witty) therapist refers to her as “Joan of Arctangent.”

Why that Narrative Was Pivotal to Me

According to the usual Woke metrics, being White is my primary “axis of privilege.” Of course, race is the one that they consider to outweigh all others. It matters more than my being deaf, living with Complex-PTSD as a consequence of serious and long-term child abuse, being a first generation college student on one side of my natal family and the first person to be literate at all on the other side, having been poor to the point of missing meals until quite recently, having been raped as an adult, struggling with depression serious enough to have been, at times, life-threatening, and all the other ways my life has been challenging.

But in my DI-1 class, I learned that there was a particular arena in which I am super duper oppressed. OMG, so oppressed. Be-Prepared-To-Do-Emotional-Labor-All-Day-Every-Day-For-All-Your-Working-Life oppressed. You’ll-Be-Lucky-To-Earn-80%-of-What-Men-Do-For-The-Same-Work oppressed. That arena is the one of seeking to get paid for doing STEM stuff while being female.

It is hard for me to explain how weird of an ambition a STEM degree was for me. I come from a background and social milieu where getting paid primarily for using one’s brain (for what one knows, as much or more than what one does) is nearly unheard of — with the exception of clergy. I didn’t grow up dreaming of doing what I do now. It became clear to me that being a nanny for $13 an hour was the best I could hope for unless I got an education, and since it would be loans all the way through, I only considered majors that would lead to a good paying job without the need for graduate school, family connections, or overwhelming good luck.

Mathematics was the most interesting, fun, and accessible option I could see, but it was a brutally difficult challenge. Whatever natural talents I possess are not mathematical in nature. (Writing and drawing are the pursuits where I was able to gain skill without much effort and on my own.)

Mathematics was quite different. I had to spend months on Khan Academy teaching myself high school math, since I grew up in an isolated church community and my high school years were spent in a church basement reading the Bible for “school.” University mathematics required getting up at 4am to study, haunting the tutoring offices, and every moment on the bus or in line at the cafeteria devoted to memorizing the derivatives and anti-derivatives of the trigonometric functions, all the unit circle angles, and everything else that might help me eek out one more partial credit point.

Mathematics majors live and die by partial credit points.

Naturally, I was terrified. If I failed, I would have all of the debt and none of the earning potential. More than that, I would set myself up for a life with no counter-argument to offer the voices in my head that still believed I was worthless.

So I headed to college with this larger-than-life drama I had created for myself and terror of how it might turn out driving me, only to be presented with this narrative. It was most powerful in my DI-1 class, but it was omnipresent background noise everywhere else, too.

My university offered special support groups, panels, speakers, conducted surveys, etc., all towards female STEM students. I doubt there was a two-week period without some sort of mention of my oppression and how willing the university was to support me as I worked to thwart it.

And, for a time? I fell for it.

What Made It Fall Apart

Two bits of good fortune helped me start to get free.

One was my therapist, a guy brave enough to call bullshit out for what it is despite his being privileged in every way the Woke consider to matter, and furthermore, who doesn’t give a fuck about making me feel better. He challenges me, holds me accountable, calls me out on my bullshit, and shredded this narrative—almost entirely through quiet questions.

“Would that square with your experience of how heterosexual men behave? Do they conspire with each other to keep women who share their interests away from them?”

When I brought up the wage gap, he asked, “Is that how you see corporate America behaving—they just go around flagrantly and fearlessly doing things that would both be public relations nightmares and get them sued for violating the 1963 Equal Pay Act? And your position is that they do this freely, in a world with ubiquitous camera phones and social media?”

When I admitted that that some of the narrative seemed self-contradictory, he said, “You’re studying high level statistical analysis. So go do some analysis. Look into it yourself. Go get data, analyze it, and do the math. See what you get.”

So I did, and found that the wage gap was fiction. That made me ask what else they were lying to me about. Once my faith in the narrative was shattered, it made me start asking why they were pushing it so hard — what benefit did it serve my university, selling me a very expensive education, to make me demoralized and scared about my possibility for success?

That was an easy question: it was a major part of the Leftist narrative that was present in nearly every course, the goal of which was to make me feel connected to them, my “allies,” and needful of/grateful for their goodwill and support.

The second bit of good fortune was that I struck up a friendship, via email at first, with James Lindsay. He has a PhD in mathematics and experience as an instructor, and thus understood how mathematics departments work. He was just as honest with me as my therapist. He didn’t give me any “rah rah you go girl you can do it!” smoke-blowing. Rather, he told me that mathematics is hard and not many people could do it at a high level. Maybe I could. Maybe I couldn’t. He didn’t know, and neither did I—but I would only know if I tried very, very hard. The main impediment to trying hard would be believing that the deck was stacked against me. He was the first person that I recall telling me I would need to find an “internal locus of control” and would have to decide that if I failed, it would not be for lack of effort.

I was very lucky that these two men invested in me. One was getting paid by Medicaid, but he still didn’t have to tell me the truth. His checks would have still cleared if he had coddled me, patted me on the head, and made me leave his office smiling instead of, often, in frustrated tears. (It was patently obvious what I wanted to hear, believe me. It would have been exceedingly easy to give me that.) The other had no reason but kindness to talk to me at all.

That’s not the only way I was lucky. If I had a child, for example, studying fourteen hours a day would have been impossible, so I might have needed six or seven years, instead of four, to earn my degree.

Like all other humans trying to do something hard, like gain qualification and skills in a STEM discipline, I had fewer obstacles than some and many more obstacles than others.

Which, friends, is exactly the point.

What Happened When I Got A Job

I graduated during the pandemic with a B-minus average, which I was and am proud of, as I worked very hard for the mathematics course B’s (mostly), C’s (some) and A’s (two mathematics ones, in Non-Parametric Statistical Methods and Calculus 3, and in all the classes that were mostly paper writing, especially the diversity ones) I earned.

Then I got a really good job, but a voice in my head thought I was a diversity hire.

Why wouldn’t I think that? I had been fed a narrative for four years that I was unwelcome and unwanted, and that the only reason anyone would hire a woman to do mathematics was to cover their asses against accusations of sexism.

A few months into my job, I was assigned a project that affected a ton of money and many people’s jobs, and those fears receded…but they didn’t vanish.

The same weakness of character that makes this mindset so attractive still exists in me. Some part of me still wants the false dichotomy where success makes me a hero and failure isn’t my fault. But today I can recognize it as false, own it, and commit myself to overcoming it.

I Don’t Want This To Be True

I don’t want this maniacal situation to be reality. I don’t want this craven exploitation of a normal, human weakness of character—in the people who could most benefit from learning to be good in a STEM field and enjoy the upward mobility it causes—to be what the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry is based on. I don’t want this bullshit manipulation and its craven pursuit of political power by building a coalition of everyone who’s a “minority” in any sense, regardless of how much it damages those people along the way, to be what’s really going on.

But it is.

Evil can only be overcome by facing it.

I reject the lies. I will succeed or fail on my own merit or lack thereof. That doesn’t mean that my particular challenges aren’t challenging, or that life is fair. Of course they are, and of course it isn’t.

My challenges are hard. So are yours. My life has been unfair. So has yours.

Accepting personality responsibility for locating and acting from an internal locus of control means that everyone — “cishet” dudes included — has obstacles, and we all overcome them, or don’t, by playing the hands we get dealt.

A bad hand skillfully played can almost always beat a good hand played carelessly.

This is the scary, wonderful, liberating truth.

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