“One Step In, One Step Removed”: An Ode to Status Literacy
I’ve said it before that I’m not a very good dreamer. Like many, I’m more adept at criticizing than proposing and creating. My imagination extends perhaps a little farther than where I presently stand but typically not much further. At best I could call myself a skeptical optimist. On a good day.
Thank goodness, I can read. And listen. Over time, I learn.
A thing I’ve been thinking about lately is status. And specifically in the way that Tressie McMillan Cottom describes it in her recent interview with Ezra Klein (which is excellent, by the way):
The thing is, status looks the same everywhere you go, but it wears a different outfit…And the way I explain it to students and my audiences is status is the thing that is external to you that defines you as much as your identity does…
We’ll walk into a room, and everybody agrees who’s supposed to sit at the chair at the front of the room. That’s status, right? And that it operates a little differently everywhere you are standing. But if you learn how to identify it wherever you are standing, in many ways, you become one of the most powerful people in the room because you see what’s driving and shaping the decisions.
Tressie McMillan Cottom in conversation with Ezra Klein, April 2021.
Status is always at play yet rarely named directly. It naturally benefits the dominant and powerful in that respect. To see it, break it down into its elements, becomes its own skill set. In my own situation, however, it feels like I inherited my status sensitivities. I mean, I grew up in a working class two-income Black family where all three children earned bachelor degrees at 4 year institutions. I attended mostly PWIs (predominantly white institutions), took ballet and theater classes, played sports. I held my first job only once I enrolled in college. In a number of ways, I was raised in middle class fashion despite the fact that my parents were modest earners. As a child, I grew accustomed to bridging gaps in my experiences between suburban private schooling and my all-Black moderate-income neighborhood; between my enthusiasm for a broad vocabulary and responding to questions about why I talked “like a white girl.” My youth was couched in a fervent both/and understanding, always holding two (or more) realities in my head and in my sights. This shaped me fundamentally.
Early on in the interview, Tressie* made a statement that made me sit up in recognition. She was literally “telling my whole life with [her] words,”
When I’m in a space, I’m very much a one step in, one step removed kind of person. I’m watching the thing I’m participating in, can’t turn that off.
“One step in, one step removed…” “That’s my life!” I wanted to shout when I heard it. It explains how I function in my institution, in my adopted Central European home, in my field of practice, even in my family! Sometimes “in it but not of it,” other times “from here and also from there,” I have created a life in which I set myself up to consistently play at least a couple of roles at a time in most contexts. In order to do that successfully, my observational skills are sharp and attuned to see more than the subjects/objects in front of me. My real superpower is divining the relationships between people, things and the setting. One step in, one step removed.
It won’t surprise you but a lot of this derives from growing up Black in white contexts, being Black in Black contexts and learning the differences required of me to get along in nearly any context. Getting along was the goal, to be outstanding without standing out; to fit the bill even if I didn’t fully ‘fit the bill.’ Assimilation City, Codeswitch Drive is where I settled. Kind of.
I decided to make a chart. Of my social identities and how they align with dominant culture in my varying contexts.
Remember, Tressie’s point about how status operates “a little differently everywhere you are standing?” Far more often than not I am standing in the box of the dominant culture. That is not a little thing. Even in the country where I identify as an immigrant, I exist largely in step with the dominant culture. Wherever that alignment shows itself, it creates an unearned advantage. I enjoy privilege in a variety of ways. I enter most rooms with more than a couple of pathways towards a bit or sometimes even a chunk of status. Depending on the context, when you add my educational pedigree, language skills, social connections in academic and other circles, you have the building blocks of my status laid bare.
Tiffany Jewell uses some clear language that I find incredibly helpful . In This Book Is Anti-Racist she writes:
I know who I am and I am still learning how all the parts of me make me a whole person in our society. I know that there are parts of me that exist outside the box and other parts of me that are inside the box or appeal to the dominant culture…
My adjacency to the dominant culture is my power in undoing it. And I can use this to keep the doors that have been opened for me wide open for those who are on the margins.
Tiffany Jewell, This Book Is Anti-Racist, p. 128
Yes, and.
Status both confirms and complicates the experience of being dominant culture adjacent. Whereas my social identity markers tend to be more static than fluid, my very particular form of status in a given context represents a negotiation rather than adherence to strict patterns. My raw identity markers like race, gender expression and first language set up a frame, but status involves filling the spaces in between, giving the frame its shape, color and character. Let me try out some examples.
- I attended an Ivy League undergraduate institution where I studied International Relations and also ran track for 2 years. It was only many years later that I understood how I had been there but missed the social hierarchy boat. I got the education without taking care to build the intricate friendship and professional networks that would help me build my social capital and career after graduating. That’s what wealthy, well connected students were there to do (and did) along with pursuing their degrees. As a Black girl from a working class family, I had no idea that was central to the (unspoken) purpose of an Ivy League education.
- At my current institution I’ve had a very long tenure of over 25 years. I have friendships and connections throughout the school in all divisions and areas of operation. That said, as a local hire and not a member of teacher couple, I have typically remained on the periphery of friendship circles that form based on shared demographics and experiences of being international couple hires.
- In Austria, my immigration status is a settled matter. I am authorized to live and work here indefinitely. I speak German fluently. In the past when I’ve organized excursions for new teachers, although I was usually the strongest German speaker in the group, the bike rental employees routinely looked expectantly to the older white males in the group to take the lead in stating our business.
Status involves reading each situation anew while understanding the complexities we bring into the space. Having grown up with a number of reasons to decode all kinds of different contexts and experiences, I thrive in the sport of social observation. It’s a particular and deeply useful literacy that has likely served me better than several other social skills. It has probably also saved me a lot of grief and heartache.
Being dominant culture adjacent in many areas did not mean having easy passage wherever I went. Instead it meant building and refining my understanding of the multiple ways in which I could be in a group but not of it; a participant-observer but not its central organizing principle. I learned to not confuse proximity with belonging.
All those years as a successful Black girl student in a variety of PWIs were not lost on me. My racial, gender and class identities required my consistent negotiation of how I would adapt to, accept and integrate with dominant culture values and patterns of behavior outside my home environment. Sometimes I was told point blank where I did not belong (in a mean girls’ club in 3rd grade — I wanted in, but they spurned me), other times I had to figure it out the hard way (Why was it that I had lots of male friends in HS but couldn’t get a date?). I see now that these experiences provided me with a form of social awareness that enables me to read relationship patterns and adjust accordingly. Being a “one step in and one step removed kind of person” turns out to be a kind of superpower.
In the interview, Tressie notes that we have lots of language for talking about identity but not in the same fullness for describing status.
We don’t have as rich a conversation to talk about status, which, coincidentally, is some of the most powerful work that status does. It becomes so taken for granted that we never even label it, right?
Tressie McMillan Cottom in conversation with Ezra Klein, April 2021.
In a white supremacist society, the assumption would be that I am not one to hold or wield power. In several contexts, my influence and leverage might indeed be minimal. And yet, here I am, throwing ideas and words into the ether to find out what resonates with others. Who can hear me? To whom will this make sense?
These are central questions to the educative process and they are the product of reading, listening and reflection. As a profession I long to see us get better at naming and handling the underlying stuff. As a society, I dream that we’ll get better at probing beneath the surface, at exposing the undersides that keep us rooted in poison soil. But that’s a non-dominant cultural undertaking.
Who’s with me?
Notes:
“Your Success Probably Didn’t Come From Merit Alone” Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom on the Ezra Klein Show, April 13, 2021
Tiffany Jewell, This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons On How To Wake Up, Take Action And Do The Work, Illustrations by Aurelia Durand. Quarto Publishing, 2020.
Not mentioned but always in mind here: Charles Derber, The Pursuit of Attention: Power And Ego In Everyday Life. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Images CC0 via Pixabay.com
*I’m taking a particular license to refer to Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom by her first name and omitting her title above. I’m aware and I believe that she would approve of my choice here. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you can do it. See what I just did there?
